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The Survivor: The Good Cop

30 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: The Good Cop, by Peter Steiner
Severn, 2019. 185 pp. $29

As a cop, Detective Willi Geismeier has a steady job, something many people envy in the Munich of 1920. The collapse after the Great War has left Bavaria a wreck, like every German province. Munich is a city of desperation, destitution, theft, political gang violence, and hopelessness. The central government in Berlin struggles to keep the nation afloat, while there are many who wish to drag it down and seize power; Munich possesses more than its share of revolutionaries.

This is where Willi’s job becomes difficult, if not impossible, for so many crimes have political motivations, and ultranationalists have Munich’s judiciary in their pockets. Hard as it is for most people to credit, the most threatening movement, really a ragtag mob of thugs, hangers-on, and a few ultranationalist businessmen, calls itself the National Socialists. Its leader, who seems utterly disreputable and incompetent, is Adolf Hitler.

Marienplatz, Munich, after the failed beer-hall putsch of November 9, 1923. The lone figure standing above crowd level is Julius Streicher, later convicted at the Nuremberg trials and hanged (courtesy German Federal Archive, Bild 119-1486 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Willi’s involvement in these deadly currents begins when unidentified assailants throw a grenade into a newspaper office, killing or wounding some journalists working there. You might think that such a crime could not have taken place without multiple witnesses; yet somehow, the leads quickly grow cold. But Willi, recognized as Munich’s best detective, doesn’t give up, because he’s a thinker first, before he’s a civil servant, and he’s studied his Shakespeare:

Willi had learned from the English bard that lawful human behavior followed well-mapped social patterns. Every crime was a unique moment in human history, where human psychology and behavior ran off the rails in a very particular way. When you looked into crime thoroughly and deeply, as Willi had, it revealed dark, as yet uncharted corners of the human soul. Criminal activity oozed through civilization’s unmapped dark alleys in ways that were surprising, illuminating, and, for Willi, irresistible.

No one trusts Willi, because he follows his own nose rather than instructions, which scares everybody in times like those. What’s more, when enemies try to trap him, he never lets himself be pinned down. He’s a survivor, in other words, and you sense that no matter how relentlessly his superiors try to push him under, he’ll bob up somewhere else. Indeed, while the most ambitious members of the police sign on with the National Socialists, Willi keeps his own counsel (and a private cache of incriminating documents). For starters, he interviews Sophie Auerbach, a reporter badly injured in the newspaper bombing, and Maximilian Wolf, an artist with a remarkable facility for drawing quick portraits. From then on, the case never goes cold.

The Good Cop is an absolutely terrific, stunning book, but not a classic thriller. There’s no condensed time frame that circumstances shorten even further; the narrative covers more than twenty years. Consequently, the “no — and furthermore,” instead of getting in the characters’ (and, therefore, the reader’s) faces, haunts the background in ever-increasing ominousness, mirroring the Nazis’ rise to power. As such, Willi’s investigation progresses in fits and starts over time, fulfilling the proverb about the wheels of justice grinding slowly, and is all the more believable for it.

At every step, Steiner creates an atmosphere so chilling, you have a ringside seat at the prizefight between lunatic thuggery and civilization — and many who subscribe to the latter don’t even recognize they’re about to be pummeled. You see how the Party attracts sadists, ideologues, petty nationalists who blame their own troubles on others, the not-terribly-bright ordinary Joes, all of them on the make. Meanwhile you also have the Munich of prostitutes, legless veterans, picket lines, storm troopers, and businessmen in fancy cars.

Steiner’s narrative can sound didactic, and you can tell he’s written the book with a cause. Even so, he knows his history, and you never doubt that what you’re reading either could have happened or actually did. He further understands how that history resonates. Not for nothing does he have the Nazis say, “Make Germany great again,” or refer to “fake news” and its purveyors, while the crowd chants, “Lock them up!”

The Good Cop tells a gripping tale, a thriller that makes you think. I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Fission in Two Parts: Hannah’s War

09 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Hannah’s War, by Jan Eliasberg
Little, Brown, 2020. 301 pp. $17

In April 1945, U.S. intelligence has uncovered a security leak at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project is building the atomic bomb. Suspicion falls most heavily on the scientists who’ve circulated a petition demanding ethical constraints on the weapon they’ve worked to invent, whose destructive power remains theoretical. What’s more, one signatory has just sent a telegram to her German counterparts in Europe, presumably to convey military secrets.

Said scientist, the only woman at Los Alamos with a high security clearance, is Dr. Hannah Weiss, an Austrian-Jewish physicist. She’s beautiful, brilliant, and tough to corner, a job that falls to Jack Delaney, superspy and seasoned interrogator. He has seventy-two hours to find out what, if anything, Hannah has told her friends in Germany.

Eliasberg tells this story in two narratives. With the Los Alamos story, she seamlessly integrates Hannah’s prewar work at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where, despite her exceptional gifts, she’s consigned to a basement laboratory, her findings ignored. “Jewish science” can possess no truth in Nazi Germany. Eliasberg says that she has based Hannah on Lise Meitner, who received no credit for discovering nuclear fission, because Otto Hahn, with whom she had worked closely, left her name off the paper they published in 1939 so that their research would be taken seriously. Further, at his Nobel address in 1944, he conveniently omitted mentioning her. That in itself is a story, and though the novel follows a different path from her actual life, the Berlin narrative raises similar historical issues and derives tension from them.

Unfortunately, the Los Alamos sections don’t measure up. To be fair, Eliasberg, a screenwriter, keeps the pages turning rapidly throughout, and her dialog punches hard. When Jack and Hannah square off, the verbal jousting sets off sparks. Better yet, the cat-and-mouse contest does more than furnish the necessities of thrillerdom; the interrogation covers questions of science and morality, the power of life and death, responsibility to individuals versus society at large. I also believe the re-creation of Los Alamos, with its hard partying, personal rivalries, and the tension and desperation of discovery with the world’s future at stake.

But I don’t accept the premise. They’re too quick in Los Alamos to slap handcuffs on Hannah and string her up, the stated justification for which runs as follows: Why would a Jewish refugee collaborate with the enemy? Because she must have slept with that enemy. I’m sure such sexist, anti-Semitic logic had its followers; General Leslie Groves, who commanded the Los Alamos installation, was a nasty piece of work, bigoted and ambitious, as the author portrays him here. But that army or intelligence brass would rush to try Hannah before a military tribunal, threatening to hang her before you can say, “Albert Einstein,” stretches credulity. They would certainly have done more to figure out which secrets she’d passed, and what they were worth.

Are her friends working for Germany or the Soviets? The narrative waffles, and faced with that vagueness, the American spymasters plan to kill off famous German scientists right and left, a hasty, perplexing verdict. It’s also puzzling how, even in April 1945, everyone assumes the European conflict will go on forever, ignoring how Germany was in its last gasps.

In reality, battles still took place, but the Reich posed a greater threat to its citizens judged defeatist than its foreign enemies, and was certainly in no condition to develop or deliver an atomic weapon. Yet, somehow, the Los Alamos scientists greet the news of Germany’s collapse as a surprise.

With the exception of Groves, the army and intelligence characters feel flat, and the way they strut and shout gives the impression that they’re trying not to admit how empty and wrongheaded they are. Even Jack, who receives more authorial care, strikes me as a stock character, the rough, tough guy with the usual manly trappings, who needs the right woman to let him be vulnerable. His role in the novel’s resolution, a clumsy, predictable section, wraps the story briskly but, like the rest of the Los Alamos plot, remains forgettable.

Compare that to the Berlin narrative. As before, surprises and twists abound, but the people seem natural, deeper, more complex. Special kudos to Eliasberg for creating characters whose Jewishness feels real, not a matter of convenience, as evidence of which they spend time and effort trying to practice their faith and cope with anti-Semitic decrees. But the non-Jewish scientists who believe they have their handlers by the tail, only to find out the opposite, make an impression too. As a result, the tension feels higher here than in the other narrative, even though the bomb hasn’t been built yet, and the threats against Hannah are only potential.

Given all that, would the Lise Meitner/Hannah Weiss narrative have made a thriller by itself? It’s a great story, that’s for sure, the gripping part of Hannah’s War.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via an independent publicist, in return for an honest review.

Holocaust Hallucination: Cesare

10 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: Cesare, by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue, 2020. 365 pp. $27

Berlin, 1943. Amid Germany’s war against the world and murder of European Jewry, there are many secrets dangerous to know, not least that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence, has a private agenda. Whenever he can, he hides Jews, mostly German Jews, of whom a few thousand may still be found in the capital. Most are tenuously protected by marriage to Christians; others live underground in ghettos that even the SS doesn’t bother to penetrate. But the biggest secret is that Canaris uses his best agent, the widely celebrated Cesare, to try to make sure these hunted people stay safe.

Er, wait. The head of the Abwehr rescues Jews? His best agent’s persona is a household word?

Wilhelm Canaris, executed for treason weeks before the war ended, remains a mystery as to the extent of his dissidence. This photo dates from 1940 (courtesy German Federal Archives, via Wikimedia Commons)

While floating through the dream that is this novel, once or twice I had to check the historical record, just for grounding. Concerning one particularly stunning instance, which I can’t divulge because it would give too much away, I found that Charyn reports history as it happened. So however strange Cesare may be, the truth may be even stranger. Does it matter?

No. And there’s plenty of powerful fiction here, starting with the protagonist. Cesare’s real name is Erik Holdermann; six years earlier, in 1937, he rescued a tramp from a severe beating by a group of hoodlums. The tramp was Canaris, and that made Erik’s fortune. But what he does with it is something else. Cesare takes his sobriquet from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, an expressionist film of 1920 in which Conrad Veidt (remember him as Major Strasser, in Casablanca?) plays a somnambulist slave who sleeps in a coffin and murders people while in a dream state. And just as Dr. Caligari explored the horrors that occur between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and oblivion, Charyn wants to show you the nightmare that built and characterizes the Third Reich, not least of which is its citizens’ refusal to face their murderous reality.

This warped image describes life from the ground up, at least for a certain privileged class. Every form of entertainment attacked as “degenerate” by the regime exists within blocks of Gestapo headquarters, tolerated by the authorities, many of whom enjoy its frenzies. Such dualities apply everywhere. Cesare’s great, obsessive love, Lisalein von Hecht, the half-Jewish daughter of a banker, plays many roles, or appears to — his ally and protector, his betrayer, wife of a Party muckamuck, lover of a cabaret chanteuse, communist, rescuer of Jews. Her father helped bankroll Hitler because he feared the Reds more than the Nazis and assumed the vulgar corporal would be easily managed. Even Cesare himself, though not Jewish, was looked after by Jewish prostitutes as a young orphan; and when he must penetrate an inner sanctum he can’t enter any other way, despite his reputed shape-shifting skills, he wears a black uniform of the SS. To the Jews, there’s no doubt about his identity:

The ghetto had its own golem, not twisted out of clay, but a man of bone, blood, and gristle, born in Berlin. This golem had never harmed a single Jew. He often traveled about in the boots and silver sleeves of an SS captain. How wily their golem was. He mimicked their enemies, and could make a gauleiter [district leader] disappear. And if their savior was a somnambulist beholden to a white-haired German admiral, what could it matter to them? The coffin Herr Cesare slept in was secreted somewhere in [the Jewish ghetto]. And woe to any man who rocked that coffin and interfered with Cesare’s sleep.

With such portrayals and references — throw in Kafka and Melville — Cesare is a literary novel par excellence. But it’s also a disturbing, hallucinatory thriller, with as many plot twists and double crosses as the number of angels capable of dancing on the head of a pin. Throughout, the author immerses you in the hell that was the Third Reich. As with other thrillers, there’s plenty of sex, but it’s mostly desperate, typical of German activities then, rather than erotic. At times, it’s hard to tell whether female characters are mere sex objects (sometimes for each other), or whether Charyn’s trying to turn James Bond on his perfect, Casanova head.

What I do know is that Cesare possesses the reader, in a howl of pain and madness. Yet I didn’t feel suffocated, only glad I could close the cover and realize I wasn’t living inside it. And with this novel, Charyn has shown me what fiction can do.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Different Kind of Thriller: The Second Sleep

03 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2019. 298 pp. $27

In 1468, the bishop of Exeter sends a young priest, Father Christopher Fairfax, to a remote village to bury a parson who has just died in an accident. But when Father Fairfax gets there, he discovers that his late colleague collected antique books that the church and government have condemned as heretical. What’s more, at the funeral, a stranger interrupts the service to declare that the deceased’s death was no accident, nor did it result from witchcraft, as some have said — the accident site is thought to be haunted. To no surprise, more startling facts come Christopher’s way, and what he thought was a trip to perform a sacrament turns into something not at all routine, likely dangerous or compromising.

Shield of the See of Exeter, established in the tenth century (courtesy Hogweard, via Wikimedia Commons)

In The Second Sleep, then, do we have a murder mystery with a Gothic overlay? Is this another example of a trope, Killed by an Ancient Manuscript? Or, maybe, to play the book publicists’ game, this novel is The Name of the Rose meets Middlemarch.

None of the above. We’ve got a splendid, thought-provoking, unusual thriller, by a master on top of his game. I thought Harris slipped some with Munich, but The Second Sleep evokes the quality of Dictator and An Officer and a Spy. As with those novels, here, the pages gently exhale history like a subtle, authoritative scent, “no — and furthermores” pile up effortlessly, and the protagonist undergoes an arduous journey, changing in a way he couldn’t have predicted.

But there’s more, because Harris has bent to the genre to his will. As the narrative gradually makes clear, there’s something odd, not to say out of character, about this fifteenth-century English village. And as you continue to puzzle how this can be — for the details are too precise to be accidental, and Harris is a careful storyteller — you and Father Fairfax have something in common. You’re both due for a significant surprise.

However, as I said, this is a subtle, gradual reveal. Consider this paragraph from the fourth page, one that displays Harris’s fine prose as well as a hint of his intent:

After a while, the road began to ascend a wooded hillside. As it climbed, so it dwindled, until it was little better than a cart track — ridged brown earth covered loosely by stones, shards of soft slate and yellow gravel braided by the running rainwater. From the steep banks on either side rose the scent of wild herbs — lungwort, lemon balm, mustard garlic — while the overhanging branches drooped so low he had to duck and fend them off with his arm, dislodging further showers of fresh cold water that drenched his head and trickled down his sleeve. Something shrieked and flashed emerald in the gloom, and his heart seemed to jump halfway up his throat, even though he realised almost at once that it was nothing more sinister than a parakeet.

Parakeets? How’s that?

In finely wrought coherence of story and character, The Second Sleep takes on themes regarding knowledge, faith, reason, church and state, and human frailty. There’s even a touch of coming-of-age, for, like the best of Harris’s protagonists, Christopher faces severe challenges to his beliefs, character, and principles, and the narrative pushes the envelope at his expense. But the author neither lectures nor spells out anything unless he has to, which leaves room for the reader to think and feel — what a novel should do.

I’d say more about this fine book, but I fear giving too much away. Don’t read the blurbs on the back, though for once, the flap copy is safe. The Second Sleep will both entertain you and make you think.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Revenge Tragedy: After the War

06 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: After the War, by Hervé Le Corre
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor
Europa, 2019. 533 pp. $19

A man sits, tied up, being tortured to divulge who killed a certain figure from the Bordeaux crime world. This figure, like most of his brethren during the late 1950s — like the police beating him up — collaborated with the Germans during the recent world war and profited from it. In fact, few profited as handsomely as Albert Darlac, the commissaire de police, and the man leading the interrogation. Jewels, art, and furniture taken from dispossessed Jews made him rich, and without a trace of compunction or remorse, he can say that his department would cease to exist if such activities disqualified a man from serving the law.

Maurice Poupon, member of the Legion of Honor and illustrious politician in the Gaullist government, 1967. As a Bordeaux police official during World War II, he had arranged for the deportation of more than 1600 Jews; during the Algerian War for independence, he allegedly tortured rebel prisoners (courtesy Archives municipales de Toulouse via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, Daniel, a twenty-year-old garage mechanic who lost his parents at Auschwitz, has terrible trouble understanding the ache inside him. His adoptive parents, former Resistance members who rescued him from a rooftop the day his biological parents were arrested, have protected him and given him a warm home. Their daughter, Irène, also adopted, is the only person to whom Daniel can show any vulnerability. But Daniel fears that this happy life — happy, considering his circumstances — will soon end. He’s due to receive his draft notice and fight in Algeria, in a colonial war his friends and family staunchly oppose.

Darlac and Daniel, victim and perpetrator, don’t meet for quite a while. The contrasts between them provide the context and the moral theme of this extraordinary, exceedingly violent narrative. Darlac scorns everything remotely resembling compassion or kindness as weakness that deserves to be crushed. As one old-time acquaintance says, “Other people die and you’re the one that smells like a rotting carcass.” Daniel, however, wishes he could make himself more accessible emotionally — not that he entirely realizes this, a superb stroke of characterization — and often hides inside movie images, which he’s constantly imagining in his daily life. But you know that once he reaches Algeria, his struggles to become fully human will only get more desperate.

Connecting the two, a figure from their pasts has come to Bordeaux to settle old scores. How Darlac reacts in particular provides much of the story, and a searing one it is. Any author can follow Raymond Chandler’s advice and have a man with a gun enter the scene to prevent tension from flagging. Le Corre has plenty of men with guns, but he doesn’t have to worry about the tension. It’s not just that stuff happens, because if it were only that, a hyperactive plot would do as well. No; he grounds every scene so thoroughly in the physical that you can’t help feeling that his narrative is happening all around you, and that you’re involved by turning the pages. Whether it’s the Bordeaux docks or the Algerian desert, Le Corre knows every inch of his territory, and how it feels to be there, so you do too.

But even that wouldn’t work if he didn’t also put you firmly in his narrators’ heads, as with this introduction to Daniel, which also happens to portray the port of Bordeaux:

He stops suddenly in front of the gates of the port, his bicycle between his legs, and remains there, stunned. With his balaclava and his sheepskin coat with the collar turned up and the mittens on his hands gripping the handle bars, only his eyes are visible. He observes the blaring traffic of cars and trucks, intoxicated by the din they make, grinding his teeth as axles groan and bodies shake over the large cobblestones… He feels the dull rumble in his legs as a train trundles slowly past endless rows of warehouses, accompanied on foot by a man swinging a lantern in his hand. The city buzzes and trembles in his flesh.

Many people will find After the War a bloody business — and so it is, because the title’s ironic. Wars merge, so that there’s no apparent space between one and the next, no aftermath, because even if the calendar says that a few years have passed, in men’s minds, they haven’t. Darlac is also a complete monster, so he’s hard to take. But it was that kind of monster who made the French portion of the Holocaust possible, a fact conveniently ignored in France. Rather, I’m more troubled by the way female characters seem to exist largely in a man’s perception, not necessarily as sex objects, though in Darlac’s case, that’s all they are, but without readily definable aspirations of their own. They’re invariably the kindest characters, but they’re not fully rendered, not like the men.

Nevertheless, if you like noir, After the War is as noir as it gets, a first-rate thriller by an author who understands how to put it all together.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Five Years, and I Still Haven’t Read Everything

28 Monday Oct 2019

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Novelhistorian celebrates its fifth birthday this week with the usual retrospective of the books that have made the deepest impression on me during the past year. I’d also like to thank you, my readers, for making this blog worthwhile. I’m glad you’ve stuck with me, and I hope it’s rewarding.

There are thirteen books this year, more than normal, because I couldn’t bear to leave any out. In no particular order, they are:

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker, retells the Trojan War from the point of view of Briseis, Achilles’ captive concubine, whom Agamemnon seizes and thereby causes rifts within the Greek camp. Tradition holds Briseis to blame, but, as the protagonist of this superb novel points out, the tellers of that tradition are male. Barker’s storytelling is so acute that you can imagine she has known these mythical figures all her life.

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason, offers an unusual romance and coming-of-age story set against harrowing, scrupulously observed scenes at a First World War field hospital in Poland. Mason not only renders his characters in full psychological depth, he explores what medicine means for the healer as well as the patient, a fresh, compelling theme.

Sugar Money, by Jane Harris, shows you late eighteenth-century slavery in the Caribbean, and what a heart-breaking, riveting picture that is. The novel succeeds as adventure, a tale of another time, sibling rivalry, and an exposé of colonialism; the prose, vivid as a poem, relies heavily on Kréyol phrases and at times reads like music.

Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard, recounts the courtship between an up-and-coming Illinois backwoods lawyer and a Kentucky belle, revealing the lighter side of each as well as their lonely, tortured souls. Often hilarious, this novel reminds me of Austen for its wit and social observation, but you also see the president in the making.

Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, tells the mystery of how a child in late nineteenth-century Oxfordshire emerges from a river apparently dead, only to revive — and no one knows who she is. The solution involves violence, loss, conspiracy, and romance; storytelling doesn’t get more seductive than this, and though the premise sounds woo-woo, it isn’t.

Wolf on a String, by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville), tells an age-old story about a young man on the make. But the year is 1599, and the court of mad Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, is a snake pit, especially if you have to solve a murder to survive. The tension never flags, and the story has the ring of historical truth, even though the author made most of it up.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar, narrates the unlikely romance between a straight-laced eighteenth-century English merchant and a courtesan. The story reminds me of a modern-day tale by Henry Fielding, complete with intricate plot, ribaldry, and social commentary, much of the latter concerning how men use women as possessions.

Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans, features a once-famous English suffragist in the 1930s who, decades after her heyday, mourns the lack of passion and radical feeling among the young—and her own irrelevance. The solution to both problems propels a funny, engaging story and involves a maddening yet sympathetic heroine.

In The Dream Peddler, by Martine Fournier Watson, sometime in the early 1900s, a well-dressed salesman with courtly manners arrives in a Midwestern rural town and offers his customers the dreams they desire, with a money-back guarantee. At first, the townspeople suppose he’s a charlatan, but he’s not; and in a way, that causes more trouble.

The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason, spins the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species into a brilliant psychological thriller involving an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria and multiple murders. I hate suspense novels whose surprise solution involves a psychopath, but here, the villain is in plain sight. So are Prince Albert, Karl Marx, Thomas Huxley, and many other figures, including three famous Charleses — Darwin, Dickens, and Field, our hero detective, a real historical figure.

The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, tells the utterly madcap story of the seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Leibniz visiting a recluse astronomer who, alone in Europe, has predicted a total eclipse for a certain hour. Start this novel, a howlingly funny sendup of philosophy and its practitioners, and you too will want to know whether the eclipse will happen.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman, invokes the trope du jour. This particular bookshop, vintage 1969, belongs to an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (huh?), who falls for a taciturn Australian sheep farmer who doesn’t read books and hasn’t heard of Auschwitz. Treacle? Not in the least, because nothing in this novel happens without reversals, second thoughts, mixed feelings, or a sense of dread; the author has taken his characters’ measure and renders them as mature adults.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, narrates a series of murders in 1327 at an abbey where a conclave debates such issues as whether Christ laughed. Such a premise might seem pointless or abstract. But this discursive yet mesmerizing novel explores profound philosophical and political issues; offers a page-turning mystery; and illuminates the past by its own lights, therefore revealing the present. The latter, to me, is the highest purpose of historical fiction.

If there’s a common thread here–besides the obvious upmarket/literary slant–it’s each author’s ability to show via concrete detail what another (and, in my view, lesser) writer would choose to tell. Getting closer to physical vividness has been my mantra as writer, especially in the past year, and many of these books have inspired me that way.

Thanks again for reading.

Blood, Royal and Otherwise: The Darwin Affair

26 Monday Aug 2019

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Review: The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason
Algonquin, 2019. 373 pp. $28

The year 1859 witnesses an event that shakes England — and the Western world — to the core: the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Mason’s ingenious, exquisitely plotted, and atmospherically rich thriller supposes that the uproar over Darwin’s theory and an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria has a nefarious connection. Further, Mason takes Charles Field, a real-life historical figure, as the detective who uncovers the connection, what it means, and who’s behind it, men in high places. Naturally, practically no one believes Field’s conspiracy theory, though one person willing to entertain the notion — however fanciful — is Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, and, by the by, a Darwin supporter.

Charles Field, as he appeared in Illustrated News of the World, London, 1855

Charles Field was Charles Dickens’s model for Mr. Bucket of the Detective, a character in Bleak House, among the first such fictional figures. It’s a brilliant conceit to build a novel around Field, but Mason goes one better. Field hates his fame as Bucket’s alter ego, and the surest way to inflame this bad-tempered detective is to call him Bucket or taunt him by suggesting that his fictional shadow would have solved the case before now. The Darwin Affair therefore begins with both feet in the shifting sands of mythic allusion versus deadly reality, and whether a person is who he is or what others take him for. From there, things get even more complex.

Field’s nemesis styles himself the Chorister, and an evil piece of work he is. I usually avoid suspense narratives with sociopaths, because the story’s thoroughly gruesome, and I can’t stand it when an outwardly decent citizen is suddenly unmasked as a raving lunatic responsible for multiple murders. But here, you know the Chorister’s a bad one from the get-go, and the plot revolves around stopping him when so many people fail to realize the danger he poses, a classic device in thrillerdom. Once again, however, Mason goes one better. The Chorister has handlers who think themselves righteous, which shows their utter hypocrisy; and they believe they can control him, about which they’re dreadfully wrong. Rest assured, plenty of tension results. In a final stroke, the psychological source of the Chorister’s bloodlust is revealed, and plausibly, which raises him yet another notch above a mere device.

I admire how Mason imbues his narrative with history as inhabited background. I don’t mean the presence of historical figures like the royals, Darwin, Dickens, Thomas Huxley, or Karl Marx, though Mason handles them all beautifully. (Field’s confrontation with Marx is a real hoot.) Rather, I mean going beyond the People magazine fascination with name recognition to grapple with the era’s ethics, passions, and preoccupations, and to render the everyday, even at the palace. Albert’s perpetually cold because the queen hates central heating, and candles and oil lamps are the order of the day because she finds gaslight too modern. The author can’t resist a witticism, and I’m glad of that, because otherwise, we’d have done without this gem from Albert about his better half: “And, to be frank, Victoria would not approve of any assassination attempt in which she was not the target.”

Fittingly, Darwin’s theory takes center stage in this rendering of midcentury Victoriana. As everyone knows, the church objects, but the conflict feels broader than that. Evolution has subversive implications for the social hierarchy, which also seems obvious in retrospect, but has somehow faded from sight. If we share a common ancestry, and random chance happeneth to us all, who’s to say that the peer deserves his peerage, and the laundress her bleached, burning fingers? That question will never go out of style.

Interestingly, Field himself reads The Origin of Species, a struggle because he hasn’t had much education, yet he derives a great deal from it.

If I understand what Mr. Darwin is saying, a creature will do anything at all in order to survive. And every creature that does make it does so because some other creature don’t. Everything and everyone at war all the time, just to keep the show going, and it’s been a very long-running show indeed. Look at it that way, nothing matters, really.… Look at it another way, of course, it makes every second we got desperate precious.

Make no mistake, The Darwin Affair is a gory book. But it’s also the most gripping thriller I’ve read in years, so if you don’t mind the blood and mutilation, you’ll be well rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Rusalka: The Huntress

15 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Huntress, by Kate Quinn
Morrow, 2019. 531 pp. $27

In spring 1946, memories of the war are just beginning to fade — for some. Seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride, who lives with her widowed father in Boston, meets his new fiancée, an Austrian widow. Jordan welcomes her future stepmother and half-sister Ruth and takes them into her heart, luxuriating in the warmth and support she receives in return. Even better, Jordan’s stepmother encourages her to dream of higher education, something Dad doesn’t think a girl needs.

Four years later, in 1950, former British war correspondent Ian Graham; his assistant and translator, Tony Rodomovsky, an American; and Nina Markova, a former pilot with the Red Air Force, join forces in Vienna to track down Nazi war criminals. The Nuremberg Trials have focused on the big fish, but thousands of minnows have swum to safety, whether in various corners of Europe or the New World. They may be former assassins, concentration-camp guards, or petty functionaries who oiled the machinery of murder and appropriation, and Ian and Tony want them all, though they know that’s impossible.

Rare color photo of defendants at Nuremberg, taken by Raymond D’Addario, November 1945 (courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nina, however, wants one in particular, a woman nicknamed die Jägerin (The Huntress), with whom she has a score to settle. So does Ian; and in one of the strange but clever twists in this thriller, Nina and Ian are married, though they’ve met only once, five years before for a couple days, and haven’t seen each other since.

Confused? Read The Huntress, and you won’t be. Quinn’s a fine storyteller, and she does an excellent job of stitching together many disparate pieces to make a coherent, exciting whole. The pages turn quickly, nothing happens too easily (except for a happy coincidence or two toward the end), and the stakes are plenty high enough. The reader knows long before the main characters who die Jägerin is, and where, but Quinn strings the inevitable confrontation out beautifully.

Of all the essential elements, I like the plot of The Huntress best. I do salute Quinn for calling attention to the problems of tracking down war criminals after Nuremberg, a forgotten cause. And I also like her attempt to explore the means one is permitted to use to see justice done. Ian rejects violence; Tony wouldn’t mind slapping around a witness or three; and Nina always carries a knife.

She’s the most interesting, fullest character by far. She’s done her best to amputate her heart, yet she comes across in part because she’s the only one with a developed past. Born by the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, she styles herself a rusalka, a water witch, the type who drags down the unsuspecting victim. That lake figures heavily in her psyche:

The lake was frozen in a sheet of dark green glass, so clear you could see the bottom far below. When the surface ice warmed during the day, crevasses would open, crackling and booming as if the lake’s rusalki were fighting a war in the depths. Close to shore, hummocks of turquoise-colored ice heaved up over each other in blocks taller than Nina, shoved onto the bank by the winter wind.… Nina stood in her shabby winter coat, hands thrust into her pockets, wondering if she would still be here to see the lake freeze next year. She was sixteen years old; all her sisters had left home before they reached that age, mostly with swelling bellies.

Nina’s half-savage, knows it, and likes scaring her friends. But scaring her enemies feels even better, for in a life lived without sweetness, revenge is the only substitute.

The other characters don’t grab me particularly. Jordan, though she represents feminism in wanting a photojournalism career, lacks angles or corners and seems too all-American. Tony’s too good to be true, a composition of charm, chutzpah, and linguistic wizardry. (The narrative rather dubiously depends on the relative ease with which certain characters pick up, say, fluent German or Russian in a matter of months.) Ian feels like a compendium of elements rather than a complete person, and though his heart’s in the right place, I don’t entirely believe him.

But the story’s the thing, here, and aside from the occasional detail that makes me raise an eyebrow (having mostly to do with photography or firearms), Quinn has researched her ground thoroughly. I note a few present-day idioms that someone should have flagged, and too many bizarre verbs replace said, often followed by unnecessary explanations of what the character means by what she says. But The Huntress is a top-notch thriller with an unusual premise, and I think it’s worth your time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Big Pharma, 1899: Deadly Cure

24 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: Deadly Cure, by Lawrence Goldstone
Pegasus, 2017. 295 pp. $26

As the nineteenth century lurches to a gaudy, jingoistic close, Brooklyn physician Noah Whitestone has much to hope for. He has a busy, satisfying medical practice in partnership with his father, a fiancée as intelligent and independent-minded as she is devoted to him, and a cause to inspire him: preaching against patent medicines, which kill as often as cure, usually through appallingly large doses of opiates.

Still, Noah carries the scars from the death of his stillborn son and first wife, and worries that though he admires his fiancée, he feels no passion for her, beautiful and vivacious though she is. He’s also piqued that his father and he have to run themselves ragged to earn a living, while Noah’s hoity-toity neighbors consult Dr. Arnold Frias, an unctuous glad-hander far more gifted at politics than medicine.

That envy causes Noah no end of trouble, for when Dr. Frias is busy hobnobbing with Admiral Dewey and other military heroes recently returned from the Spanish-American War, one of said hoity-toity neighbors sends for Noah. Her five-year-old son, just getting over a cough, has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Dr. Whitestone suspects opiate poisoning, but he must stabilize the child’s respiratory difficulties first, and does so with two drops of laudanum, a dose too low to hurt the boy. When Noah returns a few hours later, however, the child is dying, beyond help.

Noah’s convinced that Frias must have prescribed too much dope to cure the boy’s cough; or someone else was concurrently dosing the lad with patent medicines; or both. But such is Frias’s social position that Noah’s left holding the bag. He’ll be lucky not to face prosecution for murder, while revocation of his medical license seems likely.

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, as it appeared in Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz [Flora of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland] 1885, Gera, Germany (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Moreover, a reporter for a radical newspaper buttonholes him and claims that the boy’s death is one of many such, victim of experimentation by unscrupulous doctors testing the effects of heroin, a new morphine derivative. Noah finds that hard to believe, and the reporter’s general political outlook, highly critical of American military atrocities in the Philippines, leaves him skeptical as to motive. But as the trail to discover what killed the boy leads to German drug companies and the deaths of whistleblowers, the good doctor doesn’t know whom to trust.

Having recently read Lucy Inglis’s Milk of Paradise, a rambling, informative history of opium, I learned that the German chemist credited with deriving heroin from morphine was looking for a cough suppressant powerful enough to help even consumptives, yet would not be addictive. Medical science believed that he had succeeded, a persistent, misguided theory that matters here. So does the chemist’s other claim to fame, the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid, soon to be known as aspirin (a discovery he made the same week as that of heroin, by the way).

The political and medical contexts of these two drugs therefore shape the narrative, with patents and royalties as a possible motive for mayhem. But Noah, who falls easy prey to moral certainties, learns that with lives and money at stake, right and wrong become more difficult to distinguish, so that he winds up doubting himself, his father, and cherished beliefs. The potential involvement of Big Pharma in nefarious activities could be today’s headlines, as could the debate over American behavior in a colonial war.

Goldstone excels at period detail, especially that of medical science, and his authorial voice carries authority. When he writes that Frias’s Benz automobile, specially brought over from Germany, costs a thousand dollars, I’m sure it does, and that it looks exactly as described. Some authors might suggest rather than state, saving themselves the trouble of knowing absolutely everything, but Goldstone sweats these details. When two doctors discuss a diagnosis, for instance, they’re utterly believable as medical colleagues — to this layman, at least. The only slip I noticed was talk about allergies, a word that hadn’t yet entered the language. But overall, he creates a pretty impressive effect.

At times, that zeal for minutiae leads to information dumps, but mostly, the atmosphere keeps you turning the pages — that, and the “no — and furthermore.” Whether it’s new evidence that challenges Noah’s perceptions of truth, or unexpected obstacles that make him stumble, the path to the resolution remains properly bumpy until the very end. Along the way, Goldstone offers priceless dialogue, especially for Maribeth, Noah’s fiancée, and her brother, a medical colleague of his whose iconoclasm made me laugh.

Where Deadly Cure falls short is the absolutely improbable derring-do of the last few chapters, the cartoon villains, and the melodrama that results. Sometimes, when a writer is so convincing about the troubles the protagonist faces, there’s no believable solution. But if you can suspend your doubts, Deadly Cure is an entertaining thriller and a reminder that controversies involving industrial medicine go back a long way.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What a Tangled Web We Weave: The Poison Bed

10 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: The Poison Bed, by Elizabeth Fremantle
Pegasus, 2019. 403 pp. $26

In 1615, England’s golden couple, Robert and Frances Carr, face trial for murder, and the only question is whether both will swing or only one. At first glance, their predicament sounds highly improbable, given how far they have fallen and how quickly. Why, it seems only yesterday that Frances was a star at the court of King James I, celebrated for her charismatic beauty, wit, and sharp intelligence. Further, as a member of the powerful Howard family, she’s a force one does well not to dismiss. Her husband, who rose from obscurity as the orphan of a minor nobleman to become the king’s lover, trusted advisor, and a rich man, cuts an equally brilliant figure. (To read what Winston Churchill had to say about that as a historian, click here.) Not only that, he rescued Frances from an abusive marriage — not without help, of course, and therein hangs a tale.

As Robert observes, “If people know what you love most, it is a fault line they can exploit to break you.” And success breeds enemies who’d like nothing better than to bring down the blessed and seize their substance. So as the novel begins, and guards sweep the Carrs away to prison, the narrative gradually leads you to wonder who’s behind the arrests, and why. But nothing’s as it seems. Robert and Frances both love wealth and power, and her family — well, they’re venal and vicious as they come — and maybe the golden couple cut corners (or throats) on their way to the top. So who’s guilty, and what did he — or she, or they — do, exactly? You won’t find out until the very end.

Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, as William Larkin painted her in 1615 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

What a brilliant thriller this is, with enough thrust, counterthrust, and deception to make a Jacobean revenge tragedy. (John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi even makes a cameo appearance as a theatrical offering.) Fremantle tells her story in two directions, like halves of a sliding door that roll from opposite sides until they meet. This is exceptionally hard to bring off, and many such narratives feel forced or shoehorned simply to fulfill a literary conceit. Not here. Told in alternating chapters, titled Her and Him, with rare exceptions — all early on — the storytelling feels coherent, almost seamless, despite shifting verb tenses, from present to past, and back.

The Poison Bed succeeds, in large part, because of the prose, which puts the two main characters so vividly on the page, they’re practically sitting next to you. Take, for example, this passage from before their marriage, when Robert sees Frances for the first time in years:

In the intervening years, she’d become a woman. I watched her with [Prince] Henry, laughing about something, their heads flung back, mouths open, but she stopped suddenly, turning away from him, her gaze locking on me, as if she were a hawk and I a hare. I like to imagine it was the force of my desire that drew her attention. I had never seen such eyes, dark glossy ovals. Just a square of white in each, a reflection of the window behind me, and my own tiny form etched there. She said nothing, just smiled, displaying teeth as neat as a string of pearls.

Rest assured that Frances’s view of Robert in the same scene is equally feral. But Fremantle’s approach goes deeper. She extends such metaphors throughout the book, always taking pains to imbue emotional transitions with physical parallels, often concerning animals. During one conversation with the king, while hunting with falcons, Robert’s keenly aware that James’s bird, much larger than his kestrel, could destroy her if it wished, and there’d be nothing Robert could do. That’s the same position he’s in with his monarch. Similarly, when Frances wonders what to do regarding her husband’s anxieties, she watches a groom calming a skittish horse and gets her answer. I like that approach much more than rhetorical questions, such as, What do I do now?

But if The Poison Bed has a flaw, it’s an unfair shift in which it comes out that not all the narration may be trusted. Having called out Samantha Harvey for that in The Western Wind, I’m bound to mention it here, while trying not to reveal too much. When the change first happens, if you’re like me, you’ll resent it and feel manipulated. But if there’s a saving grace, it’s that the revelation can’t be a complete surprise, given the court atmosphere, the power games the characters have played, and the lies they tell themselves in justification — assuming they even bother. In all that falseness, some readers may be put off; after all, for whom is the reader meant to feel empathy?

Still, maybe that’s what Jacobean court life was like — and even if it wasn’t, The Poison Bed has created that world in fine, plausible detail. Despite the rude surprise, it’s one of the most gripping novels I’ve read in a long time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.