Bronx Requiem by John Clarkson

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on November 8, 2016

Too many thrillers send the message that good prevails over evil because good guys are bigger and stronger and probably have Special Forces training. There’s a little of that in Bronx Requiem (two big, strong guys duke it out in a good vs. evil confrontation), but the more refreshing message is that good guys can beat bad guys by appealing to the decency in common people, by encouraging a community to stand up and fight back against its evil elements.

James Beck is released from prison after his conviction for killing a cop is eventually reversed on appeal. Beck made one true friend in prison, a righteous con named Paco Johnson. When it is finally Johnson’s turn to be released, Beck helps arrange Johnson’s parole. When things don’t go well for Paco in the real world, Beck pursues justice.

Paco has a daughter named Amelia. Things haven’t worked out well for Amelia, who finds herself wanting to kill Derrick Watkins, the pimp who controls her life with regular beatings. Other people are gunning for Watkins, literally and figuratively, including the police and, soon enough, Beck.

Police detective John Palmer doesn’t think a cop killer should ever be released from jail, even if the cop was killed in self-defense. He wants to send Beck back to prison and he’s willing to manipulate evidence and coerce witnesses to lie if that’s what it takes. But Palmer has a deeper connection to the story that becomes clear as the novel progresses.

The story pits Beck against the police, against gangs, and against the person he’s really after, although identifying that person requires some effort. John Clarkson introduces a variety of believable characters, most of whom walk along a path that has them doing bad things for good reasons. The plot is sufficiently complex to be interesting but not so complex as to be messy. The ending stirs the right emotions without becoming sappy, and the final chapter holds a nice surprise.

John Clarkson’s surefooted prose conveys the story without using clichés or calling attention to itself. He delivers enough action and suspense to keep the story moving at a brisk pace, but the story’s strength comes from characters who band together to help each other and to help the powerless triumph over the powerful.

RECOMMENDED

The Old Man by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 3, 2017

The Old Man is sort of a Bonnie and Clyde story except that Bonnie isn’t a criminal and Clyde isn’t a bad guy. So more accurately, it’s a “two lovers on the run” story. But it’s also a Superman story, because the protagonist might be old, but he still fights like a superhero. A reader might need to adopt comic book expectations to enjoy The Old Man, because the plot and the main character are thoroughly unbelievable.

Before he retired, Dan Chase (one of several names the main character adopts during the novel) was a special ops guy who resigned from the military to carry out a boneheaded mission involving the clandestine delivery of cash to a group of insurgents near Benghazi. Predictably, the middleman to whom he delivered the money kept it. Nobody saw this coming? The government is prepared to write it off because $20 million is small change, so Chase steals it back using vaguely described techniques that apparently required super speed, invisibility, and the ability to leap tall walls in a single bound.

Thirty years later, the intelligence services that were willing to write off $20 million are still chasing Chase. Actually, the Libyans are trying to assassinate Chase and the American government is helping them. I find it difficult to believe that either the CIA or the Libyan bad guy still cared about Chase three decades later. The insurgents gained tenuous political power in Libya after Chase stole the money, but don’t they have more pressing problems to deal with than getting vengeance against Chase? And why is the U.S. helping the Libyans assassinate an American citizen, simply because an “important” Libyan wants the American government’s help? None of it makes any sense, but that’s the premise.

Chase starts the novel in Vermont with two dogs, a bugout bag, and a daughter the government doesn’t seem to know about. How the government can find Chase while remaining ignorant of his daughter’s whereabouts is another stunning impossibility that the reader is asked to accept.

A few dead Libyans later, Dan’s next attempt at a life has him shacking up with a woman and his dogs in a Chicago suburb. Of course, he has to run again, this time with his new girlfriend, who apparently doesn’t mind that he used her and put her life in danger. Seriously? It isn’t credible, but that’s the setup for the senior citizen version of this lovers-on-the-run story.

The girlfriend’s dialog seems like something a writer would put in a character’s mouth, not like anything a real person would say. The needlessly long story has several dead spots, including the tedious description of how to load and fire a gun that every thriller writer seems to think is essential to good storytelling. The girlfriend’s backstory is so contrived it’s just silly. A reader could skip several chapters of The Old Man without losing track of the plot.

The best character in the novel is Julian Carson, a conflicted young man in military intelligence who isn’t sure that helping Libyan assassins kill the old special ops guy is the best use of his time. He’s more interesting and believable than Chase, and he’s certainly more admirable than either Chase or his girlfriend.

The end of the book resolves too easily, but nothing is difficult for Superman. The ending, at least, isn’t as predictable as it might have been. I liked some of The Old Man. It held my interest, but there aren’t enough thrills in this thriller. Too much of the plot is forced and, with the exception of Julian Carson, I never warmed up to the characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson

Published in Sweden in 2011; published in translation by Hogarth on July 12, 2016

If Kafka had a sense of humor, if he had been less dark and gloomy, he might have written The Invoice. The novel imagines a scenario in which irrational rules are imposed and people have no choice but to follow them without understanding why. But unlike Kafka’s Josef K, the bureaucrats in The Invoice are only too happy to explain his obligations to the novel’s narrator, although in terms he can’t possibly understand. Of course, every time the narrator meets with the bureaucrats, his efforts to make things better only worsen his predicament.

The Invoice is Jonas Karlsson’s latest contribution to the field of absurdist literature, following The Room. While The Room is darkly amusing, The Invoice is brightly amusing. It is a novel that reminds us to value all the small things that make us happy, notwithstanding the bureaucrats who make a mission of impeding joy.

The unnamed narrator of The Invoice receives a bill for 5.7 million kroner. He doesn’t know what the bill is for, but he is confident that he didn’t incur the debt. He also knows he doesn’t have 5.7 million kroner. After he gets a second bill, he calls the number on the invoice and after a long wait, speaks to a live person who tells him that he is being billed for the experiences that have made him happy. It seems as if Sweden has a happiness tax, although it’s actually being implemented worldwide. An interesting idea, although in the United States an anger tax would probably generate more revenue.

The narrator’s problem is that he isn’t angry often enough, and so has incurred a huge debt for the things (like sunshine) that make him happy. With a job in a video rental store and no girlfriend, it doesn’t seem as though he should have accrued such a large debt. He’s so desperate for female companionship, in fact, that he develops a crush on the administrator he keeps phoning to discuss his inability to pay the debt. One of the novel’s points, I think, is that it’s possible to make a connection with another person under even the most unlikely circumstances.

Like The Room, The Invoice pokes fun at cabined, bureaucratic thinking. But it also sends a life-affirming message. The narrator really doesn’t realize he’s happy, even denies that he’s happy, because he has chosen not to take advantage of opportunities to be happy. He is a slave to habitual behavior. He lacks the spontaneity to seize the moment. He goes with the flow. He envies people who have the ability to “look after themselves and sort things out.” Forced to think about his easy, uneventful life, he concludes “it’s pretty damn tragic.”

At the same time, it is exactly those traits that have caused his tax debt to mount. He doesn’t crave money. He doesn’t care that he has a dead-end job. He doesn’t worry that he has too few friends. He came through a break-up without feeling bad about himself. He’s content when he eats a combination of mint chocolate and raspberry ice cream, when he breathes in the mild summer air. To other Swedes, the narrator might seem dull and unambitious, but The Invoice seems to suggest that those traits are worth cultivating if they help us appreciate the joy of life’s simplest pleasures.

RECOMMENDED

The Mayakovsky Tapes by Robert Littell

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on November 22, 2016

Robert Littell has written some excellent spy novels. Be warned: The Mayakovsky Tapes is not a spy novel. I’m not sure what it is.

The narrator of The Mayakovsky Tapes tells us that he smuggled recordings out of Soviet Russia in 1955 that, at the age of 86, he feels safe revealing to public. In the post-Soviet age, he assumes, few people remember the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The novel purports to be transcriptions of discussions that took place in 1953 with four of Mayakovsky’s lovers.

According to Wikipedia, Mayakovsky’s work “regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Communist Party” before the Revolution and for some time thereafter. His relationship with the Soviet system became less sanguine toward the end of the 1920s, as he confronted cultural censorship and the government’s support of “Socialist realism” as the Soviet Union’s preferred art form.

The women knew Mayakovsky at different times in the 1920s. Mayakovsky met Lilya Brik while she was married to Osip Brik, who became Mayakovsky’s publisher. Mayakovsky met Osip when they served together after being drafted in 1916. Mayakovsky later began living with the couple and, with Osip’s tacit approval, had an affair with Lilya. As Lilya explains it, he was one of several lovers Lilya entertained during the course of her open marriage.

Mayakovsky traveled to New York in 1925 to give a poetry reading. There he met and began a secret affair with Russian émigré Elly Jones, a model and interpreter. According to the novel, they were inseparable for eight weeks.

In 1928, Mayakovsky visited Paris and met another Russian émigré, Tatiana Yakovleva, who was working as a model for Chanel. Tatiana explains that she refused to give up her virginity to Mayaskovsky despite his protestations of love and proposals of marriage, although she considered their relationship to be deeply intimate.

Mayakovsky’s last lover of the four was Nora (Veronica) Polonskaya, an actress in Russia with whom he had an affair at the end of the decade. At that point, Mayakovsky had fallen out of favor with the Soviet government and was being openly belittled by audiences who accepted the Soviet propaganda that condemned him as an elitist.

The bare facts of Mayakovsky’s love life can be gleaned from the historical record (i.e., Wikipedia), so the question is whether the novel adds something of artistic value to the cold facts. During much of the novel, the women debate Mayakovsky’s personality, his talents as a lover and poet, and his fate. The women have each shared some form of intimacy with the poet, and a certain cattiness predictably erupts at regular intervals during the recordings. That’s not enough to carry a story. In fact, nothing approaching a story develops as the women chat about their respective relationships with Mayakovsky. At least, nothing like an interesting story develops.

At the two-thirds point, I was wondering whether Littell had changed the course of his writing career by choosing to write the sexual biography of a Russian poet rather than a spy novel. I was heartened when Littell took a break from the four women to reveal the imagined contents of Mayakovsky’s GPU file (which reads much like Mayakovsky’s Wikipedia page), but apart from a recommendation that Mayakovsky be shortened by the length of a head, the file adds little to the reader’s knowledge.

Fans of historical celebrity name dropping might enjoy mentions of Isadora Duncan and Georgia O’Keeffe and various American jazz musicians and Russian poets and artists. Fans of Russian history might enjoy the account of Pasternak berating Mayakovsky for supporting the Revolution long after it became clear that Stalin was not true to its goals. Fans of good storytelling will need to look elsewhere.

Considering that the novel consists of nothing but dialog, my first complaint is that none of the dialog seems natural. Littell is a good prose stylist, but people don’t speak as if their words were written by a good prose stylist. My second complaint is that the novel is of academic interest but stirs no passion (except, perhaps, for fans of Mayakovsky’s poetry, if any still exist). My final complaint is that listening to four women praise and condemn the poet they spent time with just isn’t compelling fiction.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

First published in Japan in 1999; published in translation by Minotaur Books on November 8, 2016

Under the Midnight Sun begins in the early 1970s and covers a span of two decades. It jumps forward in increments, each early chapter beginning a few years after the last one ends. Some chapters feature relationship drama while others focus on crime or shady business dealings. Each early chapter reads like a separate story, although they intertwine. The relationship of some characters to others only becomes clear as the novel enters its second half. Characters come and go, but two characters, Ryo Kirihara and Yukiho Karasawa, bind the others together.

Ryo is ten when the novel begins. His father, a pawnshop owner, is stabbed to death. Detective Sasagaki develops suspects — Ryo’s mother might or might not be having an affair with a pawnshop employee — but the cops cannot find enough evidence to make an arrest. They aren’t even sure they know the motive for the murder, although Ryo’s father had withdrawn a large amount of cash shortly before he was killed.

The story resumes four years later. After her impoverished mother died, Yukiho was adopted into a middle-class life. She seems to be a sweet, gentle, and friendly, a perfect example of Japanese femininity. Her delicate beauty attracts the attention of undesirable admirers, and eventually of men who have some family wealth. She is thte novel’s most intriguing character.

Another plotline involves bored housewives who pay to hook up for sexual adventures with high school boys. One of the boys is Tomohiko Sonomura, who eventually regards Ryo as his best friend. Still another plot thread involves Yukiho’s friend, a girl named Eriko, who transforms from a duckling to a sexy swan with the help (and money) of Kazunari Shinozuka. Eriko and Kazumari later return to the story at different times and in different ways.

Parts of the story amount to a police procedural as Sasagaki methodically pursues leads, conducts surveillance, interviews witnesses, and develops suspects in the murder of Ryo’s father. Parts of the story touch on organized crime as the yakuza take an interest in criminal schemes that some of the novel’s characters perpetrate. Some of the story features dark domestic drama as characters pay a heavy price for caring about — or betraying — other characters.

Keigo Higashino’s non-criminal characters tend to be introspective. Most of them are relatively dissatisfied with life. Readers who feel a need to identify with or like a main character might be unhappy with Under the Midnight Sun, as there are few characters a reader might care to know. I don’t view that as a flaw in a plot-centered crime novel, given that the darkly realistic characters have at least a modest amount of depth.

The plot takes time to develop, but interest never wanes thanks to the mini-dramas that shape each chapter on the way to laying out the larger story. Fans of fast action might be bored by Under the Midnight Sun, as the intricate story includes no shootouts or fistfights. Killings and assaults generally occur offstage. Fans of a good mystery should enjoy it. Much of the ending is foreshadowed, but the final pages hold some surprises.

It’s always interesting to read a Japanese crime novel, if only to take note of cultural differences in the story’s background. Udon (noodle) shops, funeral rituals, and tatami mats are among the details that establish the story’s setting. The background, the carefully constructed plot, and the mysterious nature of the key characters makes Under the Midnight Sun an excellent example of Japanese crime fiction.

RECOMMENDED