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By Sean Clark, on January 23rd, 2012 Author: Raymond Chandler
1939, Alfred A. Knopf
Filed Under: Mystery, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).
Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:
Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.
The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.
It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.
This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it
Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).
By Nico Vreeland, on November 11th, 2011  Author: Daniel Polansky
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Mystery, Fantasy
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
Low Town is a genre mashup the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever read before. It combines the world of a gritty fantasy novel—and its attendant medieval melee and magic—with the plot of a mystery novel. The hero of the novel (though “hero” is a loose description of him) is the Warden. It’s unclear exactly what that title means, but it’s certain that the Warden is the primary drug dealer in Low Town, the nickname for the slums of a large city in Polansky’s fantastical Thirteen Lands.
When the Warden stumbles upon the gruesome murder of a child, he gets drawn into a mystery that involves cruel nobles, twisted magicians, and his own dark past as both a scarred army hero and a disgraced detective.
On paper, this looks like an easy home run, but the reality is not quite as successful. It’s a bit of a mystery itself as to why it doesn’t work as well as it should: my complaints are relatively small, and Polansky is quite skilled at the things he does well. For one thing, the fantasy side of this novel draws a lot more water than the mystery does. Low Town (the place) is well-detailed and intricately imagined, down to its smallest details, like the tidy tidbit that an incompetent branch of the city’s law enforcement is ruefully nicknamed “the hoax.”
The mystery side of things isn’t quite as enjoyable, mostly because it’s too simple for my taste. I prefer a nuanced, multilayered mystery; Low Town offers something closer to an adventure, the plot points coming in the form of logistical problems rather than secrets or lies to uncover. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on September 23rd, 2011  Author: Jussi Adler-Olsen
2011, Dutton
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first English-translated book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling Danish crime series, about the unique Department Q. It stars Carl Morck, who’s one of Copenhagen’s best detectives… until he falls into an ambush and watches his partner crippled and another cop killed.
Morck is deeply traumatized by the incident, and his passion for detective work vanishes. Since his superiors can’t fire him without starting a union battle, they devise a plan to stash Morck away by creating a new department for high-profile cold cases, Department Q. Morck’s assignment to Q is technically a promotion, which appeases the police union, but really it’s a way to put Morck on ice. Nobody will care if the traumatized detective never solves one of the years-old crimes assigned to him, so it’s the perfect place for him to recuperate (i.e. not work very hard). Meanwhile, the bosses can route most of the government money earmarked for Dept. Q to their underfunded homicide division.
Morck, for his part, is more than happy to sit around staring at the covers of case files. Until, that is, he runs across an interesting case and his curiosity drags him back into an investigation. Keeper follows that investigation as a straightforward, quite entertaining police procedural. …
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By Sean Clark, on September 22nd, 2011 Author: Dashiell Hammett
1934, Redbook
Filed Under: Mystery.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
For whatever reason, I’ve never really been into mystery novels. But after unexpectedly finding a lot of enjoyment in No Rest for the Dead, I wanted to ride the wave a little longer and figured I ought to hit some of the classics. I opted to hold off on Sir Doyle (A Study in Scarlet is in my short pile), and go for the more gumshoe-y cred of Dashiell Hammett. I wanted something that I would be totally ignorant of, so The Maltese Falcon was out–I love the film. The Thin Man, though it doesn’t have any written sequels, spawned a very popular series of films (that have been languishing in my Netflix–Qwikster?–queue for ages), and seemed to have a strong following of fans on the internet. So I went to library and snagged a copy. …
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By Sean Clark, on August 24th, 2011 Author: Andrew F. Gulli (ed.)
2011, Touchstone
Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
The inevitable first question when looking at a mystery book with 26* authors is, how did they do it? The second is, of course, does it work at all?
I’m still not really sure the answer to question number one. I had fun imagining, while reading this book, that each author was given a character, or a role, kind of like a dinner party parlor game. By the end of the book, with enough authors writing multiple entries from varying perspectives it becomes clear that this wasn’t the case.
It also becomes clear that Gulli is a fine and comprehensive editor. The answer to the second question? Yeah, it works; everything is sewn up nicely. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 17th, 2011  Author: Benjamin Black
2011, Henry Holt and Company
Filed under: Literary, Mystery.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
A Death in Summer boasts no world-breaker plot, no nail-biting race to find a killer, and no chilling plot twists. In fact, for long stretches the mystery idles in the background, nearly forgotten as characters sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.
For most mystery writers, that would mean the book fails. But Benjamin Black—or John Banville as he’s known when winning Bookers—isn’t most mystery writers. In his hands, such a premise becomes a pleasure, mostly because he’s such a damn good writer that simply existing in the world he creates will satisfy. …
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By Samantha Warburton, on August 9th, 2011 Author: Nora McFarland
 2011, Touchstone
Filed Under: Mystery.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
Hot, Shot, and Bothered is the second installment of a planned trilogy of mysteries featuring Lilly Hawkins, a camerawoman for a local news station. (Although I haven’t read the first Hawkins story, the plot of this novel stands on its own just fine.) I’m no stranger to mystery series like this: churned out quickly with little pretense of literary quality. Such books can be high on mindless entertainment and great to read by a pool or on a plane. So I picked this up expecting Janet Evanovich, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even by those standards, Hot, Shot, and Bothered fell pretty short.
The story opens with Lilly covering a wildfire in the mountains a few hours east of LA and spotting a coroner’s van on its way to the site of a drowning accident. Fifty pages of unnecessary and convoluted detail later, it’s finally revealed that Lilly knew the victim from her own “shady” past.* Despite more pressing news coverage of the fire and her boss’s direct orders to drop it, Lilly becomes increasingly determined to solve what she is certain is a homicide case. Her suspicions are founded entirely on believing that the victim was so wholesome when Lilly knew her thirteen years prior that she couldn’t possibly have been the “party girl” that she is now alleged to have become. Later, these suspicions are confirmed by a decidedly weak “aha!” type of reveal.
There is also a subplot around Lilly’s career aspirations and the development of her romantic relationship, which is woven nicely into the larger plot, adding some substance without ever taking over the main stage. And, having lived in a town bordering mandatory evacuation zones of a serious wildfire not too far from the setting of the story, I can say with confidence that McFarland’s treatment of the fire is the book’s strongest aspect. It was both well-researched and true to experience. It would have been an easy mistake to use the fire to drive plotlines by manufacturing urgency or manipulating situations, but to her credit, McFarland rarely did.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 28th, 2011  Author: John Hart
2011, Thomas Dunne Books
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
I first read John Hart when his last novel, The Last Child, was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2010—Child later won that prize, giving Hart back-to-back wins for his second and third novels.
That streak is over. Iron House, Hart’s recently released fourth novel, shows that his writing relies on the strength and tightness of his plots. The Last Child‘s plotting was superb, and it outweighed Hart’s several flaws as a writer, such as his bombastically underwhelming prose and his over-emotive, two-dimensional characters.
Iron House, unfortunately, teeters on an unsteady premise that can’t support its own weight, and its plot delivers only mild thrills. As a result, those underlying problems become much more noticeable. Altogether, it makes for a disappointing mystery/thriller hybrid that can’t quite get off the ground. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 14th, 2011 [This poorly written mystery is the latest babytown frolics.]
 Author: Will Lavender
2011, Simon & Schuster
Filed under: Mystery
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
Dominance is one of those books, like a bad one-night stand, that fills you with shame every time you remember another detail. Oh, and the flashbacks, I’ll think to myself, even now. Just awful. What was I thinking?
The plot goes like this: in 1994, Richard Aldiss—a professor who’s been convicted of two murders—teaches a literature class from jail by remote CCTV. The purpose of that class is to find the identity of a mysterious author named Paul Fallows, whose two puzzlesome books hold secrets, and might also hold the key to Aldiss’s freedom.
One of the students, Alex Shipley, does just that. She unlocks the mystery of Paul Fallows, which leads her to the real killer and helps her free Professor Aldiss. Fifteen years later, members of the “night class,” as the CCTV Fallows seminar is called, are being killed in the same manner as those two long-ago murders. It’s up to Alex to reconvene the members of the night class, and figure out which one of them is the killer.
The novel—the present timeline, at least—is a fairly basic locked-room mystery, with a lit-class face on it, presumably because Will Lavender was a literature professor. But none of this was why I started reading Dominance. Instead, it was this detail that seduced me: the way these students engage with the Fallows books, the way they unlock the secrets therein, is by playing a game called the Procedure.
What does such a game look like? How does it work? How does a book function as a puzzle? This, rather than who killed so-and-so, was the mystery that led me to pick up Dominance. I should’ve known better.
[Minor spoilers ahead regarding the Procedure and how dumb it is.] …
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By Paul Kirsch, on July 1st, 2011  Author: Dan Simmons
2011, Reagan Arthur Books
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller, Sci-Fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Whenever I read a book by Dan Simmons, I learn something new about life, love, and literature. The man knows how to hook his readers. He grabs the emotional center of mass and never lets go. He also taps the intellectual core, using literary allusion and some well-worn clichés to recontextualize the story on the page. By engaging the reader on this risky and intelligent ground, Simmons crafts his books as equal parts thriller and college seminar.
His latest novel, Flashback, is the story of ex-detective Nick Bottom, who submerges into the depths of memory-enhancing drugs in order to revive an investigation gone cold.
His case is deceptively simple: the murder of a wealthy executive’s heir. Except that dozens of detectives failed to solve it already, and Nick’s only resource is his drug-addled memory. Using a combination of high technology, altered consciousness and ham-fisted detective work, Nick hacks and punches his way toward the shocking conclusion. …
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