Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat # 2,037

Being the latest in yours truly’s crime fiction round-ups for The Newspaper Formerly Known as the Old Lady of D’Olier Street. To wit:

Urban Waite’s THE TERROR OF LIVING (Simon & Schuster, £12.99, pb) derives its momentum from the intersecting arcs of three men: Bobby Drake, a deputy in Washington State, who stumbles across a drug-smuggling operation high in the mountains on the US-Canadian border; Phil Hunt, an ex-convict who subsidises his small-time ranching with an occasional trip across the border muling heroin; and Grady Fisher, a psychotic killer detailed to retrieve the missing heroin and murder anyone who might implicate his employers. Those broad strokes run perilously close to the plot of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2005), and largely accounts for the comparison to Cormac McCarthy in the novel’s blurb. While THE TERROR OF LIVING lacks McCarthy’s lyricism, the writing is pleasingly spare, muscular and lean, the characters sharply and for the most part sympathetically drawn, and the narrative a compelling blend of breathless plotting and existential angst. Beautifully descriptive in capturing the details of Seattle’s rural hinterland, THE TERROR OF LIVING is a remarkably assured debut.
  Louise Penny’s sixth novel, BURY YOUR DEAD (Sphere, £7.99, pb), is something of a curio, and not just for its Quebec setting. Featuring Penny’s recurring series protagonist, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté, the novel is comprised of three distinct investigations, with Gamache, off-duty and recuperating after an operation went disastrously wrong, surreptitiously investigating the murder of a Quebecois historian who was obsessed with Samuel de Champlain, the legendary founder of Quebec City. Most intriguing, however, is the narrative strand in which Gamache, second-guessing his own investigation in Penny’s previous novel, THE BRUTAL TELLING (2009), sends his second-in-command, Beauvoir, to the bucolic village of Three Pines to unofficially re-open the case. Penny’s interweaving of her various strands is ambitious, and there’s much to enjoy in her affectionate and elegant descriptions of Quebecois foibles and the bitter Canadian winter. That said, first-time readers might find themselves confused by Penny’s rewriting of a previous novel’s plot, and there are times when the story reads like a too fervent homage to Agatha Christie, not least in the finale when not one but two groups of suspects are brought together to hear a detective announce the identity of a murderer.
  Peter Leonard’s ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL (Faber and Faber, £12.99, pb) also reads like something of a homage, in this case to Elmore Leonard, Peter Leonard’s father. American student McCabe gets kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity in Rome; once released, McCabe sets about retrieving the ransom from the Mafia-connected gang who kidnapped him. A multi-character narrative incorporates Angela, a Mafia don’s daughter, flamboyant Detroit mobster Joey Palermo, ex-Secret Service agent Ray, and Sharon, Ray’s wife and Joey Palermo’s current squeeze. The various narrative arcs converge on Rome and its rural hinterland, both of which Leonard is adept at evoking despite his pared-down style and use of the American vernacular. A bright and breezy comedy crime caper, albeit one which boasts a deadpan tone and blackly comic touches, the story moves at a furious rate as the characters ricochet around Rome. It’s all highly entertaining even if, in the most odious comparison possible, the novel lacks the heft of an Elmore Leonard novel, particularly in terms of the absence of any sense of real menace from the gangsters McCabe and Ray encounter.
  The killer whose murder propels Laura Wilson’s A CAPITAL CRIME (Quercus, £12.99, pb) also lacks menace, although given that Wilson has based her novel on a true crime that occurred in post-WWII London, and that the murderer is a pathetically child-like creature, the novel is all the more fascinating for its absence. The third novel to feature Wilson’s DI Stratton, after STRATTON’S WAR (2008) and AN EMPTY DEATH (2010), the novel opens with Stratton charged with assembling the evidence that will reinforce John Davies’ confession that he strangled his wife and baby daughter. Satisfied that the facts mostly add up, Stratton sees Davies hanged, but subsequently comes to suspect a miscarriage of justice. Meticulously researched, A CAPITAL CRIME is suffused with an almost claustrophobic sense of post-war London, a city still suffering from the impact of rationing and only reluctantly coming to terms with the decline of Britain’s empire. Stratton himself is an immensely likeable character, an amiable and morally upright policeman who is only too aware of his own flaws. Wilson neatly contrasts Stratton’s ongoing mourning for his dead wife with his daughter’s dawning awareness of her lesbian sexuality, blending the personal with the more political aspects of Stratton’s professional self-doubt in a very satisfying historical police procedural.
  Set in rural Mississippi, Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER (Macmillan, £11.99, pb) opens with the shooting of small town mechanic Larry Ott, a semi-recluse who has long been suspected of the abduction and murder of a local girl some decades before. Local deputy Silas Jones is reluctant to lead the investigation into the shooting, as he and Larry were childhood friends before an ugly racial incident drove them apart, but the disappearance of another young girl overrules Silas’s personal distaste for the case. Ostensibly a police procedural, Franklin’s third novel deploys the genre’s narrative conventions as a framework for a much deeper exploration of the psychology of small-town America and its recent racist past. Both Larry and Silas are superbly drawn and fully fleshed characters, their personalities and conflict chthonic to rural Mississippi but luminously relevant, in Franklin’s hands, to any locale on the planet. Factor in a mesmerising evocation of rural Mississippi, language of sinuous and shimmering elegance, and a finely tuned ear for the nuances of dialogue, and you have a novel that is an early contender for one of the great novels of the year. - Declan Burke

  This article was first published in The Irish Times

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL by Peter Leonard

American students in Rome, McCabe and Chip - the latter the son of a prominent US senator - embark on a drunken prank one night when they hijack a taxi. Thrown in prison to await trial, the pair are separated, and McCabe locks horns with gang member Mazara. When McCabe and Chip are finally released, after Chip’s father pulls some strings, a photograph published in a local newspaper confuses their names under their photograph. Shortly afterwards, McCabe meets the beautiful Angela when he foils an attempt to mug her; capitalising on his opportunity, and hoping to score a date, McCabe is drawn into a sting in which, mistaken for Chip, he is kidnapped by Mazara’s gang. Released when the ransom is paid, McCabe decides to track down the kidnappers and have the ransom repaid.
  Meanwhile, in Detroit, Sharon’s marriage to Ray is falling apart, mostly because Ray, a Secret Service agent, spends much of his time on the road. Embarking on an affair with the flamboyant Joey Palermo, Sharon finds herself swept off her feet. When Ray arrives home after being sacked from the Secret Service, he discovers that Sharon is missing. Setting out to track her down, Ray discovers that Joey Palermo is a Mafia mobster, who has suddenly departed the country for Rome.
  The various storylines converge in Rome, as Joey Palermo, nephew to Rome’s Mr Mafia, muscles in on Mazara’s gang, just as McCabe kidnaps Angela in order to retrieve the ransom that was paid for his release. Meanwhile, Ray is hot on the trail of Sharon, who will lead him directly to Joey …
  ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL is Peter Leonard’s third novel, following QUIVER (2008) and TRUST ME (2009). He is the son of legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard, and it’s fair to say that ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL has all the hallmarks of a Leonard novel. The multi-character narrative, the dry and blackly whimsical humour, the unfussy use of American vernacular, the ordinary man underestimated by the criminal fraternity who proves himself a resolute hero.
  The two main characters in the novel are very likeable. McCabe is an ordinary guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and it’s refreshing to read a lead protagonist in a crime novel who isn’t a swaggering, bullet-proof hero with limitless resources of strength, courage, intellect, etc. Having said that, his decision to pursue his kidnappers with the aim of retrieving the ransom posed some problems for me, especially as he’s a stranger in a strange land. Leonard never really explains McCabe’s motive for doing so, other than to suggest that his personal principles are insulted by the notion that someone else’s money was paid for his release. It’s difficult to believe that a young American in his early ’20s would make that decision, to go up against what might as well be a Mafia gang on their own turf; and, as that decision propels the story forward from that point onwards, there’s always a question mark hanging over the authenticity of the story and McCabe himself.
  Ray, meanwhile, is another likeable character: a taciturn Everyman with the kind of resources that the conventional crime novel hero tends to have, even if he very rarely employs them. My problem with Ray, however, is that he is very reminiscent of a number of Elmore Leonard’s cop characters - Elmore Leonard has created a number of characters called Ray - and that Peter Leonard’s Ray comes across as a facsimile of more sharply drawn and interesting Rays from his father’s oeuvre.
  The novel has a cracking pace, which benefits from Leonard’s cross-cutting between characters, particularly as the story gains momentum. It’s particularly pleasing that Leonard tells his story in such a relaxed and deadpan fashion, so that the reader is never really aware of how quickly events are moving.
  That said, the rapid pace requires some considerable suspension of disbelief. The most notable example comes when McCabe and Angela, two hard-headed and pragmatic characters, fall in love almost overnight, this despite the fact that Angela is the daughter of a Mafia don, and McCabe has kidnapped her. Angela isn’t even in McCabe’s company long enough for Stockholm syndrome to set in; the plot requires them to establish an unbreakable bond, and so they declare themselves mutually infatuated. Given that Leonard almost entirely eschews melodramatic twists and turns, this moment stands out as a glaring anomaly.
  The style of the novel is equally pleasing. As with his father, Peter Leonard is a devout disciple of the ‘show, don’t tell’ school of storytelling, and he employs language designed to tell the story in as simple and straightforward a fashion as possible. Despite doing so, he’s also adept at inserting telling descriptive phrases, and does a very nice job of evoking both the busy streets and architecture of Rome, as well as the quieter rural hinterland where much of the latter stages of the novel plays out.
  On the downside, it has to be said that the novel lacks heft. It’s a relatively short novel at 292 pages, but brevity doesn’t necessarily mean that a novel will lack depth. While Leonard creates characters that are entertaining in themselves, and in their interaction with other characters, it’s difficult for the reader to get a good feel for them - there’s a sense that the characters do no more, and are no more, than the plot requires of them. That’s not to say that a character should necessarily come laden down with bags of backstory funnelled into the story for the sake of it; but each should have depth and breadth, and particularly in a story such as ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL, which is to all intents and purposes a crime comedy caper, a sense that they have an existence beyond the parameters of the novel, that the story we’re reading is an anomaly in their lives.
  Leonard, aiming to write a novel that tells the story with the bare minimum of words, achieves his goal and does it with style and wit; by the same token, I was always aware that I was reading a novel in which one obstacle after another is contrived and placed in the protagonists’ way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; for example, Carl Hiaasen’s comedy crime capers are excellent examples of archly contrived parodies of the genre. Leonard appears to fall between two stools, however; this novel arches a knowing eyebrow at the conventions of the comedy crime novel without fully delivering on that kind of novel’s inherent absurdities; meanwhile, his characters, and particularly those regarded as the bad guys, lack the banal evil so brilliantly evoked by Elmore Leonard.
  I probably sound a lot harsher on ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL than I mean to be; for all my criticisms (and constantly comparing Peter Leonard to his father is as odious as comparison gets), I enjoyed the novel as a light, breezy take on the comedy crime caper, particularly given its neatly evoked setting of Rome and its environs. So far, Peter Leonard has written three standalone novels, but if he were to write another featuring McCabe, I’d be sufficiently interested in McCabe as a character to investigate further.
  Would I recommend this novel? I think that any crime fiction fan who hasn’t read an Elmore Leonard novel will thoroughly enjoy it; it’s fun, it’s fast, it’s rooted in an enjoyably exotic setting. As for the other side of that recommendation, that ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL lacks the heft of an Elmore Leonard novel, well, it’s probably fair to say that there are very few living writers who can match Elmore Leonard. - Declan Burke

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Peter Leonard

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins. My father, Elmore Leonard, gave me the book right after it came out. He said, “Read this. You won’t believe how good it is.” And he was right.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. Looks like he has a pretty good time.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I read ‘People’ magazine, which chronicles the comings and goings of American movie stars, important stuff like who’s dating whom, where they vacation, what clubs they frequent.

Most satisfying writing moment?
My agent called telling me St. Martin’s Press had made an offer on QUIVER,
my first novel.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen. Jack Taylor is a wonderful character, and Ken is a hell of a writer. His prose is gritty, violent and funny. I read it in one sitting.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst is probably the sting of a bad review. The best, I get paid to invent characters and tell stories. What could be better than that?

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s 1971. A Holocaust survivor’s daughter is killed in an auto accident by a German diplomat. Harry Levin, a scrap metal dealer from Detroit, goes to Washington D.C. to claim his daughter’s body and find out what happened. A D.C. detective named Taggart tells Harry the incident has been covered up by the U.S. State Department. The diplomat, who was drunk, has been released from police custody and given immunity. Harry flies to Munich to get revenge and learns that the diplomat, Ernst Hess, figures in his past.

Who are you reading right now?
MR. PEANUT by Adam Ross.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. It’s too compelling to give up.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Character-driven suspense.

Peter Leonard’s ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL is published by Faber and Faber.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Peter Leonard

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins. It’s a masterpiece.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Sherlock Holmes.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
PEOPLE magazine and STAR. I want to know what the beautiful people are
doing.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Selling my first novel, QUIVER. My agent called and said, “Are you sitting
down?” And then delivered the good news.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen. Ken’s a great writer, dark and funny.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE GUARDS. I think it’s in the works.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is cheap shots by critics. You can spend a year writing a novel and
have it trashed in fifty words or less. The best thing is the satisfaction
you get developing characters, making them come alive and making them talk,
putting them in a story and seeing what happens.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Two American students steal a taxi in Rome. They are subsequently arrested
and sent to Rebibbia Prison where they cross paths with members of Mafia
gang.

Who are you reading right now?
Doug Stanton, HORSE SOLDIERS.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Five years ago I would have said read. But now I’m compelled to write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Character-driven, entertaining.

Peter Leonard’s TRUST ME is published by Faber and Faber