Review: WORLD GONE BY by Dennis Lehane

“Before the small war broke them apart,” begins Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By, (Little, Brown) “they all gathered to support the big war.” The story opens in December 1942 in the Versailles Ballroom, Tampa, at a glamorous fundraiser for US troops stationed overseas. Actors, singers and sport stars mingle with financial and political heavyweights, the event organised and choreographed by Joseph ‘Boston Joe’ Coughlin, the Irish-American gangster we first met as a street punk on the make in The Given Day (2008), and who whose bloody and brutal rise to power during Prohibition is detailed in Live By Night (2012).
  By now a largely respectable businessman, albeit one who still has business interests in common with the notorious Meyer Lansky in Cuba, Joe Coughlin is respected and feared by his colleagues and enemies. A man who has always ensured that his associates in ‘the most powerful business syndicate in the Western hemisphere’ earned handsomely from his illicit ventures, and a former gangster who no longer has any power worth killing for, Joe is to all intents and purposes untouchable. So who has put a hit out on Joe Coughlin? And why would anyone want to kill him and disrupt the status quo?
  These questions provide World Gone By, Lehane’s 12th novel, with its narrative spine, as Coughlin tries to discover who his enemies are and second-guess their motives, all the while trying to keep a lid on a race war that is threatening to explode as an ambitious Italian-American faction tries to muscle in on the Tampa turf of ‘the Negro gangster Montooth Dix’. There are thrills and spills aplenty as the story unfolds, but it’s in the flesh Lehane packs onto the bones that the novel truly comes alive. Joe Coughlin is a fascinating creation, a dignified savage who is every bit as vicious when it comes to defending his own interests – including, most notably, the life of his young son Tomas – as he is noble in his aspirations for a better, more rewarding life for those he holds dear.
  He is a complex man, the black sheep scion of “a family tree whose branches had bent over the centuries with the weight of troubadours, publicans, writers, revolutionaries, magistrates, and policemen – liars all.” He is capable of falling in love with another man’s wife (in the process risking abject humiliation for them both) while still fiercely grieving for his dead wife, Tomas’s mother Graciela. He is acutely self-aware of his failings as a man and a father: “No,” he says in the wake of a shoot-out massacre, answering Tomas’s question as to whether he’s ‘a bad guy’, “just not a particularly good one.” Haunted by what appears to be the ghost of a young boy, Joe is unable to decide if he is hallucinating due to stress, experiencing a foreshadowing of his own mortality, or suffering a self-fulfilling prophecy born of years of subsumed guilt over the blood on his hands.
  Ultimately, World Gone By is a novel about the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era, as epitomised by Joe Coughlin and his peers, to the post-WWII years and the more organised crime of the Mafia. Joe Coughlin, the former hot-headed punk who grew up to become a thoughtful strategist, straddles both worlds, although from the beginning Joe, one of the great tragic anti-heroes of contemporary crime fiction, is conscious that his is an untenable position, that fate itself decrees that blood must always be paid back in blood. “Sometimes,” Lehane writes, “when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Publication: The US release of THE LOST AND THE BLIND by Declan Burke

I’m heading off on holidays in the next couple of days, which is nice, although it does mean that I’ll be away from the desk when THE LOST AND THE BLIND (Severn House) gets its official US release, on April 1st [insert your own April Fool gags here]. Quoth the blurb elves:

This gripping Irish thriller is an intriguing new departure for comic noir writer Declan Burke.
  “A dying man, if he is any kind of man, will live beyond the law.” The elderly German, Karl Uxkull, was senile or desperate for attention. Why else would he concoct a tale of Nazi atrocity on the remote island of Delphi, off the coast of Donegal? And why now, 60 years after the event, just when Irish-American billionaire Shay Govern has tendered for a prospecting licence for gold in Lough Swilly? Journalist Tom Noone doesn’t want to know. With his young daughter Emily to provide for, and a ghost-writing commission on Shay Govern’s autobiography to deliver, the timing is all wrong. Besides, can it be mere coincidence that Karl Uxkull's tale bears a strong resemblance to the first thriller published by legendary spy novelist Sebastian Devereaux, the reclusive English author who has spent the past 50 years holed up on Delphi? But when a body is discovered drowned, Tom and Emily find themselves running for their lives, in pursuit of the truth that is their only hope of survival.

  So there you have it. The early word has been quite positive, I’m delighted (and, as always, relieved) to say. To wit:

“Burke shows again that he’s not just a comic genius, but also a fine dramatic writer and storyteller.” – Booklist

“There’s much, much more, and readers with the patience to watch as Burke (Crime Always Pays, 2014, etc.) peels back layer after layer will be rewarded with an unholy Chinese box of a thriller. Make that an Irish-German box.” – Kirkus Reviews

“In “The Lost and the Blind,” Declan Burke weaves plot twist after plot twist together to create a thriller full of mystery and intrigue … Not many authors are capable of successfully pulling off such a complex plot, but Burke does and makes it seem effortless.” – Library Thing

  If that sounds like your kind of book, you can find THE LOST AND THE BLIND here. I thank you for your consideration …

Publication: A POSTCARD FROM HAMBURG by JJ Toner

It sounds a lot like the title of an Alan Furst spy novel, but A POSTCARD FROM HAMBURG is the third in JJ Toner’s WWII series of crime thrillers to feature Kurt Müller, and the sequel to THE BLACK ORCHESTRA. Quoth the blurb elves:

1943. WWII is raging in Europe. Kurt Müller is living in London. While working for British Intelligence he discovers a photograph of his girlfriend, Gudrun, among the possessions of a German agent. Then he gets a postcard from Gudrun, posted in Germany, and he knows the Gestapo has taken her…

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Review: SOME LUCK by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley returns to the agrarian American mid-west setting of her 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres for Some Luck (Mantle) the first book in a proposed ‘Hundred Years Trilogy’ that will span the 20th century. The novel opens in Iowa in 1920, with young farmer Walter Langdon – recently returned from the trenches of WWI – experiencing the blend of joy and terror that comes with being a new father who has just bought his first farm.
  Walter’s pragmatic voice (“Oat straw was also a beautiful colour – paler than gold but more useful.”) is by no means the only one to be heard in Some Luck. The story offers perspectives from Walter’s wife Rosanna and their growing brood of children – Frank, Joe, Mary, Lillian, Henry and Claire – all of whom have distinctive takes on the experience of growing up on a farm in rural America.
  The novel covers the years from 1920 to 1953, and so incorporates major events in recent American history, such as the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the rise of American Communism, WWII, and the post-WWII development of the Cold War. Rather than deal with these events head-on, however, Jane Smiley tends to refer to them obliquely, or at a tangent (WWII is the exception, given that we follow in Frank’s footsteps as he fights his way from North Africa, across Sicily and into Italy).
  Events such as the Wall Street Crash, for example, merit no more than a couple of lines of conversation between two characters, as they give voice to their fears that the crash might affect produce prices in the Mid-West. The same applies to the Great Depression. While there are references to the ‘Oklahoma Dustbowl’, and times do grow leaner (and a ham-fisted attempt at an armed robbery by desperate men causes some excitement), the Langdons and most of their neighbours escape the worst of the deprivation and poverty – although, as always, prices keep on falling.
  Despite the huge sweep of the story, however, given the backdrop of momentous events, the number of characters who appear and the time-span involved, Some Luck is a very intimate kind of epic, and one that is rooted in the domestic concerns of Walter and Rosanna Langdon.
  Indeed, the recurring motif of the book is the physical manifestation of family domesticity, the house: at various points in the novel, the characters’ good and bad times are reflected in the kind of house where they live, and the condition of that house. The novel opens with Walter walking out on his new farm and evaluating the farm’s prospects, but eventually turning to the solidly built home that lies at its centre; the devastation of the Great Depression is characterised by abandoned houses, which turn into eyesores on the landscape; and the novel concludes with the young Claire struggling to cope with the news of a momentous death, and the emotional churn inside that leaves her feeling ‘like an empty house’.
  Beautifully descriptive in its depictions of an Iowa landscape at the mercy of volatile and extreme weather conditions – blistering sun in summer, savage blizzards in winter – the novel is an elegy for a forgotten generation but also a cautionary fable against mythologising their world (“Every house is in a dark wood,” warns Frank after his experience in WWII, amplifying the recurring fairytale motif, “every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother …”). All told, it’s an engrossing, bittersweet love letter to a people whose experience of a relentlessly changing world taught them to appreciate its natural charms but never underestimate its perils. ~ Declan Burke

  Some Luck by Jane Smiley is published by Mantle.

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Review: THE BLACK LIFE by Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston’s The Black Life (Crème de la Crime, €18.99), his sixth to feature the Greek-Scottish private detective Alex Mavros, is rooted in the past, although it’s a past that becomes more relevant with each passing day. Hired to investigate the apparently miraculous reappearance of Aron Samuel, a Jewish man thought to have died in Auschwitz, Mavros travels to the city of Thessalonika. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a tale that links the extermination camps of the Third Reich with the recent rise of the fascist Greek political party, Phoenix Rises. What follows is a powerful novel on many levels. Johnston doesn’t shy away from describing the hellish activities at Auschwitz, and he further explores the extent of the collaboration that existed between Greek citizens and the German authorities when it came to deporting the Jewish population of Thessalonika. He also investigates the activities of those Jewish men and women who took their revenge on former Nazis in the post-WWII years, weaving the narrative strands through a political tapestry that includes the beliefs of Mavros himself, whose own family suffered terribly for their Communist leanings during the reign of the Colonels. Harrowing in places, it’s a gripping private eye novel that offers a chilling snapshot of modern Greece. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.