DETECTED, INSPECTED

This column by Elinore Standard appeared in The Record Review in August, 2004, as one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series.

Works mentioned in this piece: Death in Dublin, Death of an Irish Lover, Death of a Joyce Scholar, Death of an Irish Tinker, Outsider in Amsterdam, Corpse in the Dyke, Blond Baboon, Love in Amsterdam, King of the Rainy Country, Roseanna, Laughing Policeman, Aqua Alta, Murder Down Under, Bony and the Mouse, Sands of Windee, Fade to Clear, Over the Shoulder, Underkill.


MY READING LIFE



DETECTED, INSPECTED


Come with me on a trip around the world to meet a few of my favorite detectives along the way.
We’ll travel eastward, stopping first in Ireland. Bartholomew Gill is, alas, no longer with us (he died in 2002) but we’ll look around the Dublin of his novels, the locale for more than 15 novels featuring brainy Dublin police Inspector of Detectives, Peter McGarr.

In such mysteries as “Death in Dublin”, “Death of an Irish Lover”, “Death of a Joyce Scholar”, and “Death of an Irish Tinker”, McGarr and Gill’s other characters evolve as the series progresses. His people change: they get older and wiser, they rise in rank, some leave the force,they marry, they split, they die. Gill’s writing is comfortable to read and I’m sorry he’s gone. I miss him already. Our local libraries have many of the McGarr novels and they are also available in paperback, generally published by Harper.

Hop across the Channel, now, to the Netherlands and the work of Janwillem Van de Wetering whose Commisaris of the Amsterdam police, and his subordinates, policemen Grijpstra and deGier have partnered in an enjoyable series that includes such titles as “Outsider in Amsterdam,” “The Corpse in the Dike,” “The Blond Baboon,” and others, now reprinted in paperback (many by Soho) and available on Amazon.

Although the murders in these books are brutal, there is a thoughtfulness and humanity on the part of the characters that sometimes borders on the quirky. DeGier is a tall, skinny, Zen-practicing cat owner and flutist and Grijpstra is an ageing and somewhat dissolute drummer. They worship their elderly boss and make inside jokes about just about everything.

In 1972, the late English writer Nicolas Freeling (1927-2003) actually had the nerve to kill off his own Amsterdam police Commisaris, Piet Van der Valk, after several successful novels. A “Guardian” obit of Freeling said, “He was tired of the tyranny of having to write the same story over and over again.” I always missed Van der Valk (“Love in Amsterdam” 1962, “King of the Rainy Country, 1967) but I did enjoy Freeling’s sop to his disappointed fans: two novels featuring Arlette Van der Valk, the widow. Freeling also wrote 16 novels set in and around the Alsace region of France with Henri Castang as the detective-hero in those. Good, but not as good, as the Dutch series.

Get on a coastwise freighter and make your way up the North Sea to the Stockholm of the early 1970s, and to climate and atmosphere as cold as the long, dim days of Nordic Winter. Swedish husband-and-wife writers, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo created 15 novels in a police procedural series featuring Martin Beck of the Stockholm homicide squad. Written before 1975, when Wahloo died, titles include “Roseanna" (1965) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1971) which was later made into a movie featuring Walter Matthau.

Martin Beck is solid and methodical and usually fed up with the general incompetence of the police force and the dehumanizing aspects of his job. His colleague, Lennart Kollberg, hates violence and refuses to carry a gun.

Should you wish to remain in Arctic emotional deepfreeze, check current detective titles by Swedish novelist Henning Mankill and Norwegian, Karin Fossum.

Thaw out, and head South, now, to watery Venice and the Inspector Guido Brunetti novels by Donna Leon. This is a fairly recent series, a dozen novels beginning in 1992, and Leon seems to write a new one almost yearly, so that’s good. I love it that Brunetti often comes home for lunch and as the reader, I get to share what he’s having. My favorite in this series is “Aqua Alta” (1996), set during the winter floods when many of the streets and sidewalks are under water and Venetians make their way about town on boardwalks hurriedly placed for that purpose.

Quick! Hop on QUANTAS or hurry to the stacks at your local library, or go on line, and order any of the many Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte books by Arthur W. Upfield (1888-1964) generally not in print but still available for sale through Amazon. These stories, set in flyblown small towns of Western Australia during the 1930’s to ‘50’s, are gems of description and in each one, Detective Inspector Bonaparte or “Bony” as he is called, uses his Aboriginal tradecraft and cunning to deal in interesting depth with a timely Australian problem: flood, rabbits, drought, wildfire, and to solve whatever crime that happens his way.

Upfield reprint titles include: “Murder Down Under” (Touchstone, 1998), “Bony and the Mouse” (Harper, 1991), “The Sands of Windee”, (Macmillan, 1985). Thinking in his own Dreamtime, the patient Detective Inspector Bony says, “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”

At last, we make our way back home to San Francisco where we meet Allen Choice the young private eye in three recent novels by American writer, Leonard Chang. Chang studied philosophy at Dartmouth and Harvard and his work is pleasingly literary. His latest and most absorbing novel is “Fade to Clear” (St. Martin’s, 2004) in which the Korean-American PI works to find an abducted child and faces his own issues of resistance to personal commitment. The writing is a little “noir” in the tradition of the old-fashioned sleuths of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett .

This Chang novel is set in San Francisco and moves around Silicon Valley. It includes generous lashings of Kierkegaard which may sound off-putting but is really not. . “Fade to Clear” has a third person point of view and is written in the present tense, something not easy for a writer to manage without annoying the reader. I am impressed by Chang’s insight into his complex characters and his willingness to try a little literary razzle-dazzle.

Chang has also written “Over the Shoulder” (Harper 2001) and “Underkill” (St. Martin’s 2003). In his website (www.leonardchang.com) remarks Chang says he is going to write more Allen Choice novels, how many more, “I’m not sure, but it feels like I’ve only started to delve into his character and family.” Chang’s first three Allen Choice novels have the makings of a durable series.

Of course, we could keep circling the globe, going around and around like the Flying Dutchman. We could return to Europe for George Simenon’s, Le Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, probably (next to Sherlock Holmes) the most famous fictional detective that ever was. Maigret figures in 78 novels and 28 short stories, and at least 50 films. On sheer output, Simenon stands first. If we felt like it, we could head down to southern Africa, to Botswana and Alexander McCall Smith’s adorable and best selling Mma Ramotswe, the “traditionally-sized” proprietor of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

The frequent flyer miles are racking up. Oh, what pleasures such armchair travel can provide!


Elinore Standard is the editor, along with Laura Furman of “Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading" (1997, Carroll & Graf).