Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

Staff Picks
April 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 12 3 min read

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I’ve been thinking lately that I should be reading more crime fiction. I’ve never been against it—in theory I’m in favor of anything good, regardless of genre, although I’ve never taken to werewolves—but I haven’t actively sought it out.

But since my second novel keeps getting categorized as crime fiction, my illiteracy in the genre that I’ve apparently been shoehorned into has become slightly uncomfortable. “What kind of a book have you written?” people ask.

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s a sort of literary crime novel?” (I know. Awkward. But if you set out to write literary fiction and end up getting reviewed in Spinetingler Magazine, what are you supposed to call it?)

“Oh!” they say. “Have you read [insert name of high-profile crime writer whom I haven’t read but obviously should have if I’m claiming any sort of association with the genre]?”

The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. For your reading pleasure, two books you might consider reading even if you don’t think you like crime fiction very much:

1.
coverSavages by Don Winslow: I think this book is perhaps best described as a Tarantino film crossed with a prose poem. It’s violent, beautifully written, and experimental, and I’ve never read anything like it. Structurally, it’s a dizzyingly intricate 290 chapters, the first one only two words long (1. “Fuck you.”)

Ben is a brilliant botanist who’s partnered up with his best friend, Chon, to produce and distribute the best pot on the West Coast. Chon, a former Navy SEAL who brought unspeakably high-quality marijuana seeds back from Afghanistan, has a girlfriend named O, but she sleeps with Ben too. Everyone’s in their twenties. The trio lead lives of hedonistic ease in Laguna Beach, until a vicious Mexican cartel arrives on the scene to stage a hostile takeover of the business.

The shifts in perspective are interesting; Winslow shifts back and forth within his central trio and then moves outward, until we’re reading short chapters from the viewpoint of practically every thug who populates the pages. The effect is fragmented, but effective. What I found most startling about this book was Winslow’s willingness to abandon conventional form and slip without warning in and out of a sort of loose poetry—

Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.

The cartel kidnaps O to speed up the takeover negotiations. The body count is considerable. The book’s practically impossible to put down.

2.
coverSnowdrops by A.D. Miller: Snowdrops is as quiet as Savages is loud. The book opens with the early-spring discovery of a body; a snowdrop, in Moscow slang, a corpse hidden all winter under heavy snows. It appears with the first thaw in front of Nick Platt’s apartment building.

It’s apparent from the first pages that a complicated crime is being played out, something slow and deadly unfolding over weeks and months; evidence of it is all around us even as we can’t see how the pieces fit together—until, of course, the trap snaps shut in the final chapters and the significance of the body in the first chapter falls devastatingly into place.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer who lives and works in Moscow in the early 2000s. One day in the Metro he meets a young woman, Masha, and quickly falls in love. His narration takes the loose form of a confession to his soon-to-be-bride, years later—“You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia”—although the deeper he goes into the story, the less certain the wedding seems.

Masha asks for his assistance in helping her aunt, Tatiana, move to a new apartment. The real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love. A lonely man in a foreign city, courted suddenly by a beautiful young girl, is willing to suspend disbelief even when her story begins to crumble and lies start showing through, even when he’s half-aware at every turn that he’s complicit in something dreadful and that everything is wrong. An intriguing debut, suffused with an atmosphere of dread.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

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Staff Pick: Hallie Rubenhold’s The Lady in Red

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October 8, 2009 | 2 books mentioned 2 min read

For all of the corseting that aristocratic ladies of the Eighteenth Century wore (stays, garters, petticoats, underskirts…), one might imagine that sexual naughtiness would have been well nigh impossible.  Those who have encountered the writings of the Marquis de Sade or Pierre de Laclos‘ Les Liaisons Dangereuses know better, of course, as do those who saw the recent Keira Knightly film The Duchess, which took its title and subject from Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806). The Duchess’ extra-marital prowess (lovers, a bastard) was matched only by that of her husband, who ultimately trumped his wife in the field of sexual dalliance by taking her best friend as his lover and settling her into their home at Chatsworth in a cozy ménage a trois.  Oh, yes: the ladies (and gentlemen) of the Age of Enlightenment managed to have rather a lot of fun and get into rather a lot of trouble with their affaires vénériennes.

Hallie Rubenhold’s recent cultural history The Lady in Red: An Eighteenth Century Tale of Sex, Scandal, and Divorce gives a vivid, lucid account of one of the strangest English sex scandals of the age: the tale of the adulterous Lady Seymour Worsley and her vengeful husband, Sir Richard Worsley.  When Lady Worsley abandoned Sir Richard for one of his friends and asked her husband for a divorce, Sir Richard refused, instead initiating a criminal conversation suit against his wife’s lover (criminal conversation covers crimes like joyriding—any unauthorized use of another’s property; in the 1780’s, a wife was property).  The case became the most sensational celebrity sex trial of the age. As the hearing of evidence began, it became increasingly clear that Sir Richard had unusual tastes in the bedroom and had been something of a collaborator in his wife’s misbehavior.  Rubenhold writes good clean prose and deftly balances the larger cultural history of the age with the particular tale of the Worsleys’ ill-fated marriage; her account of the criminal conversation trial reads something like a John Grisham legal thriller and I’ll bet my best whale-boned corset that you’re captivated by her well-paced narration of this perverse, perplexing, and very public unraveling of a marriage.

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Staff Pick: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap

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August 18, 2010 | 2 books mentioned 4 2 min read

A confession – I haven’t read much about Australia.  To be completely honest, I’m a hopelessly provincial reader – sticking mostly to the US, with only the occasional foray to Europe, Latin America, and Canada.  I’m working on it, okay?  This is all to say that I am incredibly lucky that Christos Tsiolkas landed on a panel I was moderating for the LA Times Festival of Books, as it put his tremendous novel The Slap before me in a pressing way.

The premise of The Slap, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Novel of Southeast Asia and Australia and is now longlisted for the Booker, is deceptively simple – at a suburban barbecue, a man slaps another couple’s child.  The beauty of the novel is how that slap, that one moment, reverberates through the lives of the dozen or so people who witness it.  The structure is remarkable for both its simplicity and its dexterity.  As opposed to a Rashomon structure, in which each character tells their (differing) version of the events, Tsiolkas uses each chapter to further advance the story.  But like Rashomon, each new character offers us a different perspective, not so much on what happened, but on what it means, for the characters themselves and for Australian society.

Make no mistake, The Slap is a social novel, a snapshot of the Australian middle class – prosperous, self-obsessed, and maybe a little bit complacent.  Indeed, it’s one of the many miracles of this book that a small personal incident can reveal so much of a culture and a country.  Like a highly erotic Cheever novel, The Slap skewers the middle class while giving them their humanity and even, at times, a bit of sympathy.  The portrait Tsiolkas paints of Australia – richly diverse and yet mired in deep-seeded racism, prosperous but divided along subtle class lines – is endlessly fascinating.  It is further evidence that I do, in fact, need to get out more.

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12 comments:

  1. i just got into literary mysteries thanks to “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace. I never knew the genre could be so satisfying. These look great. You make a strong case for “Savages”

  2. Great post. I came across “Savages” thanks to its inclusion in the Tournament of Books this year and also found it hard to put down. I’ve checked out a couple of Winslow’s older books from the library and hope they end up similarly satisfying.

    I used to read a good bit of not-so-literary crime fiction in my teenage years thanks to the sorts of books my dad would read a lot and pass on to me, but I grew away from the genre as my tastes turned a bit more literary the past couple years. Books such as Savages, though, have drawn me a bit back into the genre, and I even find a great deal of entertainment in cozier mystery series such as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that aren’t necessarily the brainiest or most challenging, but at the same time don’t patronize the reader.

  4. Thanks for reinforcing my wanting to read Savages, and for putting Snowdrops on my list. I have two thoughts to extend what you said.

    Could much of what is called literary crime fiction be better called literate crime fiction? Literate meaning it doesn’t patronize the reader, insult the language, or strain credibility. It doesn’t have to be on the bleeding edge of what it means to be human, or reconstruct how we tell stories, to justify itself. The literate telling of a good story, about bad people, good people, and some who blur the boundary, is justification enough; calling Rankin, McDermid, Connelly, Mosley, Minna, or Mankell writers of literate crime fiction is sufficient praise for now.

    A useful distinction others have made is between crime fiction and noir fiction. In crime fiction, the crime upsets the moral order; in the end, the crime is solved and the order restored. In noir, no absolute moral order is recognized, and the partial demands of society, family, and the individual will fight for dominance. The Singer’s Gun seems to me to be more noir-ish than crime-ish, but still literary.

  5. Emily,
    Thanks for the heads-up on the latest from Don Winslow. Your mention of the weed-growing botanists reminds me of the only Winslow I’ve read, “California Fire and Life,” which is about sleazebags who set arson fires and the people who try to catch them. Terrific stuff. And it reminded me that the best novels are rarely about people stewing in their juices; they’re almost always about people who do actual work. I’m thinking about wheat-threshing in “Anna Karenina,” bomb de-fusing in “The English Patient,” glove-making in “American Pastoral,” to name just a few.
    Bill Morris

  6. I can’t wait to read Savages. It sounds a bit like the novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith’s pot-crime-romp through LA, which is a super fun read.

  7. One of the most compelling crime thrillers that I have read is Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Winslow used to be a DEA guy but left in disgust and then wrote Power of the Dog about the Mexican drug wars. This was in the nineties! When I read it a couple of years ago I thought one of the scenes was a bit too much…but then the next week, in the news, the exact same scenario was reported! This guy has seen it all.

  8. I love crime novels in general – right now I’m finishing Breeders by Barney Rostaing, and I like it a lot. You made “Savages” sound like an absolute must-read, so I think I’ll pick up a copy as soon as I’m done with Breeders!

  9. “The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. ”
    I couldn’t agree more – assigning labels can sometimes have the unintended effect of missing out on a great book or a great experience. Thanks for these two recommendations, I have added them to my summer reading list. Have you read Skylights and Screen Doors by Dean Smart? I would define it as un-categorizable as it is part memoir, part true crime, part just great writing. Another example of how genres can be misleading.

  12. These days crime fiction is the only stuff I read. Thanks for the reccomendations. I will look out for both Snowdrops and savages.

    I have had enouogh of reading the ‘classics’ to impress others and ‘improve myself’.
    I want my daily adrenalin rush and the only way is through crime fiction!

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Staff Pick: Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds

Staff Picks
March 26, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 1 2 min read

When Terry Tempest Williams’s mother was dying, she told her daughter that she was leaving her journals to her, with one condition — that Williams wait until after her death to read them. Williams honored her mother’s wish and when she finally opened the journals she was shocked to find that every one of them was blank.

When Women Were Birds is a memoir that explores this extraordinary gesture, one that Williams chose not to write about until she turned 54, the age her mother was when she died. The book’s subtitle, “54 Variations on Voice,” refers not only to her mother’s age, but to the book’s structure, which consists of 54 short chapters. Some chapters contain stories from Williams’s childhood and give glimpses of Williams’s mother, the kind of stories you would expect from a traditional memoir. Others contain lists of words, excerpts from letters, quotations, notes, photographs, and even blank pages. It’s an intimate, fragmented book, written not to tell a story but to hint at stories untold.

Williams admits that when she first discovered her mother’s empty journals her disappointment was difficult to bear: “The blow of her blank journals became a second death.” She had hoped that the journals would reveal her mother’s private life and thoughts, but instead Williams was left with even more questions. She wonders if her mother’s refusal to keep a journal was an act of defiance; as a Mormon woman, Williams’s mother was expected to keep a journal. “All Mormon women write,” Williams explains, “This is what we do, we write for posterity, noting the daily happenings of our lives. Keeping a journal is keeping a record. And I have hundreds of them, hundreds of journals filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words. Without locks, open on my shelves.” For Williams, a writer, her journals are a refuge, but perhaps for her mother, not writing offered a great feeling of protection, of privacy. “My mother’s journals are her shadow. They hold her depth and substance and her refusal to be known.”

Williams has said that she wrote When Women Were Birds as a way to explore voice, but instead she ended up writing about silence. To write about silence sounds like a zen koan, and there is something meditative about this book, especially in the way it avoids storytelling and even analysis. And yet it is compelling, drawing you in by the weight of its questions and the open, searching mind of its author.

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Love in the Bottom Rung: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself

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February 27, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 2 min read

It’s a cliche to note that New York City or London or any other glamorous locale is a character in the books that take place there. But in the case of There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself, a collection of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Soviet-era short stories, Russia may be the only character. The book’s 17 stories are only a few pages each and read so quickly that their plots and characters didn’t make a lasting impression on me. What did is Soviet Russia, and Soviet Russia was the pits.

The collection’s subtitle, Love Stories, is apt not in the sense that many people end up with love and happiness, but in the sense that the characters — uniformly underpaid, underhoused, underappreciated, and low on groceries — have nothing to hope for but love, the one resource that can’t be rationed. They live in cramped city apartments, assigned to them by the state, with one or two generations of their family, and work in thankless jobs. The most depressing love affairs — emotionless, unrequited, exploitative — shine with promise in these settings.

The stories, as they usually go, start with a cutting introduction of an unattractive young girl:

There once lived a girl who was beloved by her mother but no one else.

What terrible fits she threw, this proud fighter for love! It’s incredible what she went through. Take, for example, her departing husband’s good-bye punch that knocked one of her front teeth inward.

A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and then left. I was that girl.

These inauspicious beginnings are followed by genuinely pathetic possibilities of love. As in, my married coworker is coming over for sex tonight so I asked my mom to absent herself; or, I think I’ll seduce my sister’s husband. Story after story goes by with these unfortunate souls aiming for the lowest rung of happiness and frequently missing. In the rare instance that they succeed, what kind of victory is the lowest rung of happiness? No one ever said reading Russian literature was a picnic.

And yet, Petrushevskaya’s vision is not wholly desolate. If the depressing nature of Soviet life is the book’s first constant, the second is the characters’ romantic optimism, which, under the circumstances, feels like grit. This hope among the ruins, if you like, is patly expressed here:
They were referring, of course, to love, for what else could girls of eighteen talk about? They discussed other things, naturally: books, weather, terrible accidents in the city, injustice and deceit, their childhoods, the constant ache in their feet, and problems at work. But mostly they spoke about friendship and love, tried to analyze their feelings, applied intuition or simply closed their eyes to everything and cried their hearts out, and gradually, in the course of those conversations, acquired a protective layer of hardness that sealed their mouths and left them to fight their grown-up battles alone, wordlessly.
What’s remarkable is not the love they find, but the fact that they’re looking for it. Given their youth, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Given their options (again, the married co-worker or the brother-in-law) it’s either audacious or loony. But they’re looking, is what Petrushevskaya wants us to see. They are indeed proud fighters for love, and when they do attain that low rung of happiness, you can’t help but be happy for them.

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