Three
crime books in as many weeks amounts to a spree of summer reading,
all in the turning days of August, full of showers, thunderstorms,
goldening chestnut trees and the occasional blast of sunshine, so
glorious even the drearest of hearts are enlivened.
Never
mind that the swallows are gathering, forming ranks along the
telegraph wires, while the sea still rolls onto the pristine beach
and the weans, sleek as seals in their black wet suits, shriek when
their body-boards tumble in the waves, turf and timber still warm the
stove in
the evening,
so
the books come out.
Sara
Paretsky’s long term Private Investigator, V. I. Warshawski,
undertakes her eighteenth adventure in FALLOUT (Hodder and Stoughton,
2017).
Michael
Connelly, with almost thirty novels under his belt, introduces a new
lead in THE LATE SHOW (Orion Books, 2017). His Detective Renée
Ballard, a woman, works the night shift at the Los Angeles Police
Department.
Brian
McGilloway’s creation, Detective Sergeant Lucy Black of The Police
Service of Northern Ireland, faces her latest policing challenge in
BAD BLOOD (Corsair, 2017).
Connelly's
and McGilloway's books are, at core, police procedurals, the former
in a huge north American metropolis, the latter in a small city in
the north-west of Ireland. Paretsky's presents
a private investigation, so there is less police procedural work
involved. All three sit within the genre ‘crime’, though the word
‘thriller’ is also applied. Thus, they can be grouped together in
an old-fashioned school essay of the ‘compare and contrast’
variety.
Firstly,
a small note for enthusiastic fans of Connelly and Paretsky and their
creations. They both have characters named Chastain, hardly a common
name in the U.S.A. There are no Chastains in McGilloway’s book.
Connelly
and McGilloway’s characters live in the world of police forces.
They have hierarchies; briefing rooms; colleagues with whom they
share professional and sexual tensions. The protagonists face
antagonism from criminals, citizens and from colleagues. There are
‘good’ cops and ‘bad’ cops, but no obvious critique of
policing as such. The grossest crime is murder – the unlawful
taking of life - and Connelly’s detective, Renée Ballard, in
particular, holds to an ethic of doing right by the victims.
McGilloway’s
detective, Lucy Black, holds to this ethic as well and, when there is
a conflict between staff members, ‘doing the right thing’ is the
favoured norm.
In a sense, both these books are morality fables, in
which the good guys, Ballard and Black, prevail, though the contexts
in which they struggle remain largely unaffected. There is an
undertow of hopelessness pulling at the torrents of action careering
along the main channel of both books.
Paretsky's
world is more expansive, with FALLOUT ranging across territory and
history in great sweeping rushes. Because Paretsky’s lead, Victoria
Iphigenia (V.I.) Warshawski, is a private detective, her antagonists
include various city and county police authorities, military and
civil authorities, families and clients, though there is, as ever,
one decent cop.
With
Connelly and McGilloway, we are in cities. The great metropolis of
Los Angeles is the territory covered by Renée Ballard. Long hours
driving on freeways, with hurried lunches and traffic snarl-ups map
the reader’s journey from the decadence of the Santa Monica
shoreline to the towns that stretch into the valley, then back
through the Hollywood hills and into the downtown area. There is very
little introspection on the long car journeys. There are African
Americans involved, but Renée Ballard never makes it to South
Central in this story.
McGilloway’s
Derry, in the north-west of Ireland, is a small border city.
He tells the geography of the city with the loving attention of a
native, taking the reader to locations not often visited. The scene
where Detective Lucy Black crawls through the innards of the city's
giant span bridge is particularly effective.
Paretsky
takes the reader to a mixed rural and urban story-scape, once again
lovingly depicted, as the university city of Lawrence, in the state
of Kansas, is her birthplace. Her detective yearns for her home
metropolis, Chicago, and effective use is made of the inter-play
between the blow-in from the big city and the Kansas locals.
Like
all crime novels, these three fine examples sometimes veer towards
the preposterous, with the protagonists placed in jeopardy and
achieving salvation from unlikely sources, each
consciously consistent with the drive of the stories. Though the
detectives are formidably committed to their work, they all have
capacities to maintain relationships with colleagues and to evoke
sympathies from freshly
encountered allies.
V.I.
Warshawski is vivacious, forceful, athletic and
resourceful.
She is the most colourful of the three lead characters. They are all
singular and single, with complex personal relations in hand or
lingering. Warshawski exercises
by running, often with her dogs, while Ballard is an expert paddle
surfer, who seems to live between a pop-up tent on the beach and her
locker in police HQ, with occasional overnights with her grandmother.
Lucy Black’s relationships with her parents are important elements
the reader enjoys. They
all eat junk food and Lucy Black, perhaps the youngest, takes no
exercise and is physically fit enough to chase suspects. Ballard is
driven. Black is adamant.
Warshawski is fervent. All are engaging and effective lead
characters.
The
plots in all three books work satisfactorily. McGilloway creates,
manages and advances the story in a dense, often claustrophobic
world, where overlapping actions, involving drug suppliers, loyalist
paramilitary factions, Roma immigrants, a gay club, a fire-brand
pastor, bent and misogynistic cops, conclude with successful outcomes
for Lucy Black and a satisfactory sense of order restored, even as a
dread undertow sloughs on.
Connelly’s
plot has the precision of a well-oiled machine, pumping and resolute,
with action trumping action until that acme of the genre, the vital
forensic revelation, clarifies and condemns in a sweepingly
believable conclusion.
Paretsky’s
plot veers most closely to the preposterous zone. It is the
marvellous cast of characters Sara Paretsky creates that drives the
story, including the two mechanics who arrive late on and who, quite
literally, save the day, ably assisted by Peppy the dog. The reader
is in danger of being seriously charmed.
The
language in Connelly’s THE LATE SHOW is generally hard-boiled.
McGilloway’s language is clipped, enlivened by crisp descriptions
and brisk turns of phrase in rooted dialogue. Paretsky, unlike the
other two writers, uses a clear “I” voice, addressing corporate,
federal and military malfeasance far away from the largely
blue-collar concerns of Connelly and McGilloway, all laced with V.I.
Warshawski's hip and metropolitan tastes in food, music and clothes.
Kefir for breakfast anyone?
All
three books are a treat for readers of the genre and were enjoyed as
summer reading, with Paretsky's coming slightly ahead of the other
two, joint second on the pleasure-ometer, because of its
expansiveness and the exposure of corporate and military crime.
All
three are light on irony and humour, though the occasional witticism
breaks through. Readers will have to re-read their well-thumbed
Elmore Leonard paperbacks for the boons of laughter and the askance
view.
Next
up? Arundhati Roy’s collection of essays, lectures and talks, THE
END OF IMAGINATION (Haymarket Books, 2016), where she notes that
“Writers
imagine they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe
that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way
around. Stories cull writers from the world.”
These
three crime stories: FALLOUT, BAD BLOOD and THE LATE SHOW have culled
fine writers from the world and readers look forward to more such
criminal culling in the future.
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