2010 Edgar winners

The Mystery Writers of America gave their 2010 Edgar award for best novel to John Hart’s The Last Child, while Stefanie Pintoff’s In the Shadow of  Gotham was chosen as best first novel by an American author.

I read the Pintoff book on vacation and never got around to blogging about it, which is a shame, because I liked it a lot.  It’s a police procedural set in 1905.  The protagonist, Simon Ziele, is a former New York police officer who’s sought a less stressful post in a small town north of the city.  A brutal murder there sends him back to Gotham, where he partners with a university professor who studies the criminal mind.  Writing in the 21st century, Pintoff effectively captures the early flavor of what we now know as criminal profiling.

I’m delighted to see there’s a new sequel, A Curtain Falls.

Movie: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

We don’t see many movies in the theater, but, when the film of  Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came to town, Ken and I were there in the first week.  We were impressed with the screenwriter’s ability to reduce the epic details of the story down to a strong central thread, and to create suspense in a story that, on paper, was a lot of exposition.  The character of Lisbeth plays a larger role in the film than in the book, perhaps because her storyline has much of the action in it.  Be forewarned:  When reading, you might not fully visualize the violent scenes, but there’s no escaping them on the screen.

While we, of course, knew the story, we both thought that someone without that knowledge would still have followed and been satisfied by the plot.

Field of Blood by Denise Mina

I just got an email this morning from the local library telling me that they’re holding Mina’s next book, Still Midnight,  for me.  Hooray!

In 1981, Field of Blood’s Paddy Meehan is a copy “boy” at the Scottish Daily News in Glasgow.  When the murder of a young boy touches her (very Catholic) family, she willfully pursues the story — the mystery — losing her family’s support and discovering that she’s self-sufficient without it.

Mina has James Lee Burke’s gift for describing atmosphere: the snow and cold rain of Glasgow, shadowy streets of vacant buildings, the parlors of people stunned by poverty.  She also captures Paddy’s emotional climate, as she goes toe-to-toe with newsroom misogynists, acknowledges her lack of faith and weighs the value of a career vs. a traditional family.

The mystery and character both develop at a satisfying and logical pace.

And, as a former journalist, I loved this passage.

Paddy: “Yeah, that’s the trouble with working here.  Everyone’s a cynic.”

His eyes softened.  “We’re all heartbroken idealists.  That’s what no one gets about journalists: only true romantics get jaded.’”

The Information Officer by Mark Mills

It’s WWII, and the Nazis, needing a mid-Mediterranean air base to attack Africa, are bombing the daylights out of the tiny island of Malta, which is being defended by the Allies.

Meanwhile, at the officer’s club and in private parlors, stiff drinks and stiff upper lips prevail, affairs flourish and wane and siege humor colors the dialog.  It’s all too, too Graham Greene.

Max Chadwick is the British information officer (PR guy) trying to bolster the locals with cheery tales of incidental heroism while covering up news of a serial killer preying on young women: a killer who may well be one of the Brits’ own.

Mills effectively mixes history with some well-drawn fictional characters.  He’s less effective as a mystery writer.  The clues didn’t draw an inevitable net tighter and tighter around the killer.   The conclusion felt more like, “Oops, time to end this book.  Here’s who done it.”

March Madness = book tournaments?

Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the literary world, March Madness conjures no visions of hoops, mascots and Tom Izzo.  It means it’s time for book tournaments.  Who knew?

Anyway, this article at Salon.com introduced me to the subject.   I especially liked the bracket at http://jensbookthoughts.blogspot.com/ in which favorite fictional detectives square off against each other.  What, no point spread?  In round three, my toughest choice was between Kurt Wallander and Dave Robicheaux.  I chose Wallander, but, if I had to choose which author’s books I liked more,  things might go the other way.

The 47th Samuri by Stephen Hunter

OK, that is NOT Bob Lee Swagger in this book.   This imposter is flippant.  He’s chatty.  He knows who Kate Spade is, fer cryin’ out loud.  And, while maybe I can imagine him buying a designer handbag for his daughter,  his wife would have had him committed when he bought one for her.

Oh, sure, he really gets into the Samuri warrior mentality, that whole honor and duty thing.  To the manner born and all that.  And it only takes a short course with the Japanese equivalent of Yoda to turn him into a sword fighter who can go mano a mano with the best guy in the entire country.

Even Hunter acknowledges that keeping the story straight as he’s switched  back and forth between the stories of Bob Lee and his father, Earl, has occasionally forced him to rewrite their history.   I haven’t kept up on the Swagger series, so maybe he’s grown into this character.  If so, could we please rewrite his character to bring back the iconic, stoic sniper/tracker/woodsman from Point of Impact?

Movie of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

According to the 3/26/10 edition of Entertainment Weekly,  there’s a Swedish film based on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplev.  Netflix has no information about the movie. Further,  they’ve already filmed the next two Larson books, with the same two leads, Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace.   Sony Pictures has optioned the book for the U.S., with screenplay to be written by Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and David Fincher (Zodiac) as a possible director.

EW sheds some light on one of my earlier blog questions about  Scandinavians and Nazis:  Larson crusaded against right-wing extremism in Sweden until his untimly death in 2004.

Nazis are everywhere these days

Stieg Larson’s Girl with the Dragon Tatoo features an elaborate family tree populated with Nazi sympathizers.  White supremacists and Nazi collaborators span two generations in Jo Nesbo’s The Redbreast, which takes a little side trip to South Africa, home to Malla Nunn’s apartheid-driven A Beautiful Place to Die.

Is national socialism still driving world politics, or is it just a useful device for contemporary suspense writers?

A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

Nunn started her career as a screenwriter. Gotta make some money before you follow your heart into the poverty-stricken world of book publishing, right, Malla?

No boring exposition here. Nunn gives her characters dialog that economically conveys character and drives the story.

In Nunn’s apartheid-based world, a cop with a secret, on the verge of trouble and insubordination (is there any other way?) navigates the dark pathways between whites and blacks to find a murderer in a South African village.

I’ve been working my way through a number of Edgar nominees and this is yet another worthy candidate.

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

Our protagonist is yet another morose, obsessive, hard-drinking Scandinavian police detective. Kicked upstairs after a disastrous shooting accident, Harry Hole gets assigned to a busy-work case that turns into a complex mystery that started 55 years ago, among Norwegian soldiers fighting with the Germans on the eastern front of WW II.

Nesbo’s work is excellent and probably lives up to the jacket blurb calling this the best Norwegian crime fiction novel ever, but only the Norwegians know for sure.