Cultural Pilgrim » Crime Fiction

Doorstopper finale: Book review of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Andres Kabel — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:00:40 +0000

So this is it, the conclusion (for author Stieg Larsson can write no more) to the Millennium thriller trilogy that has enlisted slavering fans since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. At close to 600 pages pages, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is as meaty as the first two books. Once more it features Lisbeth Salander, the young super-hacker goth with a horrific past of abusing men, who received a bullet into the head at the end of the previous volume, and Mikael Blomkvist the flinty, personable investigative reporter. This time their goal is to keep Salander free from the clutches of the Swedish secret service.

As with the first two books, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest puzzles veteran thriller readers like me. I have no doubt that if an extravagantly wordy tale like this, with a plot so labyrinthine that I know people who draw massive wall charts to follow it, were to be submitted by a wannabe novelist to an American publishing house, it would be thrown out with the comment ‘cut, cut, cut’. After a skilfully orchestrated beginning, Larsson clogs the huge middle section with an endless array of minor characters, many of them barely sketched for the reader, interacting in complicated ways. Unlike the many Millennium fans I know, I found this section, like the middle of The Girl Who Played with Fire, maddeningly repetitive to the point of tedium. Fortunately Larsson’s fetish for descriptive details helps bind this section together. And then the final third kicks into gear, with Salander and Blomkvist at stage centre, and suddenly I could not put the doorstopper down. A pivotal courtroom scene is as good as any I have read in years. Larsson’s refusal to sentimentalise Salander’s moments of triumph after so long is a towering triumph.

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest understanding why fans love the series, and if you’re one such, no doubt you already have this volume. I still find myself wondering whether a talented editor might have pared the mid-book bloat and transformed a compulsive, readable thriller into a genre masterpiece. 3 stars.

Safe cracking joy: Book review of The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton

Andres Kabel — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:00:37 +0000

This must be the season for wonderful thrillers. I had admired Steve Hamilton’s private eye series, featuring Alex McKnight, during its early years, but stopped following him some time ago. Glowing reviews of his new standalone The Lock Artist: A Novel drew me back and thank goodness for that, for this is one of the cleverest, most engaging books I’ve read this year. The complex plot follows Michael, a youthful ‘boxman,’ what we know here in Australia as a safe cracker, through the early years of his dangerous career. Hamilton alternates two separate storylines, constructed highly intriguingly to slowly reveal Michael’s tragic childhood. The author uses an intimate, chatty first-person style that enfolds the reader, and his descriptions of safe cracking techniques are fascinating. Not a word is wasted, and the mystery and tension make for a breathless read.

The Lock Artist is an original and compelling pleasure. 4 stars.

Vivid dystopia: Book review of Charlie Huston’s Sleepless

Andres Kabel — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:00:37 +0000

What a dazzling premise! Charlie Huston posits for his sci-fi thriller Sleepless: A Novel an alternative early 21st century in which a tenth of the population has turned sleepless, a condition that torments and eventually kills the afflicted. Into a familiar, yet ghastly Los Angeles, Huston plunges Park Haas, the last honest cop, and his insanely destructive antagonist, the assassin Jasper. A propulsive plot propels Haas into a quest to save his loved ones, amidst a dystopia portrayed vividly by the author’s luscious prose. Characters major and minor bloom on the page. Huston’s dialogue is among the best I’ve read this year.

Sleepless grips and never lets go until a harrowing, yet redemptive end that literally had me teary, no mean feat. And as I reluctantly read to the end of the short epilogue, wishing for more, I was struck by the sensation that this brilliant thriller succeeds exactly as did that classic film Bladerunner.

One of 2010’s best novels bar none. 4 stars.

PI of the year?: Book review of Walter Mosley’s Known to Evil

Andres Kabel — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:00:02 +0000

Walter Mosley’s character-based crime fiction series are such pleasure to read. He has the uncanny ability to imbue every page, even in midst of a speedy plot, with the thoughts and memories of his core character, so much so that the prime joy of reading is in growing into the heart and mind of that hero. James Lee Burke uses similar techniques, plus he offers ravishing place descriptions, but Burke’s two series characters are by now wrung out. Mosley, on the other hand, moves on, and his heroes bristle with life.

Known to Evil is Mosley’s second book featuring Leonid McGill, a New York private investigator repenting of a former dirty life. A nuggetty block of a man, his unprepossessing appearance hides a fertile, intelligent inner life. In this outing, McGill is asked by a feared gangster to locate a mysterious young woman, a task that immediately entangles our hero in violence. At the same time, one of his sons somehow invites the attention of Romanian gangsters. Mosley launches the convoluted plot at rapid pace and it never lets up. I found myself constantly sighing with amazement at yet another McGill action that startled me yet seemed completely consistent. The author’s hardboiled yet semi-poetic style has never sung sweeter.

Within the crowded PI subgenre, Leonid McGill is a winner and Known to Evil is Mosley’s best in years. 4 stars.

Fizzes with energy: Book Review of Stuart Neville’s The Twelve

Andres Kabel — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:00:55 +0000

The Twelve (sold in America as The Ghosts of Belfast) by Stuart Neville fizzes with energy from its first paragraph. Irish paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is dizzingly portrayed as an alcoholic has-been tormented by twelve ghosts of his brutal past, ghosts who torment him to exact vengeance on other Sinn Fein heavies. After the first action-laden section, I wondered if Neville had trapped his antihero in a predictable sequence of killings, but the plot constantly lurches sideways, and by the middle of the novel I was truly hooked. An action thriller, The Twelve also illuminates modern Northern Ireland and the unresolved consequences of generations of deaths.

Rich characterization, gripping action scenes, even a convincing romantic subplot . . . this is a rare modern thriller that delivers on all fronts. 4 stars.

Plot as countdown: Book review of Lee Child’s 61 Hours

Andres Kabel — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:00:46 +0000

Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s nomadic, taciturn action man, has recently been compared to Philip Marlowe. Marlowe he isn’t, but amongst the panoply of male antiheroes so treasured by us mystery/thriller readers, Reacher definitely stands out. The ultimate baggage-free male (literally and emotional), he’s unnoticeable until the world needs him, then becomes brutal, rational, efficient . . . the traditional superhero. I know, I know, that description slights Reacher, but the truth is, the real hero of the Reacher books is Lee Child himself. Unusually for this genre, Child is not only stylish (that’s a given for successful thrillers), he is also acutely intelligent, melding superior plots, wonderful scene pacing and even humour.

61 Hours finds Lee Child at his most playful. He wields the countdown device from the first page to the last, in a Reacher episode in which the reluctant star finds himself trapped in a snowbound town assailed by bikie gangs, an assassin and out-of-town gangsters. I found the cocktail of seamless action, tension and plot puzzlers a wonderful single-sitting read.

61 Hours is Lee Child and Jack Reacher at their peak. 3 stars.

Brilliant storytelling: Film review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Andres Kabel — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:00:06 +0000

One approaches franchise books and films gingerly: ‘massively popular’ often indeed means ‘crap’. But instant franchise books can signal an artistic creation that has seized the public imagination because it is brilliant, at least in some aspects. Take Harry Potter – it succeeds because it deserves to. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is another example. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo spread globally like a super virus, readers engulfed by its potent combination of intricate, raw plots and intensely individualistic characters observed in minute detail. (Here I’m indebted to perceptive analysis by Laura Miller.)

I read the second in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire for a book group, and enjoyed the experience without falling in love with the series. Too many endless details, I sniffed. But now I’ve seen the film of the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wonder if I was mistaken. For the movie is a humdinger. Casting is a primary strength – Noomi Rapace is perfect as the emotionally fragile but unstoppable super hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist steals every scene as the dogged investigator Mikael Blomkvist. By necessity the film version truncates the exhaustive plot of the book but under the direction of Niels Arden Oplev, it maintains a kinetic pace while constantly revealing the characters. The lovingly shot Swedish countryside and cities, plus the exotic (to my ears) Swedish language, convey Larsson’s fascinating Swedishness. Not peppered with violence like most modern thriller, the film nonetheless is graphically raw when it depicts one of Larsson’s major themes, that of male violence toward women. All of this intoxicating package unfurls at the best movies do – two and a half hours vanished from my life.

It is now clear to me that Larsson does indeed weave modern storytelling magic, and the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo captures that magic triumphantly. 4 stars.

Edgar winners

Andres Kabel — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:25:18 +0000

The Edgar winners (see the official announcement) in the three novel categories range across crime fiction subgenres – I’ll make it my duty to read the first one:

Best Novel: The Last Child by John Hart
Best First Novel: Stefanie Pintoff’s In the Shadow of Gotham
Best Paperback Original: Marc Strange’s Body Blows

Local weekend reviews

Andres Kabel — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:20:14 +0000

For the list, two books by Australian reviewers whose judgement I respect:

Venero Armanno’s review of Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Andrew Humphreys judges it to be well written and with ‘a surprisingly generous heart’.
Jason Steger has a tremendously entertaining interview in The Age with Philip Kerr, whose sixth Bernie Gunther (WWII German policeman turned PI) novel, If the Dead Rise Not, is just out.