SHOOTERS AND CHASERS:LENNY KLEINFELD

I am always flattered when after a personal communication an author sends me their book for an opinion.

When I received Shooters and Chasers from author Lenny Kleinfeld I noted it already had very positive blurbs on the back cover from Chicago natives Joe Mantegna [The Godfather Part III, House of Games, and TVs Criminal Minds] and William Petersen [TVs CSI Crime Scene Investigation].

The revered Chicago architect Wilson Willetts is gunned down and it appears to be a street mugging gone wrong. The alleged mugger Meelo Garcia, is identified by a witness and is found to have the victim's wallet, and the murder weapon, in his car; so it looks like an open and shut case.

But Meelo claims to have been in his motel room at the time of the murder, because "Oscar" told him to stay there, and then he tells a bizarre story of being set up as the patsy in the case.

Homicide detectives, Mark Bergman and John "Doonie" Dunegan are inclined to believe Meelo, especially when the headless body of a possible defence witness turns up in Indiana.

Wilson Willetts had entered a design for the new LAFAM [Los Angeles Fine Arts Museum] and was in competition with two other architects backed by wealthy and very influential people quite capable of arranging such a complicated set up.

The professional killers behind both the set up and in arranging the murder, Arthur Reid [Oscar] and Dina Velaros, are in the tentative pre-love affair stage in their relationship but still have time to try and cover their tracks, as DNA and ballistic evidence mounts that the crime was committed by a Meelo look-alike. Arthur wants to retire and produce $600 a bottle fine wines, Dina wants Arthur. These almost sympathetic villains are hunted by the detectives Mark, young and handsome, and veteran Doonie, very married with a bad back, who travel to LA and California's wine country in their quest to track down the murderer and his employers.

Shooters and Chasers is written in a very different style from the British books I had just read [Val McDermid and Agatha Christie] and naturally it took me a little while to adjust to the American police procedural/crime caper style, and Lenny's slightly wacky world of lawyers, crooks, DAs, cops, cock fights, boutique wine makers, wealthy architects and other assorted eccentrics.

Shooters and Chasers was almost like a collaboration between Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain, and as such it was great fun and an exciting read.

The book is well researched as evidenced by Dina's relationship with ERMA her $9,000 German sniper rifle; while I found the clever technique of using shifting points of view retelling the same events from different perspectives, with overlapping timelines, really worked to help create a first novel with a clever plot, lots of action, witty dialogue and many memorable characters.

Shooters and Chasers is Lenny Kleinfeld's first novel, and is available on the Amazon UK both in hardback and Kindle.

You can read more reviews and some information about the author here.

Many of the owners were cops, fireman and small businessmen. The majority ethnicity was Irish, the culture was Catholic, and the religion was the Cook County Democratic Party.

END GAME 2006

"When in doubt have two guys come through the door with guns"

Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

A great line from Chandler who obviously learned his lessons, as I did , from that typical English Public school education at Dulwich College.

Well it is probably time to look back and assess the highs and lows of a year which seems to have whistled by even quicker than 2005. I am convinced that as well as global warming being a reality there is also something Einsteinian occuring, and that as I get older time is speeding up.

This was the first year for a long time that we had not been abroad on holiday, but that surprisingly did not seem to make the year drag, because we were kept so busy with our family chores.

We can't feel sorry for ourselves about not having had a foreign holiday because in the previous 7 years, we had been four times to the USA , and three times to Italy, as well as touring Spain and Ireland.

FAMILY HIGH: Our son getting a 2:1 Sociology degree from University of Bath, and a fork lift driving licence. I am not sure which will be more useful in the long term.

LOWS: The inevitable funerals and trips to see friends and relatives recovering from illness. When they are younger than you it seems even more traumatic, and quite sobering.

WORLD WIDE WEB:

This was the year I made real use of the internet and met some interesting people online. I was also able to keep in touch with old friends and relatives in Mauritania, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, Sciota PA, Forest Hill, Columbus OH, and Oxfordshire.

In the first half of the year I worked on a game enhancement for a computer baseball game with some helpful guys from Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. It was a very successful collaboration, but on those rainy days in Devon one gets a bit jealous when informed about Arizona's superb weather and Oregon's wonderful scenery.

Later in the year I started Crime Scraps and met online with a very friendly group of crime bloggers, especially Maxine, Rhian, Karen, and Peter. My apologies if I have forgotten anyone.

ALMOST GOOD REAL CRIME MOMENT:

The conviction of Danny and Ricky Preddie for the manslaughter of 10 year old Damiola Taylor. It had taken 6 years, three trials, and two police investigations to reach this conclusion and frankly the 8 year sentences were too lenient. There can really never be a "good moment" in this sad saga, but at least the convictions brought some kind of justice for young Damiola.

WORST REAL CRIME INCIDENT:

The shooting of five young girls aged between 7 and 13 at a school house in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.

The lack of anger in the community and their forgiveness for the shooter, who had committed suicide, was an example of their deep faith.

I think these two incidents particularly affected me because I knew both areas quite well, Peckham from my childhood in Camberwell, and Lancaster County from holidays there in 1979 and 1994.

MOST INTERESTING REAL CRIME INCIDENT:

The reappearance of 18 year old Natascha Kampusch near the Austrian home of Wolfgang Priklopil, where she had been imprisoned for 8 years. The full story will probably never be revealed as Priklopil threw himself under a train when he realised she had escaped.

BEST CRIME FICTION MOMENTS:

The discovery of authors Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri, Gianrico Carofiglio and Carlo Lucarelli, and enjoying every page they had written.

The realisation that Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were as good as I remembered after a 15 year gap in reading their police procedurals.

Learning so much history from the wonderful crime fiction of CJ Sansom and David Liss.

And of course delving into all those other crime fiction blogs with their excellent recommendations.

MOST ENJOYABLE CRIME READ OF THE YEAR:

A difficult one this as there were so many good books, but the choice is a triple tie:

The Locked Room by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Day after Day by Carlo Lucarelli, and The Coffee Trader by David Liss.

I really could not seperate these three novels.

MOST BORING CRIME READ OF THE YEAR:

Another tie between Half Broken Things by Morag Joss, and Predator by Patricia Cornwell.

CRIME FILMS:

I really enjoyed the best of them, History of Violence and Criminale Romanzo, both were exciting and even though you knew the probable outcome very gripping.

At the other end of the scale I nearly walked out of Hidden, and was only prevented doing so by the fact that most of the people in our row were comatose and asking them to move could have been dangerous. A totally hideous film that had all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros, and none of the excitement.

NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS:

To lose weight, my regular New Year resolution, and to enjoy every day whatever it may bring.

Today the weather is Devonian in that it is dark, very windy and raining, obviously an ideal day for reading about Salvo Montalbano and his problems on sunny Sicily.

"It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books, which are your very own."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930]

HAPPY NEW YEAR

TWO BIG FISH

I am 120 pages into The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder, and I am totally gripped by the brilliance of their collaboration.

The sparky dialogue between Erlendur and his colleagues Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli is just right. There is the wicked humour that crackles when Erlendur and his drug addicted daughter Eva Lind are struggling to form a relationship, and the interesting back story is full of melancholy for a lost and discredited cause. This is wonderful stuff and I am wallowing in the anticipation of more to come as the novel develops.

Of course I could be influenced by the fact that my wife has had a kipper for lunch and the whole house smells like a fish shed in Reykjavik.

"You still seeing that old bag?" Eva said, fiddling with her hair.

"Stop calling her an old bag,"Erlendur said. "Valgerdur's two years younger than me."

"Right, an old bag. You still seeing her?"

***********

Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland? Sigurdur Oli asked.

"No," Elinborg said firmly. There are too few of us."

Bernard Scudder (1955-) is a distinguished translator of Icelandic into English. He has translated old things, like Eigil's Saga and the Voluspa (The Prophecy) and new things, Thor Vilmjamsson's novel, Justice Undone and Einar Mar Gudmundsson's Angels of the Universe as well as a number of Icelandic poets. He was short-listed for the Aristeon Literary Award in 1999. Born in Canterbury, England, he somehow found his way to Iceland in 1977 and has lived there ever since. [taken from www.salmonpoetry.com]

COLLABORATION

Have Arnaldur Indidrason and his translator Bernard Scudder become the Mozart and Da Ponte, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, of crime fiction?

Well with The Draining Lake the latest in the Reyjavik Murder Mystery series they have attained a new level with a gripping story that succeeds on so many levels.

The plot is not new and could well be classified as derivative, but then so are Verdi's Otello or Puccini's Butterfly. You can tell I am in a musical mood today.

The Draining Lake is a police procedural, woven together with a love story, interlinked with a spy story and all constructed with subtlety, humour and a deep understanding of human emotions.

The water level in an Icelandic lake, Kleifarvatn, falls to reveal a skeleton weighted down by a radio device with Russian markings. Erlendur, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg begin an investigation to discover the identity of the skeleton. Erlendur is particularly interested in one of the missing persons from the 1970s called Lepold who disappeared leaving his girlfriend Asta abandoned, and his Ford Falcon car outside the coach station.

Part of the pleasure of reading the Indidrason stories is that we learn so much about the lives of the detectives, and their everyday problems. Sigurdur Oli and his partner Bergthora are trying to conceive a child. Elinborg's cookery book is being published and she is worried about the reviews. Erlendur is continuing to have problems with Eva Lind, his drug addicted daughter, and is trying to form some kind of understanding with his son Sindri Snaer.He is also hoping that his budding friendship with Valgerdur develops further and becomes a romance.

Erlendur's situation is almost a treatise on the damage caused by family breakdown.

The back story tells the story of left wing idealistic Icelandic students sent to study at Karl Marx University in Leipzig in the years before the Hungarian uprising of 1956. The East German state was a brutal dictatorship masquerading under the guise of socialism, and the story captures brilliantly the atmosphere of fear and suspicion among the students. As some of the students become more and more disillusioned Tomas and Ilona fall in love and as their romance proceeds they are watched by the Stasi and their agents.

The book is full of believable minor characters such as the extremely grumpy old farmer Haraldur.

"I think Lepold came to visit you," Erlendur repeated without answering Haraldur.
"Bollocks."
.................
Haraldur raised his head and stared at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows.
"Get out," he said. "I never want to see you here again."

And the pompous German Ambassador, Frau Doktor Elsa Muller.

"I know you'll find it amusingly absurd," she said," but in terms of the diplomatic service, Iceland is the back end of the world......"

Iceland may well be the back end of the world but Indidrason and Scudder have brought it to the forefront of the crime fiction genre.

The Draining Lake is definitely one of the best crime books I have read this year.

THE QUIZ ANSWERS: PART ONE

I will start back by giving you the first few answers to the Winter Quirky Quiz.

You can see the full list of questions here.

1] The photos are of course two time winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel Inger Frimansson, and the wonderful Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

2] What is the cinematic link between Patricia Highsmith, and the British band Coldplay?

I did not want the first result of googling this [Jamie Thraves and the Cry of the Owl] but the much better known star from the movie of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley, Gwyneth Paltrow, who is married to Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, who comes from Exeter.

3] Who was "inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious and resourceful"?

Archie Goodwin, according to supersleuth, gourmet and orchid collector Nero Wolfe.

4] Which crime fiction books end with the words:

a) X as in Marx.

This could only be from those well known Marxists Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and comes from The Terrorists, the tenth and last Martin Beck book.

b) "...never retired from work and came to grow vegetable marrows."

The murderer's lament at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

5] Which crime fiction writer lost a name, the art of working together and a burial place when he crossed the Atlantic?

This was the first slightly tricky question. Here is how to tackle it.

The art of working together is collaboration= collaborator?

A burial place is a grave.

Who wrote books with 'collaborator' and 'grave' in the titles and those titles were changed?

The answer is:

Matt Beynon Rees in the USA became Matt Rees in the UK. The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the USA became The Bethlehem Murders in the UK, and A Grave in Gaza in the USA became The Saladin Murders in the UK.

[to be continued]