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Dangerous liaisons, a clever Greek and a deadly diamond. By Paul Skenazy
by Paul Skenazy
The Washington Post
September 5, 2004 Sunday
Final Edition
Garry Disher's The Dragon Man (Soho, $23) is a lean, compelling
police procedural that uncovers rural Australian life in all its
hazardous dailiness. Detective Inspector Hal Challis runs the police
office on the Peninsula, "a comma of land hooking into the sea
south-east of Melbourne." Women have been disappearing along the Old
Peninsula Highway. One body has been discovered. While mothers and
friends appeal for help in finding the other women who are missing,
Challis and his mates at the police station try to trace a pattern in
the crimes. They also cope with a rash of burglaries and a series of
mailboxes set on fire. And a car set on fire. And a house set on
fire.
Disher keeps his style curt, his bits of dialogue short, his
invasions of the psyche pointed. Weaving back and forth between the
police and the criminals, and among the uniformed cops and
detectives, Disher smoothly creates a choral portrait of the police
and the people they work with and for, delivering a community of
stories. Loneliness is as commonplace as the muddy roads and broken
fences. The police force that Challis commands is a varied lot,
including a wife frustrated by an indifferent husband and rebellious
daughter, a cop who falls for a cocaine addict and starts supplying
her from the evidence locker, a young recruit recovering from a car
accident who is as interested in her surfing teachers as in her
police procedures. Challis himself is the "dragon man" of the title
(a nickname that refers to his efforts to restore a vintage airplane,
a de Havilland DH 84 Dragon Rapide). He fluctuates between exhausted
patience on the phone with his ex-wife, who is in prison for trying
to kill him, and a discreet and intermittent affair he's having with
a local newspaper reporter. Though Disher broadcasts the killer's
identity a bit too early, this is still a first-rate piece of crime
writing: a dense, hard-nosed portrait of a world unto itself.
Ed McBain (a k a Evan Hunter), the grand master of the police
procedural, returns in Hark! (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), his 54th
book about the 87th Precinct cops, the crimes they solve, and the
lives they live outside the station house. The thief known as the
Deaf Man has returned, eager for revenge on the woman who left him
for dead (he shoots her in the first scene) and eager to mock the
87th crew with a series of teasing clues about his next crime. Steve
Carella, Meyer Meyer, Kling, Cotton Hawes and the rest start
receiving messengered notes that seem impossible to decipher. Some
prove to be anagrams, some palindromes, some quotes from Shakespeare.
The notes appear to define the date, and even hint at the crime --
except they hint at several crimes at once.
Meantime, the detectives are clueless about what to do with their own
lives. Carella is trying to avoid thinking about the joint wedding he
is planning for his mother and sister. Cotton Hawes is making it with
Honey Blair of Channel Four News, until someone starts shooting at
the two of them. Kling is worried that his sweetie is meeting
secretly with a man she used to date. And the Deaf Man (who calls
himself Adam Fen) wanders the city, visiting the New York Public
Library to view an original copy of Shakespeare's First Folio on
display, showing intense interest in a classical violin recital. He
shacks up with a prostitute named Melissa Summers, whom he sends on
errands to find delivery men for his notes to Carella and Co. And he
waits.
McBain is playing for laughs, and he gets them, working skillfully to
create just enough intrigue to keep us interested in the bad jokes,
the puzzling riddles and the domestic melodramas. The whole
performance is deft and light, like a magician's sleight of hand: The
trick is pulled off while you look the other way. There's nothing
lasting here, except the pleasure of watching a master having fun --
and that's a kind of Shakespearean delight in itself.
Just as the Olympics have brought Greece to the world's attention
comes the first American publication of Petros Markaris's Greek crime
fiction. Deadline in Athens, ably translated by David Connolly
(Grove, $23), features Inspector Costas Haritos, an edgy, cynical
policeman in a contemporary Athens more notable for its traffic jams
and rainy weather than its classical ruins. Like all good fictional
cops, Haritos is in trouble with his superiors and unwilling to
settle for the convenient, if unconvincing, solution. So when an
Armenian quickly confesses to killing two other Armenians, Haritos is
willing to follow a tip from Janna, a zealous, ambitious TV reporter,
that there is more to the case than appears. Then Janna herself is
found murdered, just before she was set to air a sensational news
story. And soon after, Janna's successor is found dead as well.
The evidence from one murder slowly intersects with the next, leading
Haritos to an accused child molester who has just been freed, a love
affair Janna had with her station manager, and the shipping records
of a well-connected travel agency. At home he struggles
unsuccessfully to appease his wife, Adriani, who spends her days
watching TV crime stories, and to find time to see his daughter, who
is away at school.
But the real story here is the geography and culture of Athens. From
Haritos's wily boss Ghikas, the chief of security, to the
Armani-suited corporate TV executives, this is a world where the rich
and powerful rule. Newscasters point a finger at an innocent man, and
Haritos spends days tracking him down as much to protect as to arrest
him; Haritos builds a case against a TV producer only to find himself
facing suspension. Ghikas urges him to be more "flexible," while
Haritos charges on, pushing his way through doors that want to remain
closed.
Deadline is a satisfying if sometimes slow-paced read, the wayward
elements of the plot wandering in and out of focus as Haritos reaches
one wrong conclusion after another. Still, the material is rich, the
characters are drawn with depth, and Haritos himself is an intriguing
find: zealous in his work, more in love with his wife than he will
admit, suspicious by training, his only relief from work being the
hours he spends learning new words in his dictionaries at home. Two
more Haritos tales are promised for the near future, and I look
forward to reading them and spending more time with this snarling,
amiable Greek.
Skye Kathleen Moody's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Venus
Diamond returns for her seventh outing in The Good Diamond (St.
Martin's, $24.95). This time Diamond's name claims major attention as
a pun that echoes from start to finish in a story about diamond
trading and the international arms trade. Big Jim Hardy, a reclusive
prospector, discovers a 384-carat rough diamond he calls "Lac de
Lune," after the lakebed where he found it, just outside the small
prospecting town of Yellowknife in Canada. But as he is about to
depart to have the diamond cleaved, his compound is invaded, he is
killed, the diamond is stolen, and his geologist is taken hostage.
Before he dies, however, Hardy has time to send an e-mail and scrawl
Venus Diamond's name in blood.
Still with me? Because now the plot really gets farfetched. Sgt.
Roland Mackenzie of the Royal Canadian Mounties is convinced that
Hardy has written his murderer's name and so arrests Diamond, who
then reveals that Big Jim Hardy was really Buzz Radke, a U.S. federal
undercover agent whom Diamond worked with years before. The escaping
thieves are, it seems, part of a militant group that dubs itself the
Nation of God's Chosen Soldiers (or "Company 8"), headquartered on
the Lay-a-Day Chicken Ranch just across the U.S.-Canadian border.
They want to trade the diamond for arms, through a diamond trader in
New York who is sending the guns out West with two hoodlums in a
truck with New Jersey license plates. Evidence turns up that seems to
link Mackenzie to the killing, so suddenly he is arrested and needs
to turn to Diamond for help trying to clear his name. Three master
diamond cutters -- in New York City, Antwerp and South Africa -- are
working on models of the huge diamond to see if they can successfully
cleave the delicate stone. The New York traders are ruthlessly
working to procure the diamond and frighten competitors away from the
chase. And there are rumors that the stolen diamond itself might be a
fake substituted for the real stone to prevent just the kind of theft
that occurred.
Moody has always liked to stuff her books with plots until they burst
at the seams, and this outing is no different. White supremacists,
greedy hoodlums, devious diamond cutters, desperate jewel traders;
Canadian tundra, Seattle digs, border chicken farms, New York
streets, Antwerp hovels; a militant's wife who offers a captive a
tape recorder and tapes so she can explain her life (and fill in the
plot details); a hoodlum who deserts his post to sit in the library
-- the unbelievable elements and events spiral out at an alarming
pace. Lost in the frenzy is the issue of diamonds-for-guns -- the
trade in what are called "blood" diamonds that support arms shipments
to militant groups worldwide. Lost too is Venus herself, who becomes
a cipher that we watch from increasing distances as she tries to make
sense of the confusing events. You will not be bored by this book. It
is filled with interesting diamond lore, and it clips along, jumping
with often comic cunning among its various plots. But Moody seems so
anxious to fit them all in that she sometimes sketches in her stories
rather than writing them out. The result is a confusing, faceless
tale. *
Paul Skenazy teaches literature and writing at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, where he is provost of Kresge College.
by Paul Skenazy
The Washington Post
September 5, 2004 Sunday
Final Edition
Garry Disher's The Dragon Man (Soho, $23) is a lean, compelling
police procedural that uncovers rural Australian life in all its
hazardous dailiness. Detective Inspector Hal Challis runs the police
office on the Peninsula, "a comma of land hooking into the sea
south-east of Melbourne." Women have been disappearing along the Old
Peninsula Highway. One body has been discovered. While mothers and
friends appeal for help in finding the other women who are missing,
Challis and his mates at the police station try to trace a pattern in
the crimes. They also cope with a rash of burglaries and a series of
mailboxes set on fire. And a car set on fire. And a house set on
fire.
Disher keeps his style curt, his bits of dialogue short, his
invasions of the psyche pointed. Weaving back and forth between the
police and the criminals, and among the uniformed cops and
detectives, Disher smoothly creates a choral portrait of the police
and the people they work with and for, delivering a community of
stories. Loneliness is as commonplace as the muddy roads and broken
fences. The police force that Challis commands is a varied lot,
including a wife frustrated by an indifferent husband and rebellious
daughter, a cop who falls for a cocaine addict and starts supplying
her from the evidence locker, a young recruit recovering from a car
accident who is as interested in her surfing teachers as in her
police procedures. Challis himself is the "dragon man" of the title
(a nickname that refers to his efforts to restore a vintage airplane,
a de Havilland DH 84 Dragon Rapide). He fluctuates between exhausted
patience on the phone with his ex-wife, who is in prison for trying
to kill him, and a discreet and intermittent affair he's having with
a local newspaper reporter. Though Disher broadcasts the killer's
identity a bit too early, this is still a first-rate piece of crime
writing: a dense, hard-nosed portrait of a world unto itself.
Ed McBain (a k a Evan Hunter), the grand master of the police
procedural, returns in Hark! (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), his 54th
book about the 87th Precinct cops, the crimes they solve, and the
lives they live outside the station house. The thief known as the
Deaf Man has returned, eager for revenge on the woman who left him
for dead (he shoots her in the first scene) and eager to mock the
87th crew with a series of teasing clues about his next crime. Steve
Carella, Meyer Meyer, Kling, Cotton Hawes and the rest start
receiving messengered notes that seem impossible to decipher. Some
prove to be anagrams, some palindromes, some quotes from Shakespeare.
The notes appear to define the date, and even hint at the crime --
except they hint at several crimes at once.
Meantime, the detectives are clueless about what to do with their own
lives. Carella is trying to avoid thinking about the joint wedding he
is planning for his mother and sister. Cotton Hawes is making it with
Honey Blair of Channel Four News, until someone starts shooting at
the two of them. Kling is worried that his sweetie is meeting
secretly with a man she used to date. And the Deaf Man (who calls
himself Adam Fen) wanders the city, visiting the New York Public
Library to view an original copy of Shakespeare's First Folio on
display, showing intense interest in a classical violin recital. He
shacks up with a prostitute named Melissa Summers, whom he sends on
errands to find delivery men for his notes to Carella and Co. And he
waits.
McBain is playing for laughs, and he gets them, working skillfully to
create just enough intrigue to keep us interested in the bad jokes,
the puzzling riddles and the domestic melodramas. The whole
performance is deft and light, like a magician's sleight of hand: The
trick is pulled off while you look the other way. There's nothing
lasting here, except the pleasure of watching a master having fun --
and that's a kind of Shakespearean delight in itself.
Just as the Olympics have brought Greece to the world's attention
comes the first American publication of Petros Markaris's Greek crime
fiction. Deadline in Athens, ably translated by David Connolly
(Grove, $23), features Inspector Costas Haritos, an edgy, cynical
policeman in a contemporary Athens more notable for its traffic jams
and rainy weather than its classical ruins. Like all good fictional
cops, Haritos is in trouble with his superiors and unwilling to
settle for the convenient, if unconvincing, solution. So when an
Armenian quickly confesses to killing two other Armenians, Haritos is
willing to follow a tip from Janna, a zealous, ambitious TV reporter,
that there is more to the case than appears. Then Janna herself is
found murdered, just before she was set to air a sensational news
story. And soon after, Janna's successor is found dead as well.
The evidence from one murder slowly intersects with the next, leading
Haritos to an accused child molester who has just been freed, a love
affair Janna had with her station manager, and the shipping records
of a well-connected travel agency. At home he struggles
unsuccessfully to appease his wife, Adriani, who spends her days
watching TV crime stories, and to find time to see his daughter, who
is away at school.
But the real story here is the geography and culture of Athens. From
Haritos's wily boss Ghikas, the chief of security, to the
Armani-suited corporate TV executives, this is a world where the rich
and powerful rule. Newscasters point a finger at an innocent man, and
Haritos spends days tracking him down as much to protect as to arrest
him; Haritos builds a case against a TV producer only to find himself
facing suspension. Ghikas urges him to be more "flexible," while
Haritos charges on, pushing his way through doors that want to remain
closed.
Deadline is a satisfying if sometimes slow-paced read, the wayward
elements of the plot wandering in and out of focus as Haritos reaches
one wrong conclusion after another. Still, the material is rich, the
characters are drawn with depth, and Haritos himself is an intriguing
find: zealous in his work, more in love with his wife than he will
admit, suspicious by training, his only relief from work being the
hours he spends learning new words in his dictionaries at home. Two
more Haritos tales are promised for the near future, and I look
forward to reading them and spending more time with this snarling,
amiable Greek.
Skye Kathleen Moody's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent Venus
Diamond returns for her seventh outing in The Good Diamond (St.
Martin's, $24.95). This time Diamond's name claims major attention as
a pun that echoes from start to finish in a story about diamond
trading and the international arms trade. Big Jim Hardy, a reclusive
prospector, discovers a 384-carat rough diamond he calls "Lac de
Lune," after the lakebed where he found it, just outside the small
prospecting town of Yellowknife in Canada. But as he is about to
depart to have the diamond cleaved, his compound is invaded, he is
killed, the diamond is stolen, and his geologist is taken hostage.
Before he dies, however, Hardy has time to send an e-mail and scrawl
Venus Diamond's name in blood.
Still with me? Because now the plot really gets farfetched. Sgt.
Roland Mackenzie of the Royal Canadian Mounties is convinced that
Hardy has written his murderer's name and so arrests Diamond, who
then reveals that Big Jim Hardy was really Buzz Radke, a U.S. federal
undercover agent whom Diamond worked with years before. The escaping
thieves are, it seems, part of a militant group that dubs itself the
Nation of God's Chosen Soldiers (or "Company 8"), headquartered on
the Lay-a-Day Chicken Ranch just across the U.S.-Canadian border.
They want to trade the diamond for arms, through a diamond trader in
New York who is sending the guns out West with two hoodlums in a
truck with New Jersey license plates. Evidence turns up that seems to
link Mackenzie to the killing, so suddenly he is arrested and needs
to turn to Diamond for help trying to clear his name. Three master
diamond cutters -- in New York City, Antwerp and South Africa -- are
working on models of the huge diamond to see if they can successfully
cleave the delicate stone. The New York traders are ruthlessly
working to procure the diamond and frighten competitors away from the
chase. And there are rumors that the stolen diamond itself might be a
fake substituted for the real stone to prevent just the kind of theft
that occurred.
Moody has always liked to stuff her books with plots until they burst
at the seams, and this outing is no different. White supremacists,
greedy hoodlums, devious diamond cutters, desperate jewel traders;
Canadian tundra, Seattle digs, border chicken farms, New York
streets, Antwerp hovels; a militant's wife who offers a captive a
tape recorder and tapes so she can explain her life (and fill in the
plot details); a hoodlum who deserts his post to sit in the library
-- the unbelievable elements and events spiral out at an alarming
pace. Lost in the frenzy is the issue of diamonds-for-guns -- the
trade in what are called "blood" diamonds that support arms shipments
to militant groups worldwide. Lost too is Venus herself, who becomes
a cipher that we watch from increasing distances as she tries to make
sense of the confusing events. You will not be bored by this book. It
is filled with interesting diamond lore, and it clips along, jumping
with often comic cunning among its various plots. But Moody seems so
anxious to fit them all in that she sometimes sketches in her stories
rather than writing them out. The result is a confusing, faceless
tale. *
Paul Skenazy teaches literature and writing at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, where he is provost of Kresge College.