Stay Out of my Head

photo by Peter Rozovsky

 You have probably encountered Anthony Horowitz in one format or another.  He is a master of television, creating Foyle's War, being one of the first writers of Midsomer Murders, and so on.  His Susan Ryland novels and Alex Rider young adult books have been filmed for TV.

Recently I have been listening to audio versions of his Hawthorne novels.  They are deliberately odd books, featuring a narrator named Anthony Horowitz who writes novels and TV shows, and plays reluctant sidekick to Daniel Hawthorne, a former cop who was kicked off the force because he may (or may not) have thrown a pedophile down the stairs.  They are delightful fair play mysteries.

 Each book plays with the genre in different ways.  In the fifth book, Close to Death, Horowitz is on deadline to write another book but there are no convenient crimes to work on so he attempts to build a volume out of one of Hawthorne's former cases.  This means that big chunks of the book are in third person, since our narrator (Horowitz the narrator, not the audiobook's narrator.  Got it?) was not present for the events.

And that's where I got a big surprise.  At one point we are told that Hawthorne looked off and noticed something.  I don't have the exact wording because, as I have said, I was listening to an audio-book and it wasn't convenient to go back and find it. But I actually jumped a little when I heard that sentence.

Because we have never been allowed into the detective's head before.  That made even this tiny excursion there seem like a violation.  From then on I was paying attention and was able to copy down another example: "He didn't like to be close to people he didn't know." That is not narrator-Horowitz speaking but the omniscient third-person narrator, and it just felt like a violation.

The reason is that Hawthorne himself is a mystery (each book reveals a bit more about him, not all of it necessarily true) and also he is the detective.  We are not allowed to get into his head, because if we knew what he knew, the mystery would be over long before the end of the book.

This reminds me of something Mick Herron said at a Bouchercon I attended a few years ago.  He was talking about his Slow Horses series and he said he could never let the reader into the head of the main character, Jackson Lamb.  If he did we would know how much of his vulgarity, insults, racism, misogyny, etc. was real, and how much was put-on to annoy people.  So while we can get into the skulls of his other characters, Lamb must remain sphinxlike.  

I planned to end this there but I have been reading The Night the Rich Men Burned by Malcolm Mackay (what a title!) and he brings up a slightly different issue.  This Scottish author has a unique style.  I would guess that each of his books has almost twice as many words as another novel with similar page count, because there is almost no dialog.  Everything is happening, present tense,  in the heads of the characters.  If we learn that it is raining it is because a character notices it.

And he is quite casual about head-hopping, moving from one person's thoughts to another as easily as changing paragraphs.  Usually this would drive me mad but Mackay makes it work.  

So how do you feel about writers prying too closely into their characters' skulls?

A Fox in Lamb's Clothing

Back in December Eve Fisher wrote about discovering Mick Herron's Slow Horses series.  I'd like to talk bout one aspect of these excellent books.

If you aren't familiar with them, the conceit is that Slough House is a rundown office building where MI-5 dumps its incompetents, giving them almost-worthless busywork (e.g. This car model was the most popular with terrorists five years ago, so check out everyone in England who bought one that year.) in the hopes that they will quit.  Because of the name of the building they are known as the Slow Horses.

And their leader is Jackson Lamb.  Ah, Jackson Lamb.

Imagine the worst boss you can conceive of.  Double it. Now you're getting there.  Lamb is vulgar, sloppy, lazy, vain, unhygienic, snide, malicious - and it's hard to tell whether he is really racist and misogynistic or just says such things to be as unpleasant as possible.

What type of things does he say?  

Well, when a member of his group complains about being left out of the loop: "You're always out of the loop.  The loop's miles away.  Nearest you'll get to being in the loop is when they make a documentary about it and show it on the History Channel." 

Here is Lamb mourning the death of a member of his crew: "Even when he was good he wasn't any good.  And it's a long time since he was any good."

His idea of a pep talk: "Don't anyone get shot or anything.  It goes on my record."

Please notice I did not say he is stupid or incompetent.  Because he isn't.  He slides through the dangerous waters of the spy world like an eel (okay, a corpulent. flatulent eel.)  And if he has another  redeeming quality  it is while the bosses at headquarters see their agents as pawns to serve their personal ambitions, Lamb does not. "A handler never burns his own joe.  It's the worst treachery of all."

In short, Lamb is a great, three-dimensional character and he makes me think about how genre literature is stuffed with great characters who we love to read about but would loath having to live or work with.

I mean, seriously: if you were Watson how long would you have tolerated Holmes before you smashed that insufferable egotist's head in with his own violin?

I think also of Nero Wolfe, Horace Rumpole, Gregory House, and others who insist on doing things their own way and get away with it because they are usually right.  (And now I am trying to think of any female characters that fit that description.  Surely there must be some?)

One of the reasons we love these types of people is that they do the sorts of things we would never have the nerve to do. And  they get away with it.  Mick Herron himself says of Lamb: "He says things I would never say.  I look back at some of these lines and think: My God, did I write that.  My mother reads this stuff!"

And now Mr. Lamb has come to television.  When I heard that Apple+ had chosen Gary Oldman to play our hero I immediately signed up for the channel.  I have not been disappointed.  (This is the second great British spy character Oldman has played. I enjoy his performance in Slow Horses much more than I did his version of George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.)

I have read the first four books in the series.  That means I am only halfway through, and more are expected. Hot diggity!

The Rap Sheet

An uncertain year, 2019, but a lot of good books came out. Plenty of brand names, Bob Crais and John leCarre, Alan Furst and Steve Hunter. Here's a completely arbitrary list of my own.

Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake.
A smart, tart, penetrating story about race and class, memory and regret, self-absorption, self-awareness, and the limits of transparency.

Chuck Greaves, Church of the Graveyard Saints.
If not exactly an eco-thriller, at least second cousin to Edward Abbey. A completely Western novel, and a meditation on how landscape inhabits us.

Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept.
Irresistible. A spy story, a history, a corrective to romance. The deep moans round with many voices. A book of echoes, unspoken sorrows, hope.

Don Winslow, The Border.
A fierce, furious, savage novel, a wounded lion dragging himself through a desolate waste, failing in everything but nerve. An absolute shocker.

Philip Kerr, Metropolis.
Bernie Gunther takes his curtain call. A look behind, the uncertain shadows before, a sense of irredeemable loss, and the hinges of horror creaking open under his feet.

A couple of books that weren't new this past year, but that I came on late. Mick Herron's Slow Horses and John Lawton's Black Out, both exemplars of why to start a series at the beginning. I also stumbled across Val McDermid's Forensics (2014), which is utterly indispensable, I kid you not.

Speaking of which, there was still nothing to beat the austere and windswept Shetland, all gorse and moody weather, or the sturdy and engaging Douglas Henshall as Jimmy Perez.

And best picture? Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. (I know, I don't like him either, but fair is fair.)

Max Bialystock is Dead

The six finalists for the Edgar Awards have been announced, and each and every one of them is fantastic.  Go read them.

The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam's Sons)
The Lady From Zagreb by Philip Kerr (Penguin Random House – A Marian Wood Book)
Life or Death by Michael Robotham (Hachette Book Group – Mulholland Books)
Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (Penguin Random House - Dutton)
Canary by Duane Swierczynski (Hachette Book Group – Mulholland Books)
Night Life by David C. Taylor (Forge Books)

But, while these six are basking in hope and glory, I'd also like to bring to your attention some other damn good books that came out in 2015.  

First of all, Phantom Angel by David Handler (Minotaur Books).  I love a good mystery, and I love it even better when it's funny.  Really funny.  This one is.  PI Benji Golden is hired by Morrie Frankel, who's putting on a $65 million musical adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" (yes, Emily's cheerful little romance).  If you're thinking Max Bialystock and "Springtime for Hitler", so was I.  And I was not disappointed!  Max, I mean, Morrie is killed, money vanishes, and Golden's real problem is sifting through Broadway gossip as high as a NY skyscraper to find the killer.  This was a truly FUN read.  It's also the second in this new series by David Handler - the first was Runaway Man.

For those of you who love the long slow burn...

A Pleasure and A Calling by Phil Hogan ((Picador) is classic British creep show.  You know.  The kind of story where everything is normal, perfectly normal.  Until one day, you notice that the ivy is twining the wrong way, and the next, the garbage can shifted, and later, who turned on that light, and why are you in the attic...  Well, in this one, we have Mr. Heming, real estate agent.  Wonderful man.  Friendly, helpful.  First to call.  And has keys to every house he has ever sold. Who likes to drop in, when nobody's there. Who likes to see how people live.  Who is very, very particular.  Who has motives that no one has ever dreamed of.  Who may have fallen in love.  Or not.  Who finds himself in a situation.  And knows that there is always, always, always a way out...  He's done it before...  Seriously, check it out.  You'll stay up for a while.

And now for something completely different:

The Lost Treasures of R&B by Nelson George (Akashic Books).  Nelson George's professional bodyguard D Hunter is on the job protecting rapper Asya Roc at an underground fight club in Brooklyn.  But the rapper has arranged to buy some illegal guns; an old acquaintance named Ice is the courier; a robbery is attempted, a shoot-out follows.  Who were the gunmen?  Why did they want those guns?  And who was being set up - the rapper or the Ice?  D tries to figure all of this out and, at the same time, to track down the rarest soul music single ever recorded.  The voice of this book is very real, and the whole mood of the book is an R&B rapper High Fidelity noir thriller, and I loved it. Nelson George, knows his music:  a former editor for Billboard Magazine, columnist for the Village Voice, R&B, currently co-executive producer of VH1's Hip Hop Honors and executive producer of BET's American Gangster.  He also knows Brooklyn.  The Lost Treasures of R&B is the third in the D Hunter series:  the other two are The Accidental Hunter and The Plot Against Hip-Hop: A Novel.


A brand new series to keep an eye on:

The Magician's Daughter by Judith Janeway (Poisoned Pen Press).  Magician Valentine Hill always introduces her act by announcing “Reality is an illusion. Illusion is reality, and nothing is what it seems.”  She learned that, and many other things, from her grifter mother, who is still on the loose, and her magician father. From both she learned a whole lot of tricks that will come in handy as she struggles to deal with wealthy socialites, car mechanics, cab drivers, and FBI agents.  Most of whom are also ruthless criminals, psycho killers, and seductive gangsters.  And, of course, her amoral, abusive, never-retired mother who is still on the con, and still very, very, very dangerous...

And everyone needs a good spy thriller:

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron (Soho Crime).  Tom Bettany is working at a meat processing plant in France when he gets a voicemail from an Englishwoman he doesn’t know telling him that his estranged 26-year-old son is dead.  Liam Bettany fell from his London balcony, where he was smoking pot.  Bettany goes back to London to find out the truth about his son’s death.  Because Liam might have been a druggie, but Bettany isn't just the quiet butcher he's been for the last few years.  He's been around, he knows a lot, perhaps too much, and a lot of people are afraid of his return, from incarcerated mob bosses to high powered bosses of MI5.  None of them appreciate his return.  Or did someone arrange to get him back, literally in the worst way possible?   Stylish, noirish, a don't trust anyone read that will definitely surprise you.

Under the why didn't anyone tell me? classification of series:

Down Among the Dead Men by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime).  Miss Gibbon, the most disliked teacher (of art) in a posh private girls' school vanishes in a Sussex town on the south coast of England. She is not missed, especially since her replacement is a gorgeous male teacher with a fancy car and some boundary issues. Meanwhile, detective Peter Diamond finds himself in Sussex, with the person he hates the most:  his supervisor, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore.  She's been called to lead a Home Office internal investigation into a Sussex detective who failed to link DNA evidence of a relative to a seven-year-old murder case.  And she takes Diamond with her.  What she doesn't know is that Diamond knows the suspended officer.  And over time, he notices unsettling connections between the cold case and the missing art teacher. And there's also the mystery of why C.C. Dallymore was really called on the case in the first place.  I loved the plot, I loved the characters, but most of all, I loved the wit.  Why didn't someone tell me about Peter Diamond before?

Well, that's all for this week.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some catching up to do....