Review of Isle of Joy by Don Winslow (Arrow, 1996)

After a number of years working for the CIA, smooth, unflappable, Walter Withers – The Great Scandinavian Pimp and Deadly Recruiter – has decided that he needs to return to his beloved New York. Resigning his post, he's accompanied back to the Big Apple with his partner, the diminutive and feisty jazz singer, Anne Blanchard, to take a suit and tie job with Forbes and Forbes as a personnel investigator. By day he snoops into the personal lives of corporate men for a hint of potential scandal or industry infidelity that might jeopardise their promotion prospects. At night he trails round the jazz haunts and bohemian joints of Greenwich. Then on Christmas Eve, 1958, he’s asked to be the bodyguard for Madeline Keneally, wife of presidential hopeful, Senator Joe Keneally. Both Keneallys have secrets to hide and both take Walter into their confidence. Then Joe Keneally’s secret, minor movie star Marta Marlund, dies in mysterious circumstances in a hotel room registered in Walter’s name. In short order, New York homicide, the FBI and the CIA are all hounding Withers, anxious for a scandal that will give them control of a senator on the rise.

Winslow is one of those rare writers that is relatively sparse with prose and yet fully visualises a scene in the mind of the reader. His characters are fully formed, complex, engaging, and have emotional depth. The dialogue is realistic and pitch perfect. The balance between story and back story is just right. And the historical context of McCarthy/Hoover era 1958 is well judged. The Keneallys – the womanising Joe, the protective Jimmy, and the beautiful Madeline, are well realised mimics of the Jack, Bob and Jackie Kennedy, which gives most of the story its seeming authenticity. I loved everything about this book except for the end, which spiralled to the farcical. Winslow tries to take every character in the book and weave them into a sequence which was largely unnecessary except as a narrative device and became more and more improbable. For me this was a shame, as Winslow is undoubtedly a very fine writer and the Isle of Joy was for the main a great read.

Classic crime fiction curriculum challenge

Imagine a reader new to crime fiction and wanting an education in the classics. Or consider a seasoned crime fiction reader who’s barely read a crime novel published prior to 1970. Well I’m that latter reader. I’ve read several hundred crime novels but nearly all of them are from the contemporary period. This is the year I intend to right that by reading some of the crime fiction canon. What I need though is a curriculum - a list of ten must-read crime fiction classics.

And this is where I need some help. So to that end I’m setting up a relatively straightforward challenge, one that doesn't even require any reading. The challenge is to set a ten book, pre-1970, crime fiction curriculum and to either post the list on your own blog and send me the link (rob.kitchin@nuim.ie), or post the list in a comment to this post by January 31st. I’ll then compile a curriculum based on the most popular choices (and provide link-backs to posts). Ideally, the selection of books needs to try and capture different crime fiction sub-genres and styles.

I hope you can help out, as I could do with the education. And please pass this challenge on to whoever you think might be able to advise. And if you do read any golden oldies this year, then Patti's Forgotten Friday series is the place to link your reviews to.

Most popular posts of 2009

I thought I'd take a look at the blog's traffic since its inception in July until the end of 2009 and find out which posts were the most popular (beyond the top level; and I don't have a clue how many people are reading in a reader). Overall visitor traffic is remarkably flat, with a few spikes.

The spike towards the end is my recent Blogs of the Year post which, thanks to a plug on The Rap Sheet, attracted quite a few visitors. Up until then, my most popular post on any single day had been my review of Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore. The most popular individual posts of the year across the whole period were:

Review posts
1. The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin
2. Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore
3. The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo
4. Black Out by John Lawton
5. The Killing of Strangers by Jerry Holt
6. The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
7. The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
8. The Builders by frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
9. Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie
10. Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken

General posts
1. Blogs of the Year
2. The monster arrives
3. Pre-order splurge
4. Necessary evil?
5. Putting cartography back on the map
6. Back to square one
7. I don't remember
8. Ohio-Kentucky crime fiction
9. The lazy Sunday service (6th Sept)
10. Rethinking maps

Overall, the general posts received more visits than the reviews, which surprises me. And of the reviews, only Go to Helena Handbasket is one of my books of the year. Having kept an eye on traffic I am still completely clueless as to what posts will and won't attract interest, which is probably no bad thing. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by in 2009 and became a tiny bit of the blue line above.

Review of The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (Vintage Crime, 1978)

The well-known poet and literary writer Abraham Trahearne has disappeared on one of his bender’s, working his way through the classier bars of the western states. His ex-wife, Catherine, who lives with Trahearne’s mother, has hired Private Investigator C.W. Sughrue to track him down and bring him home to his new wife, Melinda, who lives across the creek. Sughrue is no stranger to an alcoholic haze and it takes him a couple of weeks to catch up with Trahearne in a Sonoma bar owned by Rosie Flowers, a wistful woman who’s husband is long gone, her two sons dead, and her daughter missing for over ten years. When Trahearne is hospitalised after a bar room scrape, Rosie persuades Sughrue to search for Betty Sue whilst he waits for him to recover. Trahearne though has other ideas, checking himself out of hospital to accompany Sughrue on the hopeless adventure, which quickly turns into another bender in the company of Fireball Roberts, Rosie’s alcoholic bulldog. Sughrue knows finding enigmatic Betty Sue is a hopeless task, but he won’t stop until he’s discovered the truth, whatever the consequences.

For almost two thirds of The Last Good Kiss I wondered if the story was going to go anywhere. It was a pleasant enough read - the characters were well drawn and engaging, the dialogue snappy and authentic, and the prose taut and lyrical, but the story meandered around, seemingly without purpose. Then the subtle interweaving of the various strands started to become apparent and the narrative shifted gear as the clever plotting worked its way out. And the ending was from the top drawer with a sucker punch to die for. Whilst Crumley uses the wide vistas of the western states as the backdrop, the story focuses on just a handful of characters and their inter-relationships, and this is what he’s particularly good at exploring – the foibles, weaknesses, and machinations of people and how they seek to play each other. And although Sughrue is cookie-cut from Chandler’s cloth - the typical alcohol fuelled, wise-ass, philosopher, a hopeless romantic that’s unable to commit to any woman – he’s nonetheless a character worth sharing time with. The Last Good Kiss is the best kind of subtle storytelling; the kind of book that lingers in the mind after its read.

My reviews of 2009

2009 was a great year of reading. I read a number of books by favourite authors and discovered the work of many others. Here are links to all my reviews since starting the blog on July 12th. Overall I'm happy with the balance of the review ratings - ten 5*, twenty two 4*, twenty four 3*, four 2*. There were two or three 3*s that were probably on the balance of things 2*s, but otherwise I think the ratings are a fair reflection of the books and my tastes. There is a good chance that I'll read other works of any author scoring 3* or above, though I'll undoubtedly tend towards the 4* and 5* authors. For my best crime reads of 2009 see here.

Five star
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland
Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty
Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore
Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst
The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees
The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski
Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Four star
The Twelve by Stuart Neville
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce
Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli
M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker
Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield
Black Out by John Lawton
The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri
The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley
'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan
Queenpin by Megan Abbott
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill
The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart Kaminsky
The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp
The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin
If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr
Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge
Calumet City by Charlie Newton
Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole
Frost at Christmas by R.D. Wingfield

Three star
The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo
Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan
August Heat by Andrea Camilleri
Black Delta Night by Jessica Speart
Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken
Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker
Bombs over Dublin by Sean McMahon
The Last Llanelli Train by Robert Lewis
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski
Zoo Station by David Downing
The Reapers by John Connolly
The Damned Season by Carlo Lucarelli
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell
All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney
Satan's Lambs by Lynn Hightower
The Irish Sports Pages by Les Roberts
Mrs D'Silva Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta by Glen Peters
Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong
The Builders by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
Banksters by David Murphy and Martina Devlin
The Build Up by Philip Gwynne
Stiff by Shane Maloney
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Two star
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
The Killing of Strangers by Jerry Holt
Rubble by Jeff Byles
The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler

December reviews

December proved to be another entertaining month of reading with a couple of books that made my top five reads of the year - Diamond Dove and The Wheelman. Here's a full listing of December reviews:

Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland *****
Banksters by David Murphy and Martina Devlin ***
The Build Up by Philip Gwynne ***
The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski *****
Calumet City by Charlie Newton ****
Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole ****
Stiff by Shane Maloney ***
The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler **
Frost at Christmas by R.D. Wingfield ****

Best crime novel reads, 2009

A great year of reading. Since starting to blog my reading has had a fresh burst of life as I've discovered loads of new authors and their work (all but one of the books below were authors new to me this year). I'd like to thank all my fellow crime fiction bloggers who have done so much to diversify and enliven my reading over the past few months, especially those who gave me specific recommendations.

Here are my top ten reads of 2009 (from when I started my blog reviews in July), only three of which were published in 2009.

1. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (1947 in German, translated 2009)

2. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (2006)

3. Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland (2006)

4. The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees (2007)

5. The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski (2005)

6. The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst (2006)

7. Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty (2009)

8. Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman (2002)

9. Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore (2006)

10. The Twelve by Stuart Neville (2009)

I'll be submitting these to Kerrie over at Mysteries in Paradise who is running her annual collection of best crime reads, 2009 (nominated books do not have to be published in 2009). To participate click here.

Alone in Berlin was the stand out book for me; an astonishing novel first published in German in 1947. A book I've recommended to many people.