Review of The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan (Pocket Books, 2008)

Charlie Howard is a thief turned crime novelist. After a reading at a Paris bookshop, and a little too drunk to exercise good judgement, he is persuaded to demonstrate his lock-picking abilities by breaking into the apartment of a young man. The next day his fence asks him to break into the same apartment to steal a painting by a little known artist. Again ignoring the warning bells ringing in his mind he agrees to do the job, but when he breaks in the painting has already been stolen. Worst still when he returns home the apartment’s real owner is dead in his living room. Someone is trying to frame him for the burglary, and troublingly several parties are after the painting leaving Charlie stuck in the middle trying to find a way to safety. Then to add to his woes his agent, Victoria, decides that now is a good time to meet the author she’s only ever spoken to on the phone.

I’m not a great fan of first person stories with a largely descriptive style, preferring a third person narrative driven by dialogue and action. I guess I like to get a sense of the characters through how they act and behave rather than the internal ‘dialogue in their head’. The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris had then a little bit of an uphill battle to win me over. The real strength of the book is its premise (a crime author who is a criminal whose exploits parallel those of his novels), its plotting, which is well crafted and clever, and its pacing, with the story jaunting along at a nice trot (if it had been written in the third person and dropped the introspection/description it would have zipped along like grease lightening, which is how I tend to like caper novels). Where the story is probably a little weak is with respect to characterisation. Despite the first person perspective I never really got a sense of the emotional and psychological make-up of Charlie – what made him tick – and the other characters tended to be thin and underdeveloped. I think this was partly because no character, including Charlie, had a backstory; the reader never learns anything about their history or family, just their role in the caper being told. I’m aware that this probably doesn’t sound as positive as it might, so I should make it clear that The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris did win me over, mainly due to its astute plotting, and I intend to read the first book in the series. Other reviews can be found at: It's a Crime, Random Jottings, Innocent Bystander,

Sunday Service

For the first time this year we have fabluous weather with a clear blue sky. The garden beckons ...

My posts this week:
In the field
Review of The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
The Geography of the Live Register
Cover design
February reviews
Ego massage

Thanks to Mack for reminding me that Jasper Fforde has a new novel out. Another one to get for the TBR! It's getting difficult to keep up with favourite authors as the pile grows ever more rickety.

Ego massage ...

The reviews of our manuscript for MIT Press, Code/Space, turned up yesterday. Thankfully they were, on the whole, positive and provided a nice little ego massage. Well, two of the reviews did, the third brought us back down to ground with a bump. Here's a couple of nice snippets and then the bump.

"This is an excellent draft of an interesting book and I strongly recommend that MIT publish it. The book is nuanced and sophisticated in its portrayal of software as socially created, with complex and contingent effects. Overall, I find it to be engaging, convincing, and formative in its analysis of how software is injected into, and transforms, innumerable spaces of contemporary society."

"Code/Space will be a really influential text. No other book is as informed, comprehensive or accessible on the subtle and crucial intersections of code and geography. Few other authors understand these often opaque, ignored or misunderstood processes as well as Dodge and Kitchin."

"My overall and honest reaction to this text was to dislike it."

Just as you think it can't get better review number 3 pops up to put sand in the massage oil, which is probably no bad thing (although I'm quite used to sandy oil at this stage, usually accompanied by a rejection letter!)

We now have until April 15th to address the reviewers comments for it to make a Spring 2011 publication. That's going to require a little rejigging of the diary, but it'll have to be done to avoid further delay in publication. Goodbye reading time ...

February Reviews

February felt like another slow month of reading, mainly due to being sidetracked with other things. My book of the month was Daniel Woodrell's The Ones You Do. If you haven't discovered Woodrell, he's well worth checking out - carefully layered, multitextured stories of everyday life on the margins.

The Song is You by Megan Abbott ****
Kamikazi by Raymond Lamont-Brown ***
Grift Sense by James Swain ****
Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura ***
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett *****
The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell *****
Old Flames by John Lawton ***

Cover design

Patti Abbott's post about cover art yesterday has prompted me to share four possible cover designs for The White Gallows. I like to take an active role in this aspect of a book because, frankly, some of the covers on my other books have been stinkers. Whether I have a good eye or not is though a different issue. The designer is presently away on holiday and when she's back we have to decide on a cover. Whilst she's away I've taken the opportunity to take the initiative and come up with a sample of four designs. It seems that a common theme with contemporary police procedurals for cover design is to use a photo, so I've stuck with that trend. I'm leaning towards one of these, but I thought I'd see what others thought. Which cover do you like best, or do you think I should scrap them all and start again? Click on them to get an enlarged image.

1. 2.

3. 4.

The front cover relates to one scene in the book where a noose is found hanging in an oak tree on the farm owned by the victim in the first case McEvoy is investigating. The back cover is of Trim Castle, where the body at the centre of a second investigation is discovered.

BTW, if you ever want to attract curious attention, wander round a park with a forty foot length of thick rope with a noose tied to one end and then set it up in a tree.

Review of The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, translated by Benjamin Moser (Picador, 2002)

Ricardo Carvalho finishes work in the plush offices of a mining company in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, says goodbye to some of the staff, takes the elevator down to the underground car park, gets in his car, smokes a cigarette and then blows his brains out with a handgun. Only when the police turn up there is no gun and his possessions have been stolen. Inspector Espinosa, an honest cop in a police force that is often corrupt and with a keen interest in philosophy and literature, is assigned to the murder case. At first he makes little progress until the gun turns up on the black market, Carvalho’s secretary disappears mysteriously and it’s revealed that Carvalho had taken out a massive life insurance policy. For a while it seems as if the case is starting to make sense, but then it twists and turns in unexpected ways leaving Espinosa scrambling in the dark, unsure who to trust.

I enjoyed The Silence of the Rain; it’s a solid and intriguing police procedural. Espinosa is a thoughtful, world weary character who reminded me somewhat of Morse. The pace is well judged, the characterisation sound, there is a strong sense of place as the characters move around Rio, and the story has some nice twists. Split into three parts, the first and third parts are written in the third person, the middle part in the first person, putting the reader in the mind of Espinosa. It was a little jarring to swap from one perspective to another, but it actually works well. My only real issue relates to the start and particularly the end which kind of fell apart and was poorly resolved. In short, I was left with very big questions unanswered, which was pretty frustrating given that for the most part this is solid storytelling (and I imagine this will cheese some people off a lot more than it did me). I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I’ll leave it that. On balance, an enjoyable story, the first is a series of seven Espinosa novels, and I plan to read the next in the series, December Heat, which hopefully has a more convincing ending.

In the field ...

I spent 12 hours yesterday doing some fieldwork, driving round the Irish countryside looking at the phenomena of so-called 'ghost estates'. A long but interesting day. I visited a diverse set of estates, the majority of which were in pretty good order. Not necessarily perfect, but certainly livable (and often not far off being completed in terms of landscaping, etc). Their main issue is simply that very few people live on them and given the present state of the Irish economy and housing market they may remain that way until the corner is turned. They ranged from apartment blocks, to terraced housing, to semi-detached, up to very large, exclusive 5 or 6 bedroom properties. There were some though that were a bit of a mess and have been abandoned halfway through the build. All the estates had a vacancy/under-construction rate of over 50 percent (with an average of 80 percent). It can be quite strange to be walking round an almost finished estate of 60 plus houses and apartments that are all vacant. I also came across a 'firesale' where prices had been dropped to 100K (at the height of the boom the most expensive property on the estate was 399K). These were very nice houses, on a nice estate, in a nice village. If one had a spare 100K and a job was near by, one might be tempted!