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Book Review: PANICKING RALPH (1997) by Bill James

8/19/2023

In many ways, it's Business As Usual for the characters, readers, and author of Panicking Ralph, the 14th entry in Bill James's lively crime series. This is generally good news, since these books featuring DS Colin Harpur and his boss ACC Desmond Iles -- with an expansive, colorful cast of aspiring villains and restless relations -- are always good and sometimes brilliant. If this installment is more good than great it is still worth reading, especially as it continues to craft and shake the Harpur & Iles universe built up so carefully by the author in those preceding tales.

First, a confession. While the character of Ralph Ember is as carefully and convincingly drawn as any person in James's fiction -- and while the author clearly finds "Panicking" Ralph's personal and psychological contradictions appealing -- I have always felt that a little Ember goes a long way. For me, Ralph is better cast in a peripheral role, perhaps as team player to a bank robbery or a bit of criminal cover-up; when the story places him front and center, as this one does, his unique blend of chivalry and selfishness can become tiring.

At the character's heart is a paradox that is superficially intriguing: he sees himself as a noble, admirable figure who happens to engage in murder, adultery, and drug running. Nearly all of Bill James's criminals are socially conscious and aspire to the realm of wealth and respectability, but Ralph (never Ralphy) Ember already has a version of both and knows he is above the rabble that occasionally frequent The Monty, his brass-and-burnished-wood bar that once attracted Real Names.

We see this pride and hubris when he serves up glasses of Armagnac to Keith Vine and Stan Stansfield, Ember's rivals in the shifting drug trade as both teams try to capitalize on the seller's market void created by the death of the last kingpin. And we see the battle between chivalry and self-preservation as he tries to decide whether to avenge his mistress's murder. She was gunned down out at the mudflats following a tryst with Ember; surely the men were after him and not her, yes? To act or not to act, even if acting brings on that psychological freezing that has unfairly earned Ralph his derisive nickname... Prince Hamlet is referenced a few times, and it's intriguing to consider the level of narcissism built into both characters.

For me, we spend a little too much time with our Hamlet here, although we do get to know him and his thought processes very well indeed. When Panicking Ralph switches to its second story, the ground is fresher and the endgame and outcome a little more uncertain. DS Harpur makes the rather surprising (and not wholly believable) move to secretly go undercover as a bent copper, insinuating himself in Vine and Stansfield's operation so he can gather evidence against them. In doing so, Harpur (and the author) must by necessity play a long game. The move means the detective is perfectly situated to illustrate James's series-arching theme: that the line between law abider and law breaker is (and will always be) perilously thin, especially with so many easy enticements awaiting one on the criminal side.

Harpur's choice to go heroic-rogue -- he chooses not to tell Iles and Chief Constable Mark Lane about his plan, likely because both would object to it -- allows the opportunity to see those women around him in a newer, stronger light. His college student girlfriend Denise is remarkably intuitive and resilient, and her sharply observed dialogue with Harpur throughout the book, always trying to get him to say more than his policeman's instinct will allow, is a highlight. Harpur's daughters Jill and Hazel continue to find their own voices (often at the hectored expense of their father), and even deceased wife and mother Megan Harpur (see the magnificent Roses, Roses) casts a strong presence through a bookshelf Colin has never gotten around to clearing, though not from family sentiment. Says Jill, assessing her dead mother's collection:

"There's a good boxing book, The Sweet Science, I want kept, and The Orton Diaries, of course. The rest, Oxfam or torched."

One of the most intriguing ideas presented in the pages of Panicking Ralph is a theoretical one. Mark Lane wants to infiltrate and break up the drug captains before the trade can solidify again; Desmond Iles would rather form an alliance with those in charge, promising to look the other way unless things get truly out of hand.

Iles's view is partly a matter of the Devil you know, but there is something more pernicious -- and pragmatic -- lying underneath. Just as Nature abhors a vacuum, Harpur and Iles's unnamed city will never be truly drug-free, no matter how many kingpins are locked up or how many coppers walk the neighborhoods. There is a demand for product, and there always will be. Smaller pushers from more diffuse networks will find their way in, just as Stanfield, Vine, and Ember are doing now. Given that inevitability, there is logic in Iles's push to partner with the criminals and to keep them in charge of operations, for the Devil you know is perhaps containable, amenable in a way that benefits all involved.

Panicking Ralph is a solid mid-series entry, although its characters and themes are best appreciated in context of the other books. Ralph Ember may have his paralyzing doubts, but Bill James is as sure-footed as ever.

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Book Review: THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE (1966) by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

8/3/2023

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In the second detective story featuring Martin Beck, the quiet and capable investigator looks into the disappearance of Swedish journalist Alf Mattson. Mattson seems to have vanished after checking into a Budapest hotel, and the details that surface from interviews with colleagues and relations point to a combative man with possible ties to the drug trade. That gives Beck a geographical and psychological starting point, and the detective’s time in Hungary is not without danger: he warily befriends a Hungarian policeman and is followed throughout the city by men who want to put an end to the investigation, even if it means further violence.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, by the Swedish writing (and marital) team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, continues the series presenting crime narratives in a contemporary and realistic way. Martin Beck’s investigative methods certainly ring true, involving much communication with multiple police departments and interviews with witnesses that offer either a new avenue of exploration or, just as likely, a dead end. As with the previous year’s début entry Roseanna, days and weeks can go by with no breakthrough, and Beck must wait for the results of another routine enquiry before the trail becomes active again. The verisimilitude is admirable, but adhering to reality also translates to a lack of drama in some chapters.

I think, too, that Smoke suffers from the authors’ choice to keep the reader intentionally distant from the emotions of both detective and victim. In his use and the genre world in which he operates, Martin Beck reminds me of Georges Simenon’s great Chief Inspector Maigret. But where Monsieur Maigret carries his personality and his power into each investigation, Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck is the opposite. Beck is a combination of bureaucrat and tabula rasa, with no real attributes or eccentricities to coax him into focus. (Beck has a strained relationship with his wife; little is explored internally.) He does not have Maigret’s bearish manner or black pipe or evocative response to each landscape he visits. Instead, Beck is patient and competent, which are useful virtues for an investigator but hardly the stuff to promote a personal bond between reader and character.

For this reason, the people around Martin Beck often make a greater impression than he does, even when they only appear for mere pages. There is an amusing encounter with a detective named Backlund, whose frustration builds to anger when Beck wants him to provide impressions of Alf Mattson that go beyond the exhaustive, multi-page police report of a drunken fight that Backlund wrote months before the journalist’s disappearance. Inspector Szluka, Beck’s Hungarian police counterpart, is also intriguing because of his tactics: we must decide, as Beck must do, whether his invitation to the baths or recommendation for a great out-of-the-way Hungarian restaurant is offered with a friendly or a more sinister motive.

Smoke’s slow pacing and plainly presented central character are purposeful choices, and the approach makes the story more believable but less engaging. It doesn’t help that the missing man at the heart of the case is also unattractive, and that the cause of his disappearance is largely academic for both detective and reader. (The authors underline Martin Beck’s lack of enthusiasm, noting that “it was only with the greatest effort that he could summon up any interest for his assignment”.) Also academically, the plotting is solid and the solution, when it arrives, is interesting – with parallels to Maigret’s first published mystery, Pietr the Latvian (1931). It is also a solution dependent on getting the full story through the words of the killer (that is, learning key details from a confession), and this is also very much the domain of Georges Simenon and his pipe-smoking detective.

So I am left meditating on an interesting paradox: if so many fictional police characters are unbelievable or fall victim to that “broken-soul” cliché so popular with writers and readers today, we should cheer representations on the page and screen that reach for realism and truth. And yet, as with Inspector Martin Beck in his first two appearances, sometimes such quiet, sad but stoic figures leave little impression, while their cases are filled with the banal but veritable activities of investigation – writing and reading reports, interviewing dozens of people, waiting weeks before a break comes along, et cetera. Such realistic representations should be welcome, with the caveat that reality can be both rewarding and perilously slow.

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Book Review: TOP BANANA (1996) by Bill James

6/10/2023

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Another solid entry in a cumulatively excellent series, Top Banana finds Bill James’s cops and criminals on familiar ground: a war between rival drug gangs has left a few fresh bodies in the streets, and with such events DCS Colin Harpur and his boss, ACC Desmond Iles, shed few tears over dealers nihilistic enough to obliterate each other. This time, though, a 13-year-old girl named Mandy Walsh was caught in the public crossfire, and her death adds to the worries of already distressed Chief Constable Mark Lane. But Mandy was a drug runner herself, a tough teen who preferred the street name “NOON”, and her killing may have been deliberate and not accidental.

Through this murk, local kingpin Mansell Shale sees an opportunity to reach a sort of symbiotic relationship with the police, mainly by offering to stop the street feuds and maintain peace if law enforcement looks the other way on – and essentially protects – his drug business. For a moment, the pragmatic Iles considers such a pact with the enemy (as morality and even law are flexible concepts anyway, able to be shaped to meet the needs of the moment) while Mark Lane refuses to capitulate. Instead, the nervous but proud Chief Constable wants an officer to go deep undercover and infiltrate Shale’s business; it’s a plan that sickens and infuriates Iles, who feels the foolhardy step would only produce another dead copper. It doesn’t help that Lane’s top pick for the scheme, an enterprising drug-squad officer named W.P. Jantice, is rumored to be working both sides himself.

The usual joys of Bill James’s work are to be found here. Top Banana is a twisty but true-ringing crime story populated by ambitious, quirky characters familiar and new. Stalwart Jack Lamb, Harpur’s valuable informant, is once more in the mix, but this time makes a painful miscalculation when he tries to protect his own resource in Harpur. Shale’s own confidante, a calculatedly positive bloke named Alf Ivis, shows the author’s delightful skill at sketching an adept survivor circulating among the criminal classes: Alfie may be Manse Shale’s sympathizer and sounding board, but he knows perfectly how to modulate his words for maximum effect.

As in other stories, Harpur’s teen daughters manage to contend with their father’s criminal contacts (who occasionally show up at the house) by offering a fascinating mix of curiosity and sangfroid sarcasm. Meanwhile, Keith Vine and Stan Stansfield, two up-and-coming drug entrepreneurs whose hubristic characters are memorably explored in The Detective Is Dead (1995), remain on the periphery; James’s narrative promises that they will return to the center stage once more, vying for that powerful top spot in a dangerous trade where violent death is a vocational hazard.

Bill James’s darkly bruised humor appears throughout this Banana, surfacing even in the more prosaic moments, as with Colin Harpur’s observations on his boss’s flair for fashion:

The ACC looked ungenial in one of his superb single-breasted grey suits and a murkishly striped tie that would be some mighty London club’s: the kind of what-the-fuck-are-you-staring-at tie meant to cow the masses by tastelessness. He was still doing his hair en brosse following a late-night season of Jean Gabin films at one of the cinemas. He gave Harpur a kind of smile, an Iles kind, fat with insult.

And finally there is the thematic idea, working busily through all of the author’s crime novels, that a very fine (sometimes nonexistent) thread separates those who are expected to uphold the law and those who have decided to break it. This lack of moral delineation surely contributes to Chief Constable Lane’s deterioration, for he still wants to believe in a clear division between good and evil, between moral and amoral. For Iles and Harpur, who both know from long experience that such a line is both unrealistic and impractical, taking control of that division (and manipulating it for one’s own ends) is sometimes the most effective course forward in an unfair world.

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Book Review: ENTER SIR JOHN (1928) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson

5/21/2023

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I suspect that a great majority of readers who love – and who read broadly within – the detective fiction genre are looking for that next great discovery. This might be a standalone mystery with an intriguing title and a curious reputation, like Joel Townsley Rogers’s The Red Right Hand (1945) or Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (1937). Or it could be the first encounter with an author or series that proves to be rewarding and addictive. (Christianna Brand, anyone? Q. Patrick, perhaps?) Once we have read and re-read our Christies, Carrs, and Queens, what’s next on the horizon?

It is no surprise that I live and read for just that discovery. My first true literary love, the wonderfully imaginative Mrs Bradley series by the wonderfully prolific GAD novelist Gladys Mitchell, bloomed when I found a paperback copy of 1945’s The Rising of the Moon in a remainder bin. I was so taken with this author’s prose and plotting – the former at times perhaps more sturdy than the latter – that I launched a tribute website to introduce more readers to her books.

And each time I discover a “new” writer of crime fiction and delight in his or her storytelling strengths, I celebrate and know that I’m likely in for the long haul: examples include Nicolas Freeling’s series featuring Dutch detective Pieter Van der Valk; the Lew Archer tales of Ross MacDonald; and most recently, the dark and quirky Harpur & Iles stories by Bill James. These writers are far from unknown, but the initial read of one of their books felt serendipitous as I fell under their narrative spells.

A friendly, philosophical correspondent named Pavel recently reminded me of the works of Helen Simpson as he described how much he enjoyed this author’s prose. As far as I know, my exposure to Helen Simpson and her work was limited to her chapter contribution in the round-robin detective novel Ask a Policeman (1933). In that book penned by members of The Detection Club, Simpson swaps detectives (one of the book’s concepts) with Gladys Mitchell and inserts Adela into the moniker of Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, an addition which delighted Mitchell. The timing seemed right and, thanks to Pavel, my interest was piqued, so I ordered Simpson’s first mystery novel, co-written with Clemence Dane, through academic interlibrary loan and let Sir John Saumarez take the stage.

The plot of Enter Sir John is simple and engaging: Martella Baring stands accused of murdering fellow actress Magda Druce after an ill-tempered and ill-fated evening visit to the victim’s home. Standing in the dock, Martella comes off as beautiful and cool as she dispassionately surveys her surroundings and awaits her fate. But stage actor and producer Sir John Saumarez is in attendance, and the actress’s performance stays with him after the jury brings in a verdict of Guilty.

As a working acquaintance of Gordon Druce, the dead woman’s husband, Sir John learns more about the events of the fateful night. He is troubled by a bit of set dressing, namely an empty wine glass that should either have been full or not there at all. Using his connections and his charm, Sir John begins an amateur investigation that leads him to a new suspect, and one who will give the professional actor a very robust run-around before the case can be resolved and Martella Baring can be exonerated.

The book’s authors were both familiar with the world of the theatre and the sometimes vivid personalities of those who choose to perform on stage. Being playwrights in addition to prose writers, Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson bring their penchants for character creation and dramatic plotting to their story of a woman wrongfully accused of murder. Indeed, I think it is the authors’ ability to set scenes and bring to life a number of Enter Sir John’s incidental characters that makes the tale so entertaining.

From its opening-pages nod to the porter of Macbeth – each chapter begins with a quoted line from a Shakespeare play – we learn less about the principals, i.e., Sir John Saumarez and the actress he is trying to save from the gallows, and more about the scrappy, lived-in demeanors of those cast in supporting roles. It is a winning strategy: characters like Novello and Doucie Markham, perpetually behind in their rent but hoping that Sir John’s interest in the case can be parlayed into employment within his theatrical company, are spirited, sympathetic, and very amusing. And while not integral to the plot, a chapter recording the debate around the jury table is beautifully observed and quite comical, with several figures adroitly sketched to highlight their quirks and qualities.

On the other hand, the mystery plot is uncomplicated, with a rather linear detection process and only a few alternative suspects from which Sir John and the reader can choose. It doesn’t help that Martella Baring is rather conveniently (that is, unconvincingly) unconscious during the murder’s crucial moments, and that her lack of memory has affirmed her guilt within her own mind. This, we must presume, is why she makes no effort to defend herself in court or challenge the prosecution’s version of events. But such coincidence is not uncommon in mystery fiction, and it did not bother Alfred Hitchcock when he chose to adapt Enter Sir John, one of the director’s early talkies and released as Murder! in 1930.

The other element that might be bothersome to 21st century readers concerns the killer’s motive for disposing of Magda Druce, as well as that character’s… well, character. The problem is that both aspects are outdated, to put it kindly, although I can appreciate the societal pressures this rather pathetic murderer might have felt (or paranoically imagined) while living and looking for work in 1920s London. The book loses its pace around the two-thirds mark, when the culprit is revealed and must be searched for, only to be found and then lost again, not once but twice. It’s a curious, prolonged dénouement to an otherwise enjoyable book.

As an authorial pair, Dane and Simpson wrote two more detective stories on the heels of Enter Sir John. I hope to read and review these soon, as their debut crime fiction production delivered a worthwhile performance, even with some third-act stumbles.

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Book Review: PANICKING RALPH (1997) by Bill James

Book Review: THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE (1966) by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Book Review: TOP BANANA (1996) by Bill James

Book Review: ENTER SIR JOHN (1928) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson

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