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Book Review: CRIMINAL CONVERSATION (1965) by Nicolas Freeling

8/10/2021

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Amsterdam’s Central Recherche bureau receives an oddly formal anonymous letter from someone who claims to be able to connect a prominent neurologist, Dr. Hubert Van der Post, with a capital crime. The letter is passed to Inspector Pieter Van der Valk, who accepts the cloak-and-dagger rendez-vous and meets with a well-placed city official. The man believes that Dr. Van der Post has killed an aging, alcoholic painter who had once tried to blackmail the official, and likely attempted the same bite on the doctor. The official’s wife is Van der Post’s patient, and the detective believes he can see a triangle forming.
 
In a way, Criminal Conversation builds onto the conceit that author Nicolas Freeling explored in the previous year’s novel, 1964’s Double-Barrel. In both books, Inspector Van der Valk begins a book-long conversation with a key figure in the case: in Double-Barrel it is Besançon, an old man with a deep memory; here it is the amused, self-important Dr. Van der Post. The inspector has been tasked with looking into the accusation unofficially, since there is no evidence against the suspect and social landmines are strewn everywhere. So Van der Valk arrives at the doctor’s office in the guise of a patient and begins to play the role of examiner, dropping hints and pushing buttons to see what the reaction might be.
 
The novel’s second part takes the form of a written journal from Van der Post. The professional medical man enjoys dissecting and transcribing his interactions with the unofficial policeman, and he also takes pleasure in talking about himself. We learn of the man’s childhood and family circumstances, his Jesuit school education and his feelings of inadequacy towards girls while a teen. The relationship that is formed between potential criminal and playacting cop becomes complicated, and as Van der Valk concludes at the very end of this book, the doctor is interested to create an intimate bond because the detective’s confessor figure may be the only friend he has in an otherwise solitary and lonesome life.
 
Freeling is, I think, not exactly a writer inspired by conventional psychology as much as by character study and detail. He and his detective are not looking for answers; they are more interested in fleshing out people the way a portrait painter would take care – through the shadow under the eyes, the slope of the nose, the thinness of the pursed lips – to capture the truth in a subject’s face. It is an admirable approach, and often interesting. Occasionally though, as it does here and with the first Van der Valk book Love in Amsterdam, the character biography slows the story (so fascinating to the self-satisfied subject relating his own history; of less interest to the reader who wants to get back to the present plotline).

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Taken in microcosm, Criminal Conversation offers many literary (and, yes, psychological) page-to-page pleasures. The premise is intriguing and masterful in its representation of rarefied Dutch social circles and the entitled characters who move within them. The anonymous note and assignation let the inspector, the highly amused outsider, play a Raymond Chandler PI for a moment, drolly dubbing himself “Philip Van der Marlowe”. The plot is good – e.g., both the official’s wife and his Lolita-like daughter could be involved with the good doctor and/or the murdered painter to complicate that triangle – and Van der Valk’s talents as an observer and interpreter of his fellow humans are once again enjoyable to see on display. If the secret journal feels a bit labored as a narrative device, it is very much part of the criminal conversation to which the title alludes. A good entry in the excellent series featuring Freeling’s unassuming and very human Dutch detective. 

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Book Review: LOVE IN AMSTERDAM (1962) by Nicolas Freeling

2/15/2020

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At the center of Love in Amsterdam is a simple and familiar concept: an average man, most likely innocent, is accused of murder. Martin (no last name given, while the judicial bureaucrats appear only by surname) is collected by the police, brought to the station, and detained in connection with the death of Elsa de Charmoy, a former mistress who was found shot four times in her apartment. Martin claims not to have seen the woman for months, but he was sighted on her street on the evening of the killing, with no clear explanation of why he was there. At the station, he is interviewed by a talkative police inspector named Van der Valk, who eventually confides in the suspect that he is willing to presume the man's innocence if he will help him catch Elsa's killer... even if that person turns out to be Martin after all.

The story – rather slim compared with later Piet Van der Valk crime novels – and characters feel very much like products of their time. Published in 1962, Nicolas Freeling demonstrates in Love in Amsterdam that he is more intrigued with realism, psychology, and pathos than with constructing plots and planting clues that give the reader an artificial puzzle to solve. Readers will likely know right away which genre camp they fall into, but I have always had an affinity for both the 1930s-era classic detective mystery and the post-1950s gritty crime tale, provided that each is well-written and has elements to admire. The narrative's third-person focus here remains on Martin, the wronged man at the mercy of an often impersonal criminal justice system. Yet Freeling gives his protagonist an unexpected ally in Van der Valk, and it is clear that this relationship proves the compelling one that the author wants to explore.

Further, the character views and motivations are also of their time, and could understandably sour on a reader when tastes and social norms reflecting attitudes 60 years later are applied. Most problematic in this aspect is the persona of the victim, who comes to life in flashback as an attractive but manipulative man-eater, a woman who leaves her husband and children for Martin and then disposes of him in turn, taking pleasure in the power she wields. Inspector Van der Valk (here and in other stories) does not fail to appreciate the well-shaped leg or firm form of a secretary or housewife, and the detective's intelligent, anchored wife Arlette is not yet on the page in Amsterdam, only referenced, so Martin's clear-eyed and understanding girlfriend Sophia must provide the book with its check against casual chauvinism.  

Inspector Van der Valk will quickly become a memorable, likeably unostentatious lead for the series, solidifying fully in the third book, 1963's Gun Before Butter. But in Amsterdam, we are still watching the brushstrokes being applied. In some early scenes, Van der Valk employs a coarseness or jocularity that might be a tactic to get his suspect to drop his guard, but comes off as against type to the introspective detective we know from future stories. The inspector's willingness to sympathize with the accused, however, as well as his penchant for carting Martin over to the crime scene and frankly discussing the case with him, are habits that will remain and expand. Van der Valk's quiet but mischievous contempt for the self-importance and bluster of bureaucratic figureheads within the Dutch justice system is also in place already; this little-cog-in-a-cumbersome-machine perspective is one of the most winning qualities of Freeling's novels.

When it is compared with the other books in the Van der Valk series, Love in Amsterdam suffers a bit. Future stories will filter their characters and crimes through the inspector's humanist point of view, but in this one we see the world from the suspect's perspective. The choice should make the narrative more immediate, with the stakes higher, but it doesn't quite do so. Nicolas Freeling provides Martin with such an equable personality – not very much seems to surprise or trouble him – that it's hard to feel one's own pulse rise in proxy to the situation; we are as distant and removed from the action as the nominal protagonist seems to be.


PictureThe book was released in the U.S. the same year as Death in Amsterdam.
The author also pivots to the past in the book's middle section, where we learn about Elsa de Charmoy's personality and her relationship with Martin, but momentum flatlines through this lengthy flashback until we are once more in the present. Freeling excels at creating snapshot moments of Dutch bureaucracy, and these are stylistic high points, from a blustery monologue delivered by a self-important commissioner to a psychologist's maddeningly wearying interview of Martin expressed through phrases and ellipses: "Were you angry… were you glad… did you realize… don't talk, keep your answers brief…"  Finally, though, the climax arrives where the woman's killer is identified and hunted; the end scene feels strangely hurried and unsatisfying, almost as if it were just a curious addendum to the story. The approach can certainly be defended as a mirror of reality, I suppose: an investigation stalls until new evidence is found, and then everything happens at once.

With these criticisms stated, it probably sounds like the book has little to recommend it. That is not true. Taken on its own merits, Love in Amsterdam provides an unassuming, psychologically observant, and generally rewarding reading experience, and it serves to introduce Dutch detective Pieter Van der Valk to the world, which is ample cause for celebration and a reason to (re)visit his literary origins. It is also heartening to know that Nicolas Freeling – who, it is reported, began this book while in jail for theft of food as a hotel restaurant cook – would improve on the formula, expand his ambitions, and make Inspector Van der Valk the center of his stories.

Tracy over at Bitter Tea and Mystery reviewed Love (or, as published in the U.S., Death) in Amsterdam last year. I hope she and others continue to explore the Van der Valk series, as I look forward to reading each title again after nearly two decades since my initial visit.

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Book Review: GUN BEFORE BUTTER (1963) by Nicolas Freeling

3/10/2019

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At the end of the 1990s, when I was out of college and had time to truly read for pleasure (rather than for quiz answers and course completion), I made a couple author discoveries that would result in a deep appreciation and a lifelong affection for their works. Certainly Gladys Mitchell was one of these authors, and I have since read and provided summaries and reviews of her 84 novels over at The Stone House. P.G. Wodehouse, whom I also discovered around that time, brings great delight, generally in moderation; A Wodehouse book or two every six months strikes the right balance. And a third name from that era comes to mind: European chef turned author Nicolas Freeling.

Freeling introduced his most memorable protagonist, Dutch Police Inspector Piet Van der Valk, in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam. I quickly read through the series of 11 novels – 13 if you count the two titles featuring Van der Valk's headstrong French wife Arlette – and was delighted by many elements that Freeling explored, in structure and psychology and even the subversion of genre expectations. While there is always crime (and usually murder) at each story's center, nothing else is guaranteed. But Freeling is such an excellent, observational writer that I always feel fully engaged and am willing to accept any narrative path he offers.

Such unconventionality may not be welcomed by fans of Golden Age Detection puzzles, exactly. In Double Barrel (1964), for example, much of the novel is a dialogue between the inspector and a suspect in the case; with Over the High Side (1971), Van der Valk advances theories about what happened to a patriarch who disappeared from the family boat, but as the members refuse to share their knowledge of the night and incriminate one of their own, a definitive resolution is never stated. And in the story I am reviewing here, 1963's Gun before Butter, the Dutch policeman has several notable interactions with Lucienne Englebert stretching over years – first as a teenager involved in a car crash that kills her father, then in the company of Italian boys arrested during a knife fight, next as a defendant of a theft complaint – before she surfaces as a young woman working as an auto mechanic and marked as a potential suspect in a murder investigation.

I'm tempted to advise that Nicolas Freeling's writing (like Gladys Mitchell's) may be an acquired taste. His mysteries are very reminiscent of Simenon and his proletariat detective, Inspector Maigret, but they incorporate an even more philosophical tone. As a law officer, Piet Van der Valk is an iconoclast, and indeed a reader should not expect "justice" to be served by having the figure that pulls the trigger or pushes in the knife to be inevitably arrested, tried, and convicted. That isn't the world that Freeling creates – indeed, it's not true of our own reality, then or now – and for me it is a more interesting one because such a world is not bound be the strictures of moral or genre formula.

The Van der Valk novels are not formless, however; they each have narrative and tonal logic that feels highly satisfying (and rather unique) to me. The case progresses, threads are followed, the picture forms. But it's the choices that are made and the worldview of this literate and atypical policeman that make the difference. I have encountered detective characters as outside-the-box thinkers many times, but no sequence has lodged in my memory more than the way Freeling frames a certain scene in Gun before Butter; it has stayed with me for almost 20 years.

In it, Van der Valk wants to question Lucienne Englebert, but she works at a service station in Belgium, where the Dutch detective has no jurisdiction. He tries anyway, and blusters a bit too much to overcome his legal vulnerability. Enter Bernard, the garage owner and an ex-prize fighter, who, after telling Van der Valk to leave with no result, hits him efficiently in the face and escorts him to his car. The policeman leaves the premises, only to drive directly across the road to an unused lot, park, and wait. Eventually, a Belgian patrol officer checks out the parked car, and upon learning that Van der Valk is also police, gives him his blessing to remain as long as he wants. Soon thereafter, a slightly sheepish Bernard crosses the road to ask Van der Valk to return to the station. He accepts, and the two talk about Lucienne (whom Bernard loves unrequitedly) over bottles of Belgian beer.

It's a bravura scene, one of many to be found in Freeling's books, and I'm amazed by it for two reasons. First, it runs completely counter to the expectations of a traditional action crime thriller, and neatly deconstructs its elements. It is a scene of menace and brief violence carried through in a fully understated way; the moment is grounded in the present, but the action is over as soon as it begins. Any other writer would be tempted to stretch a few paragraphs out of the confrontation, with the hero cracking wise and mounting some sort of defense to show his capabilities. Nothing of the sort happens here. Second, the choices all the way down the line – Van der Valk's atypical bluster as overcompensation, Bernard's use of a single punch to get rid of the trespasser, the parking across the road and the guilt-tinged half-apology – are genuinely surprising and yet fully, psychologically sound. It's a sequence that's completely unexpected and deeply satisfying, not least because the action of each person feels so truthful to the character the author has shaped him to be.

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It is only in the final moments that Freeling's understanding of his characters falls just short of convincing. Still, it's a masterful journey, told with a great amount of wit and humanity. The rather evocative title is given meaning by story's end; the phrase guns and butter is most often connected with the political/economic question of what a society should choose to produce, assuming it has a choice. (The American title, Question of Loyalty, is far less evocative.) Revisiting this author – who produces literate, highly enjoyable novels with criminal themes more so than traditional mystery stories – was greatly rewarding, and I look forward to (re)discovering this series anew.


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