What Book to Read?

In a recent post on Nicci French’s Blue Monday, I said that that it reminded me of the Joe O’Loughlin thrillers by Michael Robotham, the most recent of which is Say You’re Sorry (2012). At the time I forgot that another Robotham, The Wreckage, came out in 2011. In it, he has returned to one of his earlier creations, Vincent Ruiz, a retired Detective Inspector, who has been either protagonist or a secondary character in the previous books. Joe gets a minor role in this one.

It is 2010. The story starts with Luca Terracini, a journalist in Baghdad, a city still occupied by the Americans and still in chaos seven years after the invasion which toppled Sadam Hussein. Luca is following up the story of yet another bank robbery, and is already off side with the Iraqi police. Is there something more than random crime going on here? In London, Ruiz befriends a young woman who is apparently being beaten up by her boyfriend, only to find he has been set up and robbed. He is outraged; he wants his stuff back. But why are other people interested in finding the thief? What could she have taken that is worth killing for? And what has this to do with the prosperity of a major bank at a time when others are reeling from the effects of the GFC? There are a number of other characters who have something to add to the story, and Robotham keeps the reader is suspense about who knows what, or what their motives could be. Unlike a number of his earlier books which are in the first person, this one is told in the limited third person, where each character only knows their own circumstances, and has little knowledge of how these might fit into the larger picture. The reader knows from the beginning that there must be some connection between what is happening in Baghdad and what is happening in London, and Robotham shows great skill in gradually drawing the two threads together. His use of the present tense adds to the sense of urgency in the story.

Robotham’s writing is, as usual, first class. Most of the characters are well drawn, though perhaps there is a bit of stereotyping, especially where one of the villains is concerned. I find Ruiz particularly convincing. He isn’t a detective anymore – which makes detecting more difficult, though he still has useful contacts. He misses the force: ‘the camaraderie of the Met, the sense of purpose, the smell of cigarette smoke and wet overcoats. It was an unreal world, yet it was more than real, if that makes sense. Important. Frustrating. Over.’ But more importantly, now that he is a private citizen, what motivates him to continue with his investigation, even after he has been warned off? ‘Maybe there was a bit of Don Quixote in all men his age,’ he muses. ‘They tilt at windmills because they don’t want to grow old.’ Unconstrained by the conventions of the police procedural, Robotham can write as a non-genre novelist, and let the reader know what is going on inside all his characters’ heads.

In terms of setting, I find his descriptions of life in Baghdad particularly compelling: ‘Sadr City is an immense suburb in eastern Baghdad full of ramshackle one-storey buildings covered in dust and patched together with scavenged building materials. The city has many neighbourhoods like this one – sectarian strongholds, full of widows, orphans and the dispossessed; Sunni or Shiite, bombed back the Stone Age’. Robotham conveys a real sense of menace and fear, but also a respect for the dignity of many ordinary Iraqis. London seems a bit flat after Baghdad.

As I noted in my post on The Night Ferry, the Ruiz stories involve crimes that go beyond individual greed or psychosis, and question the structures of power in society. Ruiz and Luca both in their way take the advice of the Watergate investigators Woodward and Bernstein to ‘follow the money’ and with money goes power. The title ‘The Wreckage’ could be taken to apply to the turmoil in Iraq, and America’s role in it, but it applies equally to the impact of financial practices of banks deemed too big to fail. It is clear from the prologue that terrorism, another sort of wreckage, will play a part in the story, and Robotham raises the problem of what is the proper response to this threat. He isn’t preaching; his apportioning of responsibility for the wrongs that are done is far from simplistic. The fact that he asks important questions is another reason why I think Robotham’s work is an example of the way that good crime fiction can go beyond genre and be considered as literature in its own right.

You can see my earlier posts on The Suspect (2004), Lost (2005) The Night Ferry (2007) and Bombproof (2008), and read more about Michael Robotham here. He is speaking at Adelaide Writers’ Week on Wednesday 5 March.