What Book to Read?

Here’s a couple of good reads for a hot summer afternoon. Both are crime fiction, from different countries and different subgenres, but with significant similarities.

I picked up Michael Koryta’s A Welcome Grave (2009) because of the glowing endorsement by Michael Connelly on the cover. According to him, Koryta is ‘one of the best of the best’. I know endorsements don’t mean much, but I respect Connelly – here’s my review of one of his recent crime stories – and he’s right that Koryta is good. Despite the fact that he is only 32, there’s a lot Connelly can judge him on. This is his third book about private investigator Lincoln Perry – all of which were nominated for various awards – and there is one other in this series, plus six other books from a range of genres including crime, adventure and ghost stories. I’m breaking into his Lincoln Perry series – but it doesn’t matter, as the book is essentially self-contained.

Perry is a private detective operating in Cleveland Ohio. He was previously a cop, but was thrown out of the force for assaulting a prominent attorney who just happened to be having an affair with Perry’s fiancé Karen. Now that same attorney has been found murdered, and Karen wants Perry to find his estranged son. What could possibly go wrong? The story follows a structure reasonably common in crime stories where things get worse and worse for the hero as events beyond his (usually) control stack up against him until he eventually finds a way of fighting back. Koryta is slightly better at setting the conspiracy up than he is at producing a convincing resolution, but overall the story works well. I like the way he writes; Perry is a bit of a laid-back, wise-cracking Phillip Marlow sort of character. But he’s not quite the white knight that Marlow is; I like Perry’s admission at the end that he had made judgements and assumptions that he wanted to be true, and has to deal with the fact that they turned out to be wrong. I also like that Koryta’s preparation for writing private detective stories was to work as a private detective himself for a time.

The second book is The Tower (2009) by Michael Duffy, a police procedural set in Sydney. It is the first of two books featuring Senior Constable Detective Nicholas Troy. Duffy is no stranger to crime writing, having been a crime reporter (among other things, including publisher and contrarian broadcaster), and author of two ‘true crime’ books and a fictionalised representation of a Lebanese crime family in Sydney.

A young woman falls from a floor high up in the unfinished Tower building in Sydney. Is it suicide or murder? Detectives Troy and McIver are searching the unfinished top floors when the more senior of them, McIver is wounded by a gunman who flees the building. The Homicide section of the NSW police force is undermanned, and Troy has to take a leading role in the investigation. The case is complicated enough, but soon Troy finds he has to deal not only with police politics but with external power and influence. ‘Troy was not used to politics, had rarely felt its breath on his cheek. But he knew it was out there, waiting for him like everyone else.’ How well can he deal with it?

The narrative moves at a good pace, but at times I got quite confused about who was doing what to whom. Duffy says that when he writes a story, he doesn’t know how it’s going to end. Along the way in this one he introduces people smuggling, union corruption and dodgy business dealings as well as sex and drugs. Some of these are central to the plot, but others seem just there to confuse, as if the author wasn’t quite sure which bits he’d use. He says in an interview that he likes TV series such as The Wire, where ‘at first you feel a bit lost but it makes you pay attention. You have to become a detective and help solve the crime.’ So maybe he applies this to his work, and I’m just not paying enough attention. And it’s probably true that there is a deal of confusion in police work, as they strive to create a clear understanding of what actually happened. So I probably shouldn’t worry too much about loose ends. Troy is an interesting character, and I did enjoy the book – I’m just not entirely sure how it all fits together.

The differences between these books are obvious. Apart from the different settings, it is the difference between the private detective story, which seems to be the dominant detective subgenre in America, and the police procedural, which flourishes in the UK and Australia. (Connelly’s police detective Harry Bosch is an exception, but I’m not aware of very many others.) Private and police detectives work in different ways, their motivations are different, and very often the structure of the story has to be different to accommodate the private detective’s inability to arrest anyone. But these two books share a similarity I hadn’t expected. The heroes of both are not just baffled by events; they become the subject of a conspiracy. They become entangled because of the sort of people they are, and both writers have succeeded in creating heroes whose behaviour is a convincing response to their circumstances.

You can read more about Michael Koryta here, and Michael Duffy here.

PS I’m surprised by one thing in The Tower, and it’s that a Detective Constable would be given so much responsibility in a case. In most British TV police procedurals, constables seem very much the lower orders (though admittedly that isn’t true of Detective Constable Rachel Bailey in Scott and Bailey).  Maybe it’s different in Australia. Having been a crime reporter, Duffy would presumably get such details right.