What Book to Read?

Somehow these very hot summer days – of which we in Adelaide are having far too many of late – seem to preclude serious reading, so here’s three crime stories that that I’ve been wallowing in, sitting in front of the air conditioner.

The first is The Reversal (2010) by the great American crime writer Michael Connelly. I’ve read nearly all of his series featuring Harry Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department (see for example my review of The Black Box (2012) here), but this is the first one for me of the related series about his half-brother, defence lawyer Mickey Haller. The title has at least two meanings: the most obvious is that Haller appears for the prosecution, a reversal of his usual role. The second is that he is prosecuting in the re-trial of a man who has had his original conviction if not reversed, then at least granted a re-trial because new information has become available. Haller chooses his half-brother Harry Bosch as the detective who helps him to look at the evidence from the first trial, and to find new evidence. I don’t usually read court-room dramas, but I found the unfolding of the case quite compelling, with the added interest of information that Bosch discovers which could or could not be a red herring. The story is told mostly in the first person from Hallers’s perspective, with Bosch’s sections in the third person. This still allows for a certain amount of tension between the two men over their different perspectives and roles. Bosch is upset when he thinks the justice system is being ‘manipulated by smart lawyers’, whereas Haller prefers cases to be ‘confined to the courtroom’.  There is a nice legal twist at the end.

Give the Devil His Due (2015) by Sulari Gentill is another in her series featuring Rowland Sinclair and his friends, set in Sydney in the 1930s. You can read my review of the previous one, A Murder Unmentioned (2014) here. As in the rest of the series, there is much reference to current events and places. The central story – so far as there is one – concerns a charity car race which Rowland has agreed to drive in, to be held at the Maroubra Speedway, commonly known as the ‘Killer’ track. There is murder and attempted murder and a series of spin-off sub-plots, concerning the New Guard, with whom Sinclair has had run-ins in the past, Sydney gambling identities, Italian migrants and witchcraft. As with the other books in the series, Gentill uses a number of real people in the story, including the Australian racing car driver Joan Richmond, the actor Errol Flynn, pavement artist  Arthur Stace, the occultist Rosaleen Norton, the poet and editor Kenneth Slessor and the New Guard’s Eric Campbell. I find this quite amusing, especially as there are some sly jokes involved, but I have an interest in history, where others may not. Gentill seems to be a believer in the ‘having something exciting happen every three pages’ school of writing, so the story moves along at a good pace, but some of the action seems there for the sake of having action. And as one character says of an incident, ‘it seems a bit of a coincidence’ … He’s right, and not just about that one.

In Mozart’s Last Aria (2011) Matt Rees sets out to explore the still unclear circumstances of Mozart’s death in Vienna in 1791. His protagonist is Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, herself a talented musician who gave up a career as a pianist to look after her father, later marrying an uninspiring Austrian bureaucrat. Was Mozart poisoned? Nannerl travels to Vienna to find out. Was it the jealous husband of one of his pupils? Or was it to do with the shadowy Masonic Brotherhood, celebrated in Mozart’s last great opera The Magic Flute? Was he part of a conspiracy against the Austrian Emperor? This was after all the height of the French Revolution. Or was he simply a great composer and artist caught up in events beyond his control? Rees, a journalist who had been reporting the conflict in Palestine, wrote the book in a break from the dangers of life in the middle-east. He is the author of, among other things, The Palestine Quartet, a series of novels about Omar Yussef, a Palestinian who gets caught up in crime; you can read my review of one of the quartet, The Saladin Murders (2008), here. In this book he has consciously shaped the structure of the story around the three movements of Mozart’s Sonata K 310, which he wrote in great distress after the death of his mother. This is an ambitious project which I’m not sure succeeds unless you know the music really well. There’s lots of references to works of Mozart in the text, and of course no way immediately after his death of identifying them other than by key signature, so I was pleased to find a listing of the mentioned works at the end giving the Kochel numbers. Listening to the music added to my enjoyment of the book, which I’m sure would please Mr Rees.

There’s a fairly recent film about Nannerl, if you’re interested – Mozart’s Sister. You can read more about Matt Rees here, Sulari Gentill here, and Michael Connelly here. Enjoy your summer reading.