So many of my favourite authors are dying. The latest is Robert B Parker, whose hard-hitting, poetry quoting private eye Spenser has been treading the Philip Marlowe path 
for the last forty years. You can argue that no-forename Spenser's relationship with his psychologist gf Susan is a tad icky (face it, they must both be in their seventies by now) and that Spenser's open-armed acceptance of all races and sexual persuasions (he flirts outrageously with gay gangsters) is perhaps a little too idealised liberal and comes at the expense of actual plot advancement in the later works, but there is no denying that he writes page turners. A master of the snappy comeback and the short chapter (less than 300 words in some instances in this novel) you never put a Parker down though boredom.
This one is a latter day Magnificent Seven - Spenser recruits a crew to clean out a nest of crims, bikers, and general nogoodniks who are driving down property values in the rich people's playground of Potshot, Arizona. The novel is, perhaps, twenty percent Spenser/Susan smooching, seventy percent recruitment, and tenpercent showdown, and it has plot holes that you could hide the British Government overdraft in and still have room for manouevre, but you still read to the end and get a sense of satisfaction. Parker will be missed.
Just who is capable of being redeemed, or redeeming themselves? James Lee Burke sets the question, and answers it in this one. Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell take themselves off on vacation away from it all and pretty soon find that "it all" won't stay away from them. 
Sadistic murders, a wealthy family with buried agendas, an escaped prisoner, a former Al Graihib interrogator-cum-torturer and, of course, reformed alcoholic Roicheaux and his conflicted sidekick, both capable of, and prone to, uncontrollable excesses of violence and self-indulgence.
This one puts in all the usual twists and turns, and throws in a couple of surprises too; if there is one thing JLB is capable of (and, believe me, he is capable of lot's more than just one thing) it is that he is able to show us characters who are fully three-dimensional - capable of good and bad, driven by their pasts but still able to change.
One of the great modern American writers, and sadly overlooked because his books are "just" crime fiction. There's no "just" about it. Crime fiction is a vehicle for the truth in his hands.
Never try and cover up. It's bound to come out in the end. That's the lesson that Nathan Redmond learns in the course of this efficient, tenseley written thriller by Neil Cross. 
A drug fuelled kinky encounter at a Z-list celebrity party ends very nastily, but a hasty cover-up seems to have done the trick and Nathan is able to lead a ... no - not a normal life, but an approximation of one. Until the day when his partner-in-crime turns up on the doorstep and tells him that the buried body is about to come to light.
Cross structures his story cleverly, sinking his hook deep early on and keeping the tension on throughout. Despite the dubious morality of his protagonist, Cross still manages to make the reader care about the outcome, and feel sympathy for the man trying to deal with the consequences of his earlier, more immature, actions.
Ed McBain is, by far, the best represented author on my bookshelves, both under this pen name, and as Evan Hunter. There's a reason for that. He wrote the best damn police procedurals ever. Hill Street Blues? A straight, but uncredited, nick from the 87th Precint - in fact, in one of the novels the characters complain about someone spying on them and putting them on TV without their knowledge.
He wrote over 50 novels set in the halls of the 87th Precint squadroom. Some have been made into films - Kurosawa's "High and Low" is based on an early 87th precint novel, and you don't get much better than that. There have been short lives TV shows, even a comic book, but nothing can compare to the original. McBain is witty, funny, sharp, and moving. His characters are flawed, changeable, reedemable, three-dimensional. His plots are complex, thrilling, amusing, puzzling. And he dies about five years ago. I still have the final book he wrote unopened - I can't bring myself to say a final goodbye to the characters. So, in the meantime, every now and again, I pick up one of the old ones and re-read (and re-read and re-read).
"The Mugger" is the second in the series, dating back to 1956 and, in the edition I have, wrapped in the glorious "revolver and gallows" jacket of the Mystery Book Guild.
54 years: you would think it would date badly, wouldn't you? OK there are references to WWII and Korea, and the teenagers are (almost) straight out of West Side Story, but humanity never changes, and its capacity for lust, greed are constant, and expressed now pretty mugh exactly as they were back then. A mugger stalks the streets of a thinly disguised New York, a beautiful teenage girl get murdered, a patrolman uses his spare time to solve a crime and fall in love. will you guess whodunnit? You know, I can't remember if I did the first time I read it, and I know the answer now, but when I read it I still look forward with gleeful anticipation the the moment when the penny drops. And I look forward to the pleasure of re-reading all the rest of the series and maybe, one day a long way away, I will open the final book and bid a rueful farewell to Steve Carella, Meyer meyer, and the rest of the detectives of the 87th
With some writers, you can see the author's hand all over the page. With some writers, every now and again, you get a glimpse of the author desperatley trying to be a writer and breaking the character's cover. And with some writers, you get the Fictive Dream cast so successfully that never for a moment do you realise that you are just reading a book and not actually inside some character's head. You find a writer like that, you come back time-and-time again to their work.
So how come it's taken me so long to stumble across Jack Irish, the hero of Peter Temple's Aussie crime-thriller "Dead Point"? 
Small-time lawyer, Aussie Rules obsessive, in-control potential alcoholic, betting man and man of principles, Jack Irish is a satisfyingly complex character, whose voice is totally realised in this novel. Temple can write, boy can he write. e ytakes a razor blade to the prose and cuts away every unnecessary word: dialogue is sparse and realistic, character vignettes tell you everything you need to know... dammit, let me give you an example.
"A couple walked by, young, handsome in black clothing, arguing, heads flicking, spurts of words. He stopped, she stopped, he raised a hand, inquiring. She knocked it away in contempt, walked. The man waited for a few seconds and came back towards us, jaw moving, small chewing movements."
That's what I call economy. A fully drawn picture in under fifty words. Enviable, immersing, unputdownable.
It's not easy, following the verbal shorthand in the conversations - but then again, eavesdropping on real people is never a route to instant clarity. I shall return to paul temple in future. I think this is the start of a rewarding relationship.
Prequels, authorised sequels, char(acter)-jacking, call 'em what you will, it is hard to think of the practise of taking other writers' creations and giving us "new" adventures as anything other than a semi-legitimized fan-fiction.
("Hold on a second", says the voice of the subconscious,"what about, say, Superman? Where would old Supes be today if only Siegel and Schuster were allowed to write him?". I give my subconscious a playful slap and tell it to mind its own business).
So it was with some nervousness that I approached "The prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon". I love the original - the pace, the characterisation, the language, the writing. I didn't think that this would measure up, and it doesn't - but only by a barrel of a very snub-nosed automatic.
Gores draws heavily on the imagery in the Bogart movie (which in turn was very closely adapted from the novel) to tell us the story of Sam Spade's first few years as an independent investigation agency. The plot is long, connects the dots nicely, and watches Spade stumble across a gold smuggling racket that will touch on his career for the next few years.
We get the skinny on his relationship with Iva Archer, semi-legitimising the philandering which makes him such an ambiguous figure at the opening of Falcon. And yes, Iva is there, along with Miles Archer, just as unpleasant as we thought he might be, Effie Perrine (fresh out of college but already a dab-hand at rolling a cigarette), and the two flatfoots, Dundy and Polhaus.
Although it is all very satisfying, and there is a kind of pleasure in seeing Spade move towards the moment when Effie Perine tells him that Miss Wonderley is waiting to see him, I am still left with one doubt; if Dashiell Hammett had wanted us to see Sam and the rest before the events of teh Maltese Flacon - well, wouldn't he have written it himself?
Black Friday is the first shopping day after Thanksgiving; a day of deep discounting, huge crowds, and, in this efficient police-tec thriller, an opportunity for a terrorist-style suicide bomb attack on a crowded shopping mall. 
The characters never really seem to come to life in this one. Too many of them crowd the pages, and there is at least one too many coincidence. Nonetheless, there's enough there to keep you turning the pages to the end, and to tempt another venture into the world of Maggie O'Dell.
I never knew that teenage fiction was quite as strong as this. I picked it up by accident (it was on the "New Books" shelf at the library) and the opening paragraphs hooked me before I realised that its target market was about a quarter of my age.
The book tackles important themes; bullying, loneliness, homophobia, tolerance, learning trust, and parallels its contemporary plot with another set in a fantasy land created by the lead characters.There is just a tiny echo of some of the works of Alan Garner - anyone who remembers "The Owl Service" will agree that cross-over didn't start with Philip Pullman and JK Rowling. "The Traitor Game" is intelligent, honest and worthwhile without being worthy, and the book is only occasionally let down by the fact that its author(ess) has never been a teenage boy so gets a few notes just a tiny bit off key. This shouldn't be sufficient to put anyone off reading it however; even someone as old as me can appreciate both the craft and the caring that has gone into writing it.
A debut novelist with a pacily written Brit-tec policer. A woman in charge, this time, and one with the usual burden of 'issues', but a 'tec without issues would be a bland old affair - even Gran'dad Sherlock had his 'habit'. Happily, instead of a too-close relationship with the bottle and a fondness for some genre music (the regular betokeners of individuality), this one lacks both self-confidence and a regular partner. Initially a little top-heavy with the supporting cast, but the pace accelerates and, as it does so, the main characters come into sharper focus. Plenty of action, and Ms. Russell is adept at turning the plot into unexpected side streets. This one will grow into a series, and don't be surprised to see it on TV one day in the future. 
