AROUND THE WORLD
Across borders, history and genres, crime pays off. For readers, anyway
Pascal Garnier. He’s French, he’s dead, and he wrote some of the best little crime novels of the past 30 years. The ones I’ve read have been of the Simenon school: psychological dissections of characters, well under 150 pages each. Unlike Georges Simenon, Garnier, especially when he gets violent, tends more toward a surreal, black vision that breaks with reality. He makes his characters subtly crazy enough for readers to follow along without complaint.
The A26 (Gallic Books, 100 pp, $15.99) is the latest in Gallic Books’ translations of Garnier’s work. Melanie Florence does an excellent job of Englishing his prose, which contains both flat, hostile conversations and rich descriptive passages. Garnier is equally willing to turn his eye on a hoarder’s home, a rat-gnawed corpse, or the under-construction highway of the title, where protagonist Bernard begins murdering people and hiding their bodies.
Bernard lives with his sister, Yolande, in the home that she hasn’t left since the Second World War, after she was publicly shamed for having an affair with a German soldier. Her disagreeable relationship with the outside world began long before that, though — she even thinks she can recall being disgusted by the “sloppy coochie-coos” of gigantic adults, “stinking of beer and cheap perfume” as they leaned over her cradle. Yolande has become a grand hoarder of food, magazines, everything, as well as an amateur clothing-designer, stitching different articles of clothing together, asking her brother if she can use his jacket when his terminal illness overwhelms him.
Eventually, Bernard begins to see the murders that he thinks of committing but doesn’t go through with as being essentially no different from the ones that he did commit, and Garnier allows fate to agree with him, when Bernard finds himself witness to a bizarre accident.
No one gets a very happy ending in The A26, but it’s a grim and oddly funny entertainment for readers. Pick this one up, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve experienced the pleasure of reading a really thin book, consumed in a few commutes.
William Deverell’s Sing a Worried Song (ECW Press, 336 pp, $24.95) is about the murder of a clown. While those who fear and hate clowns believe that this is no crime at all, Deverell and his series character, lawyer Arthur Beauchamp, are quick to establish the corpse as a real and troubled person. Joe Chumpy was a gentle Vancouver Downtown Eastside busker, stabbed several times in his apartment in what appears to be a pointless thrill murder by a visiting Toronto rich kid. The killing could also have been the work of one of the gay prostitutes that Chumpy sometimes hired, but what little evidence and valid testimony there is seem to point to the out-of-town boy.
The book opens at the 1987 trial of the killer, Randolph Skyler — an excellent sinister rich kid name. Deverell’s two kinds of pro at once: an extremely experienced lawyer and a longtime writer of crime fiction, he makes the courtroom scenes lively and realistic, animating the proceedings with details of personality conflicts and Arthur Beauchamp’s shaky hold on his sobriety.
The second half of the novel takes us out of the courtroom and 25 years further on in time, with the retired Arthur Beauchamp leading a much more pleasant life on Garibaldi Island in 2012. The sense of unfinished business from the trial hasn’t faded, and one of the major players from the events of 1987 is threatening to make a reappearance in the most unpleasant of ways.
Deverell writes the first section in the past tense and the second section in the present tense, a neat division that works quite well. Leaving the courtroom also allows each half of the book to be in a slightly different sub-genre, making Sing a Worried Song entertaining in a couple different registers. The occasional straight sex scenes are unintentionally funny, but they’re brief, and hey, those things are really hard to write.
Caterina Edwards’s The Sicilian Wife (Linda Leith Publishing, 354 pp, $19.95) is another intriguing genre-mixer. The tone is firmly noir, but this mafia thriller devotes a significant number of pages to the main character’s childhood and adolescence in 1960s Sicily. Fulvia is the daughter of a Mafioso, and her early life is a long house arrest. Part of this novel is an immigrant story where escape is more important than nostalgia, in which characters avoid the past instead of longing for it.
As the investigative angle begins with a corpse discovery in 1989 Italy, Chief Marisa de Luca tries to do her job while encountering daily, casual discrimination from the male cops around her. She has to deal with this condescension despite having made her bones in a long undercover operation that brought down key Mafioso and garnered her copious negative attention from the mobsters she hasn’t yet imprisoned.
The Canadian connection is introduced gradually. Mafia daughter Fulvia is revealed to have made her escape, and settled in Edmonton. Sicily beckons her back violently when her husband is killed and torched there, left to be identified by his bridgework. De Luca’s investigation and her own obligations to the living and the dead force Fulvia to face her past again, and to acknowledge that her ultimate attempt to escape could never completely succeed.
The novel is ambitious, flitting between different timelines and allowing the story of Fulvia’s past to inform and enrich de Luca’s investigation. For the most part, these different threads are well-balanced, making The Sicilian Wife a crime novel with a real depth of character and place.