HOT BLOODED
Nordic noir is passe, crime novel action moves to murder-rich developing countries
Over the past few years, Scandinavian thriller writers have acquired a cult status, despite a crime rate so low that for every real-life murder, there are a dozen or so murder mysteries. In the sweltering Indian monsoon, there’s a ludicrous exoticism to stoic and morally incorruptible heroes preventing dastardly deeds from going unpunished in ice and snow. But, murder-rich developing countries are more fertile ground for crime novels and political thrillers. Here are the three authors you should follow:
DAVID IGNATIUS BLOODMONEY
A former war correspondent and beat reporter covering the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), David Ignatius now writes a twice-weekly foreign affairs column and co-hosts an online discussion group with fellow columnist Fareed Zakaria. In Bloodmoney (2011), he brings that experience to bear on political thrillers that read curiously like journalistic non-fiction.
Bloodmoney is the story of a CIA “branch office” gone wrong. It begins with the offcamera capture and execution of one of the branch’s assets in Karachi. It then follows separate investigations into the apparent leak conducted by the off-book branch office, the CIA itself and Pakistan’s own ISI—offering a more convincing picture of the strange, threeway marriage of the CIA, ISI and frontier-zone jihadists than any newspaper account.
Urdu and Punjabi speakers will enjoy the “choice abuses”—as Indians like to say— which were supplied by Georgetown University security and terrorism expert Christine Fair. And even five years after the US-led war in Afghanistan began, it reads like it could describe machinations underway today. A film version of his latest novel, The Director (2014), is under development by producer Scott Rudin.
ROGER SMITH SACRIFICES
Racial anxieties of the sort that Oscar Pistorius used to portray the murder of his girlfriend as a tragic mistake play an important role in nearly all Roger Smith novels of contemporary South Africa. But Smith’s stories are less fear fantasies of a displaced white minority than a nihilistic scream of despair for a country falling into ruin.
In Sacrifices (2013), he portrays the breakdown of a wealthy white family after the couple’s vicious rugby player son commits a brutal murder and they frame their ‘coloured’ housekeeper’s boy for the crime. (Smith makes it clear that South Africa is no more black and white than India is Hindu and Muslim).
Nobody comes out unscathed as the weakwilled white protagonist, the dissipated Michael Lane, sleepwalks to ever-greater depths of depravity to protect his monstrous son—much as the countless affluent and supposedly liberal white South Africans he represents wilfully ignored apartheid. Once called “the crime genre’s greatest tragedian”, Smith can be so dark that South Africans sometimes find him hard to stomach. From India, the amoral cocktail of corruption, violence and squalor is disconcertingly foreign and familiar. Smith’s latest, Nowhere, was published in February.
DON WINSLOW THE POWER OF THE DOG
Don Winslow had a stellar career as the unofficial bard of the seedy side of California’s surf scene when he turned his hand to Mexico for The Power of the Dog in 2005.
Weighing in at 542 pages, it draws on real events, such as the torture and killing of undercover Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Kiki Camarena in 1985 and the allegations of CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking to finance its covert support of the contras in Nicaragua, to completely deconstruct the myth of the US war on drugs. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel (a sequel) are more literary, historical efforts, somewhat reminiscent of James Ellroy’s Los Angeles noirs.
Like Smith and Ignatius, Smith too has broader ambitions than airport-type thriller writer, flitting from California to Mexico, Nicaragua and Colombia to detail how America’s war on drugs created the cartels that have devastated the region—and turned cocaine into a multi-billion dollar business.
Ridley Scott is set to direct a film adaptation of The Cartel in the imminent future, with Leonardo di Caprio being courted for the starring role as DEA agent Art Keller.