3/18/24

The Narrows: Why Did I Wait So Long?

 

 

 

 

 

The Narrows (2004)

By Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company, 405 pages

★★★★★

 

Back in 1996, Michael Connelly hit his stride with his fifth novel, the award-winning thriller The Poet. It brought together two characters from other books, LA homicide detective Harry Bosch and FBI agent Rachel Walling to investigate a cluster of homicide detective suicides. Why? Because cops aren’t generally susceptible to the sort of copycat patterns of hormonal teens. Crime reporter Jack McEnvoy suspects murder and one-line “suicide” notes  from Edgar Allan Poe confirm that a serial killer nicknamed The Poet is at large. As things unfurled, a finger pointed back to FBI  superstar Robert Backus, who went over to the dark side. The book ended with Rachel pushing Robert out a window and down a steep embankment. Later a body was discovered that was said to be Backus.

 

There are other plotlines in The Poet that make it worth reading, but its ending practically screams out for a sequel. The Narrows is that book. I’ve no idea why I waited so long to read it but now that I have, I’d rank it above The Poet. In intervening novel time, Harry has retired from the LAPD after a procedural squabble. Now he does some occasional PI work. Graciela, the wife of his friend Terry McCaleb, an ex-FBI agent, asks Harry to look into his recent death. Terry was heart transplant recipient whose death appears to be a routine medication mix-up. Graciela isn’t convinced, and neither is Harry when he searches Terry’s boat. Terry has been looking into “cold cases,” including files suggestive of Backus’ MO.  

 

The FBI knows that Backus is back. Cherie Dei, from FBI HQ at Quantico recalls Rachel from a post in South Dakota, where she has been exiled for various reasons: having been Backus’ mentee, a crime involving her ex-husband, an FBI agent killed during his arrest, having an affair with McEnvoy while investigating The  Poet, and insubordination. Dei makes clear, though, that Rachel’s role is strictly advisory. Rachel finds this maddening. She truly does have authority issues, but she knows Backus better than anyone and suspects he will have altered his appearance. (Hey, it’s not just actors who get new faces!)

 

As crime novels go, The Narrows is considerably more gruesome than most. Backus has left calling cards and enjoys toying with the FBI. He literally wrote the investigative procedures the FBI uses and trained several of its top agents. He is thus several steps ahead of everyone else and, though he is a psychopath, he’s as brilliant as he is bold. His murders are so perversely cruel that it would be safe to say that the only difference between him and Hannibal Lecter is that Backus doesn’t eat his victims’ livers with fava beans. You can also bet that he takes pleasure in pulling Rachel’s strings, though Connelly wisely leaves open questions of whether he admires her or has a predetermined grisly fate in mind for her.

 

Harry and Rachel work along parallel lines until their paths cross and converge–in more ways than one. Backus will lead them on a follow-the-crumbs trail that takes Bosch to a California island and then he and Rachel to a spot in the Mojave called Zzyzx, Los Vegas, low-rent brothels in Nevada, dots in the desert on their way to becoming ghost towns, and back to Los Angeles.

 

The title refers to a canyon wash that empties into the Los Angeles River, either . Contrary to what most Easterners think, though 95% of the LA River lies in concrete, during heavy rains and spring run-off it is a raging stream that can be 25-35 feet deep. The Narrows is either the Alios or Brown Canyon Wash. It is there that the novel’s heart-pounding denouement takes place.

 

It’s a terrific thriller, even when it strays into expected places. Connelly’s law enforcement characters have attitude and stubbornness, but he prefers suspense and tension to wisecracking PIs. He leavens The Narrows with occasional humor, but of the variety that induces a wan smile rather than ripostes you’re tempted to add to your own repertoire. Instead of a notebook, you might wish to keep a blood pressure cuff nearby. I’d call The Narrows a good vacation read, except you’ll be afraid to turn off the lights.

 

Rob Weir

3/15/24

I Am a Noise Not a Conventional Music Documentary

 

 


 

Joan Baez: I  Am a Noise (2023)

Directed by: Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor

Magnolia, 113 minutes, not-rated.

★★★ ½

 

Although she was one of my favorite interviews, I have mixed feelings about Joan Baez: I Am a Noise. Some reviewers have called it a nostalgia trip, but that’s inaccurate. It’s a look into Baez’s psyche that reveals things that few of her fans knew about, including her long struggle with depression.

 

Baez (b. 1941) is the middle of three daughters born to Albert (1912-2007) and Joan Baez, Senior (1913-2013): Pauline (1938-2016), Joanie, and Margarita (1945-2001), best remembered under her married name, Mimi Fariña. Joan had dark thoughts mixed with joy from an early age, partly because she experienced prejudice due to her mixed heritage–her father was Mexican and her mother white–and because Albert, a physicist, worked for UNESCO and the family moved a lot.

 

Here’s where things get very murky and the documentary could be sharper in clarifying. It’s tempting to suspect that Joan was bipolar, but that term never appears in the film. Was there family trauma? Mimi alleged that Albert inappropriately kissed her, which both he and his wife vigorously denied and which bears hallmarks of a therapist’s “planted” memory. The film settles for an explanation of mutual family hurts, but of what family is that not true?  

 

What emerges is that Joan had swings of amazing creativity–in drawing, poetry, and journaling as well as music. Much of this is told via home movies and tapes from family members and from Joanie’s guided imagery/meditation therapy sessions. Again, it’s hard to know to make of this. Even the documentary title is mired in ambiguity. It is a quote from Joanie in which she insists she’s a noise, not a saint. Ahh, but what a noise.

 

What we know for certain is that she played ukulele as a child, saw Pete Seeger when she was 13, and bought her first guitar in 1957. What happened next would confuse saint and sinner alike. In 1958, she played her first gig at Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts–Albert got a job at M.I.T.–and was soon playing there twice a week singing a repertoire of Child ballads and songs inspired by Seeger, Marion Anderson, and Odetta. In 1959, Baez appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and an instant star was born. She was dubbed the “barefoot Madonna,” made the cover of Time, had three gold albums, and was the hottest ticket in “the folk revival.” Baez admitted to once having had a female lover, but the one that changed her dramatically occurred when a scruffy songwriter appeared in her life: Bob Dylan. She caught him in his protest phase and they were an item from 1961-65.

 

Baez grew up in a pacifist Quaker household, but Dylan was part of her move into social justice movements–until he wasn’t. There has long been a vampiric aspect to Dylan and he drifted away from Baez and social causes about the time Baez did a deep dive–civil rights, the peace movement, environmentalism…. She befriended Harry Belafonte, marched with Dr. King, married draft resister David Harris with whom she had her son Gabriel, and was soon as well-known for outspoken activism as for her glorious voice. Those on the right lampooned her as “Phony Joanie.” She told me that they hated her because she wasn’t phony like them. Yep!

 

Things grew cloudy again when the Vietnam War ended. She was part of the drug-fueled Rolling Thunder tour of 1975-75, dabbled in now-embarrassing disco-laced pop, and was creatively and personally adrift for a time. She told me that a key moment back occurred when she sang in Czechoslovakia and knew from her reception that the Iron Curtain would soon fall.

 

I Am a Noise has musical clips, but it’s not a music documentary. It’s more a confessional and how she found inner peace, dealt with the pain of losing her brother-in-law, rivalry with Mimi, estrangement from Gabriel, Mimi’s death, that of her parents, and retirement. I’m no psychologist, but I’d hazard that much of what happened to Joan Baez is that she never got the chance to work out her childhood blues before stardom claimed her incomplete self. I couldn’t be happier that she now feels centered. A confession: I was never a huge fan of her vibrato-heavy soprano. My fondness runs for alto voices, but whatever one prefers, she has never been a Phony Joanie!

 

Rob Weir  

3/13/24

A New Altan Record For St. Paddy's Day

 

 

 


Altan

Donegal

 

What could be better for St. Patrick’s Day than a new Altan album? And what could be more appropriate than one named Donegal, the Ulster County from which the band hails and which has produced some of the finest music in the Emerald Isle?

 

The usual formula for an Altan album is a “big set” of raucous tunes followed by a Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh song. (For the non-Irish speaker, that’s roughly, Mah rayad’ nah weenie, the Irish equivalent of Margaret Mooney). She has been both one of Ireland’s finest singers and fiddlers for nearly 40 years. Donegal instrumentals can often be differentiated from others in Ireland by the use of two fiddles instead of one. Within Altan, the literal second fiddle is usually Ciarán Currain, who is also the band’s bouzouki player, though sometimes young fiddle whiz Clare Friel does that duty. That’s much the same way that it depends on schedules whether Mark Kelly or Dáithí Sproule is the guitarist. Martin Tourish mans the squeeze boxes.  

 

Notice I said “usual formula. Donegal opens with “TheYellow Tinker,” which was also on the band’s The Red Crow (1990). It’s a reel, but in 1990 it was played fast but on Donegal it’s an unhurried slow reel. Don’t write it off as getting older. “The Donegal Selection” contains three fast reels that are joyous and chase their own tail as only reels can do. The middle one is titled “Tommy Peoples” and pays homage to the great Donegal fiddler (1948-2018) of that name.

 

In many ways, though, Altan seeks a different vibe on Donegal. Just about the time I went into mourning for the retirement of Clannad, Altan has caught much of their vibe. That’s no accident; Clannad was also a Donegal band and Ní Mhaonaigh is pals with Clannad’s Moya Brennan, whose vocal style is similar, as well as Moya’s younger sister Enya. “Faoiseamb a Gheobhasda” has a discernible Clannad feel in its delicacy, its moody interludes, and swelling instrumental meshes. These dovetail beautifully with Ní Mhaonaigh’s bird-like vocals.

 

What’s an Irish album without a set of jigs? Tunes beginning with “Port Arainn Mhór” fit that bill, but to return to an earlier point, they are lively but with a lighter touch than burn-down-the-hall big sets that bring the noise. Close your eyes and you could imagine  Ní Mhaonaigh and Brennan sharing leads on “The Barley and the Rye.” It’s as if Altan is inviting us to feel and dream rather than dance and shout.

 

There are exceptions to this. The fiddling on “Gabhaim Molta Bride” is melancholic with a tinge of Roma tears and a perfect example of why Ní Mhaonaigh is so revered in Irish music. And yes, Altan will make you jump up and kick your heels on the four-reel “Letterkenny Blacksmith combo. What a delight that after 15 studio recordings, numerous compilations, and a live album that Altan still has tricks up its collective sleeve.

 

Rob Weir  

 

Hear Maired and Moya  share a song here. 


Altan in truncated band for TV. Mairead goes to town.

3/11/24

The Holdover a Pleasant Film, but not Oscar Worthy

 


 

The Holdovers (2023)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Focus Features, 133 minutes, R (F-bombs, drug use, drinking, and “nudity”)

★★★

 

The Holdovers is a feel-good film. It has been compared to It’s a Wonderful Life for it fairy tale transformations and its message that virtue trumps material success. Let me be upfront about it. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, even though it’s about a teacher. I jotted down my ten favorite teacher movies–from Conrack and Dead Poets Society to Stand and Deliver and Whiplash–and nothing about The Holdovers tempted me to alter my list.

 

It follows classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) from the final days of the 1970 fall semester to the end of Christmas break. Hunham is old school, the sort whose C- is the equivalent of an A- from anyone else. He’s grumpy, stern, exudes a strange body odor, has a lazy eye, and is absolutely intractable about his standards. Hunham once went to Barton and he has ideas about what a “Barton man” should be, hence he’s  just flunked the son of a U.S. Senator and major donor. Barton is a prestigious New England private school–fictional though much of it was filmed at Northfield Mt. Hermon and Deerfield academies–but times have changed and Hunham has not. He especially has it out for students Teddy Koutnze, a rich airheaded punk, and Dominic Sessa (Angus Tully), who is bright, but also arrogant and disrespectful.

 

As a not-so-veiled put-down, Headmaster Hardy Woodrup, a horse’s patootie, sticks Hunham with “holdover” duty; that is, supervision of students who have nowhere to go during the break. At the last minute, Tully becomes one of them and is not at all happy that Hunham expects them to study during the break. The campus is fairly remote, the town has limited options for a teen such as Tully–Shelburne Falls is the stand-in–and students young and old feel like prisoners. One by one the students get reprieves until just one is left: Tully. That leaves him, Hunham, Joy , campus cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Randolph), and African American janitor Danny.  

 

One reviewer called The Holdovers “diagrammatic,” meaning its plot draws on a host of clichés, devices, and pieces of other films that define the hard teacher with secrets/young man in need of growing up genre. That strikes me as fair commentary. In other words, director Alexander Payne opted to play things safe. The chaotic 1970s, for instance, make little more than a drive-by appearance beyond Mary’s loss of her son in the Vietnam War. You can tick off the film’s sugarcoated situations: teen rebellion, reluctant bonding between Hunham and Tully, Hunham as mentor, revelations of why teacher and student are socially gauche, psychological growth, and full-scale borrowing from the 1939 classic Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

 

If it sounds like I’m being Hunham-hard on the film it’s because it was predictable, but could have been much more. The problems lie with David Hemingson’s script not with its top-flight acting. Paul Giamatti is a vastly underrated actor and has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for The Holdovers. The film is also up for Best Picture, Hemingson for Best Original Screenplay, and Ms. Randolph is the odds-on favorite to win for Best Supporting Actress. It would be a shame, though, if any of them won. To put it bluntly, The Holdovers lacks enough gravitas to be feted. (Odds are certainly against it as Best Picture, as Payne wasn’t nominated for Best Director. It happens, but it’s rare a film wins but its director isn’t up for an award.)

 

The very R rating of The Holdovers seems a contrivance to give it more heft than it has. It rests on a torrent of F-bombs, drug use (pot and lithium–what next, Ibuprofen?), and “nudity,” an ancient Greek vase and an over-the shoulder peek inside a “skin” magazine. Dear MPAA: F-bombs are as common as lottery tickets, pot is legal most places, lithium is a prescription drug, and the statute of limitations for ancient Greek nudity passed 3,000 years ago.

 

The Holdovers is a perfectly good little movie that will give most viewers a case of the warm fuzzies, its semi-sad ending notwithstanding. Enjoy it for what it is: a decent night on the sofa that won’t tax your brain very much. I hope that someday Paul Giamatti lands a role that will yield an Oscar. But not for The Holdovers.

 

Rob Weir

3/8/24

Ordet: An Unusal Film

 


 

 

Ordet (1955, 1957 in North America)

Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer A/S, 120 minutes, not rated.

In Danish with subtitles

★★★ ½

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer (1888-1968) is considered one of the greatest directors of all time. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in a theater. Likewise, Ordet has been cited by Britain’s Sight & Sound as among the top 20 films in cinema history, an assessment shared by those who awarded it a Golden Lion in Venice in 1955. I rate it lower because it takes a certain kind of viewer to appreciate it.

 

Ordet is based upon a 1932 play by Kaj Munk, a Lutheran pastor martyred during World War II. Religion is at the center of Ordet, which takes place in Denmark during 1925. The widower Morten Borgen is a prosperous farmer and the father of three sons. In his mind, though, his greatest achievement was bringing faith to what had hitherto been the darkness of Jutland. His brand of Lutheranism is stern, but joyful. His eldest son Mikkel has lost his faith, though he is married to the ebullient and very pregnant Inger. Part of Mikkel’s faith crisis is that Inger has given him two daughters, but no son.

 

To make that sound less outrageous, farm families depended upon male heirs to keep even rich farms going. The youngest son Anders is unmarried and, though he’d like to wed Anne Petersen, neither father will agree to the match. Her father,  Peter (Enjer Federspiel)* belongs to the Inner Mission sect, a very austere and sin-focused form of Lutheranism. He and Morten see each other as apostates.

 

To say that the middle son Johannes (is unlikely to produce an heir is an understatement. He was once a promising student, but studied Søren Kierkegaard so intensely that he underwent an unusual conversion; he believes that he is Jesus Christ, preaches atop empty hillsides, and drives other male Borgens crazy. Most of the villagers would attest he is crazy. A word: Kierkegaard is among the most difficult philosophers to study. He was an existentialist who believed in free will. Existentialism is sometimes called living like a saint without God, but Kierkegaard was a mystic who emphasized Christian love and believed that God could only be intuited. What, exactly, that means has baffled many. Morten blames Kierkegaard for Johannes’ troubled mind. Now you know why I said not every viewer will relate to Ordet.

 

Johannes–Latin for John­–plays another role. “Ordet” is Danish for “The Word.” The New Testament Gospel of John opens: “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” There is a new pastor in the village who thinks Johannes is mentally ill, as does the local doctor. Though the first is a believer and the latter a man of science, each agrees that the age of miracles is over. I will say no more about what happens other than it will challenge whatever you think or believe.

 

Here's how I unpack the characters, though I know little of Kaj Munk mine might not have been his intention. I’m pretty sure that Morten and Peter symbolize that theological debates are dead ends when they depart from the essence of faith and when, in Kierkegaardian terms, they seek to “prove” the unknowable. The doctor, pastor, and Mikkel seem to represent materialists who doubt anything they cannot observe. Johannes is tougher, but I think Munk and Dreyer are playing off the age-old question of whether anyone would recognize a messiah if one appeared amidst them.

 

I’m on safer ground in saying that the black and white cinematography of Henning Bendtsen is stunning, especially his empty expanses, grey skies, and grasses blown by seaside breezes, though all of Bendtsen’s camera work enhances moments of moodiness, melancholia, and astonishment. Dreyer used long takes and Bendtsen made each look like a painting. I should note that the acting is more mannered, expressionistic, and poetic than realistic. Was this was deliberate, stylistic, or because Dreyer first made films in the gesticulating silent era?** Add it to the list of mysteries. Ordet is better contemplated than explained.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

* You will not know the actors. I mention Federspeil because he too was a Danish film director.

** Thanks to friends Chris, Ian, and Kiki for those thoughts.

3/6/24

On View at Mt. Holyoke and Amherst College




 

Lewis Hine

 

The Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts has numerous colleges and universities with art museums. As befits educational institutions, many of the exhibits change–for good or ill.

 

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum is celebrating its 150th anniversary through May 25 with an exhibit titled Relaunch Laboratory. It showcases work that challenges old conventions. As you’ve probably noticed, Eurocentrism and colonialism have come under critical scrutiny, as have elitist perspectives on “fine” art. This includes both creative people in the West who find beauty in street perspectives and those from non-Western cultures whose work collapses outmoded ideas that anything “functional” is, at best, craft. 

 

Berenice Abbott
 

Thomas Hart Benton

 

Mt. Holyoke was ahead of the curve in collecting photography and recognizing how it tells otherwise forgotten tales. One such shutterbug was Lewis Hine, who fancied himself a reformer with a camera. His shot of a shirtless worker inside Holyoke’s Paragon Rubber Company is dynamic, but gritty. You can almost feel the heat and smell the raw rubber and well-worn machines. You can also imagine how many generations of young men toiled just like the central figure. Likewise, there’s nothing intrinsically beautiful about a hardware story captured by the lens of Berenice Abbott in 1938. Yet somehow it’s hard to look away from this potpourri of plebeian utilitarianism. Work is celebrated on heroic scale by a 1930s work by muralist Thomas Hart Benton. You might notice that some are working and some are “supervising” or that figures on the right seem imperiled. 

 

Ismael Randall Weeks



 

Dancing Ganesha

 

Peruvian artist Ishmael Randall Weeks challenges how we see in a work titled Código atemporal, which means “timeless code.” At first it’s little more than brick dust, cement, dirt, and black quartz placed upon a beige background. Yet it too invites you to look at its arrangement and imagine those whose hands touched the materials. Form meets function in a dance mask from Sierra Leone created in the 20th century to evoke older rituals. Speaking of which, how about the timelessness of Ganesha who is still revered in both Hinduism and Buddhism. This one dates from either the 9th or 10th century. If you carefully on the bottom right you’ll see a mouse under Ganesha’s foot. Mice represent the need to control ego. Maybe we should send a box of them to Congress! 

 

El Anasui





Vanesa German

 

I was enthralled by Bird from Ghana’s El Anasui because it is made of wood and he is an artist I associate with giant metal “curtains” made from discarded liquor bottle bands. I was also taken by a work from African American sculptor Vanesa German. Her The Father Shoe has nails and shimmery metal, each with wings. One for is for coming and other for going. 

 

Charmion von Wiegand

 Charmion von Wiegand asks a question we should always consider. Her 1957 work titled 42nd Street New York City is lines and color blocks. Do we need anything else to evoke a bird’s eye view of a city throughway?

 

 

I wish I felt as charitable about work currently on view at the Mead Art Gallery of Amherst College. The most interesting thing you can there at present are galleries being readied for an exhibit of global indigenous peoples.

 

Current exhibitions titled Trópico es Politico: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime and Like a Slow Walk with Trees: Alicia Grullón evoke adjectives such as obvious, preachy, and boring. 

 


 The first has juxtapositions of how people live in places such as Panama and various Caribbean islands versus visitor pitches. Footage of tourist advertisements are of pristine playgrounds inhabited by rich jetsetters–casinos, white beaches, golf courses…. As you know, that’s not how it is on the ground. Key phrase: As you know. It’s the kind of thing used to drive home the built-in imbalances of colonialism and then move on to discussion. Instead of driving home, the exhibit takes backroads and ends up where it started.

 

This is even more blatant and dull in Like a Slow Walk with Trees. Thesis: Trees are good, people are bad. In case you don’t get that, cosplay figures hold up signs or pose with props that tell you what you are supposed to conclude.

 

Agitprop art delivers messages, but the most effective invites dialogue rather than delivering a sermon. Once dogma enters the scene, dialogue dies and we are left with just two options: acknowledge our sins or walk away. The latter is unfortunate but the first is a dead end. Forced conversions seldom work. Add unproductive to the list of adjectives for these exhibits.

 

Rob Weir

 

3/4/24

Try This Older Peter May Mystery

 


 

 

The Man With No Face (1981/2019)

By Peter May

Quercus, 406 pages

★★★

 

I quite enjoy the thrillers and mysteries from Scottish novelist Peter May. The Man With No Face was an early effort that was reprinted after May gained renown as a British television writer, took the dosh, and then returned to fulltime writing. His Lewis trilogy is a personal favorite. The Man With No Face isn’t up to that standard, but it’s still a good read.

 

The centerpiece of this murder mystery is Neil Bannerman, a journalist with the Edinburgh Post. Bannerman is a fine reporter, but he’s also jaded, tart of tongue, and all-round pain in the keister. Not surprisingly, he lives alone. He is especially cynical of Tait, an editor who is really a cost-cutting hatchet man. Tait would love to get rid of Bannerman, but he’s too good to dump without a really good reason.

 

Instead, Tait packs Bannerman off to Brussels to cover a big EEC (European Economic Community) conference which, for an investigative reporter like Bannerman, is akin being assigned to covering local school board meetings. He encounters a group of smug embedded reporters who turn in stories that differ little from press releases and are content to treat their gravy gig as if they are at Club Med on an expense account. It takes Bannerman less than a day to offend virtually every reporter in Brussels. That includes his contact Tim Slater in whose apartment he is staying.

 

Slater is in tight with British Cabinet minister Robert Gryffe. Bannerman doesn’t care for him much either, but things get much more interesting when both Slater and Gryffe are found dead in the latter’s townhouse. Local police investigate and conclude the two shot each other during a quarrel. You don’t have to be as dogged as Bannerman to doubt that conclusion. As it transpires, there was a hidden witness to the dual slayings, Gryffe’s severely autistic young daughter Tania. She doesn’t speak, but she’s a precocious artist who drew the incident. The problem with her sketch is that the man who isn’t one of the victims has no discernible face.

 

Bannerman’s investigations will take him down several unexpected paths, not the least of which is that Tania seems at ease with Neil, whereas she goes into a shell or screams when she is in the company of anyone of than her (now-dead) father and her nanny/caregiver Sally. About Sally, how is it that a confirmed misanthrope like Neil finds himself increasingly attracted to her or feeling protective of Tania? At least he can exercise his bile toward Platt, once a promising reporter but now a loser who holds his tongue to scrounge background assignments from other derisive reporters.

 

A lot happens, not the least of which is that an amoral assassin named Kale would like to plant both Neil and Tania. But for whom is he a contract killer? That involves following leads that might yield Bannerman a major scoop. Every crumb he follows yields another layer of complexity. He comes to expect that a reclusive but respected Swiss entrepreneur René Jansen is too good to be true. Eventually he will enter a world of deadly and dirty politics in which even the men in shadows have an overlord.

 

Okay, so maybe we too jaded these days to be shocked by the idea that power, politics, and crime might be linked, but by having a lot of threads in need of being tied together, May’s 1981 plot holds up well. I’ll leave it to you to decide how well the twists involving Kale and Tania ring true. Younger readers will just have to trust me when I say that once upon a time there really were crusading journalists who wrote for pulped products called newspapers. Oh wait, was that cynical?

 

Rob Weir