Ice vs. Heat

Earlier this week, I was stunned when my fellow Material Witnesses began making lists for our upcoming summer books post on June 28th. Is it summer time already? My kids are out of school, but it's still hard to believe when the weather has been zigzagging between hot and cold. I've been pulling sweaters on and off and switching from hot chocolate to iced tea accordingly. But the decision to apply heat or ice can be trickier than that. Take the debate between applying a cold pack or a heating pad to a sports injury. And how do you pick a book when the thermometer ranges from 95° to 55°? A book like Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (the title's got that right) raises your temperature by making your heart pound, but also gives you goosebumps that chill. A better bet might be one of these two books:

When Beluga narrator Nick Reid tells himself out loud, "I'm not having the week I'd hoped to have," he hasn't seen the half of it. He and his ginormous best friend, Desmond, were "taking time off" after robbing a meth lord of $300,000 in Rick Gavin's first series book, Ranchero (reviewed here). To keep up appearances, Nick and Desmond have returned to repossessing rent-to-own furniture when Kalil's customers, many of whom live in the type of houses where dogs boil out from under the porch and a shotgun pokes out of a window, don't make their payments.

Therefore, life could be pretty routine in Indianola, Mississippi but for the fact that Desmond's ex-wife Shawnica still has him in her clutches. Her shiftless brother Larry, fresh out of Parchman Prison, wants Desmond to lend him money for a criminal scheme. A hidden trailer-load of already-stolen Michelin tires is just waiting for Larry and his friend Skeeter to steal and sell on the black market––but they need money to buy a truck. Desmond's $30,000 buys not only transportation, but also the terrible vengeance of the man who originally stole the tires, a well-connected Mississippi Delta crime lord, Lucas Shambrough. Between helping Desmond deal with that god-awful sniveling Larry, Shambrough's deadly "ninja schoolgirl assassin" and his dumber-than-two-sacks-of-hair hired cracker villains, it's a wonder Nick has time to court pretty Greenville cop Tula Raintree, although it is convenient that their first "date" happens when she's placed Nick under arrest.

Author Rick Gavin, who lives in the Delta and writes when he isn't doing construction work, combines the charm of appealing characters with insightful observations of Delta residents and traditions. The dialogue is pitch perfect. Watching Nick, a former Virginia deputy sheriff, scuff up no-goods, and Desmond squeeze relish onto his Sonic drive-in hot dogs goes well with ice tinkling in a glass of lemonade and the drone of a ceiling fan. This entertaining Mississippi Delta noir, both gritty and funny, is perfect for hot days of summer reading.

On the other hand, Richard Crompton's 2013 debut, Hour of the Red God, is a great pick when it gets chilly. It's a book set in Nairobi, Kenya, "a landscape of corrugated iron, concrete, and thatched makuti roofs."

The title is the English translation of Enkai Nanyokie, the Maasai tribe's name for the time when people turn against each other in anger and madness descends. In his criminal investigations and the loss of his wife, Detective Sergeant Mollel is much more familiar with the vengeful and capricious Red God than the loving Black God.

Mollel is a conscientious man who never seems to feel at home, even with his young son. He has long and looped ears that are a mark of pride among the Maasai but an object of ridicule and prejudice elsewhere. His boss, Otieno, has brought him back from traffic duty in Loresho to Nairobi Central CID. The mutilated body of a young Maasai woman has been found in Uhuru Park and Otieno expects Mollel to solve what he calls "a Maasai circumcision ceremony gone wrong."  Mollel disagrees. He says it's deliberate murder.

He and his colleague Kiunga, a Kikuyu, investigate against the backdrop of the 2007 election, with its ethnic violence and the involvement of mungiki gangs and the government's paramilitary General Services Unit. Evidence leads the two policemen to Orpheus House, a recently closed refuge for women who wish to leave prostitution, and to powerful political and religious leaders.

Former BBC journalist and Nairobi resident Crompton's book is nothing short of stunning. His prose, with a lack of quotation marks, takes some getting used to, but it fits this complex story about crime set in an exotic Nairobi. Mollel reminisces about his tribal childhood and shares various Maasai myths. Even in the city center, Mollel doesn't escape tradition. At night, there are rumors of night runners with supernatural speed and strength who, when killed return, to their forms as normal humans. The stories about scavengers that Mollel's mother told him influence how he solves a crime. Crompton's characters are caught between modernity and traditionalism. How does tribal identity survive in a changing world?

Change You Can Count On

I love the end of the year. It's a time of looking back and remembering. A time of looking forward and planning. My own immediate plan includes listing resolutions for the New Year. Stop procrastinating, learn Italian, improve my cooking, reorganize the basement. Right now, change for me is only a list on a piece of paper. Changes for characters in two books I've recently read result from crime. Other changes these characters face are cultural shifts and relocation.

As Arne Dahl's 2011 book, Misterioso, begins, two Swedish industrial titans are killed. We readers know that the murderer likes to work to the accompaniment of music. Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin doesn't know this but crime scene similarities make him suspect a serial killer. Hultin, of Stockholm's National Criminal Police, learned lessons from the unsuccessful investigation of Olof Palme's assassination. This investigation will be conducted by an A-Unit of highly skilled young cops gathered from all over Sweden. They include "a pale Finn, a blackhead [a Swede of Spanish ancestry], a west coaster, a fifth columnist, a Goliath meat mountain, and a media hero."

The media hero is Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm, who resolved a hostage situation at a Huddinge immigration office by wounding the Albanian hostage taker. Unfortunately, Hjelm isn't a hero to his lonely wife or to the internal affairs officers investigating the shooting. The IA officers ask him to look into his heart and answer questions about why he broke the rules. When he joins the A-Unit, Hjelm is feeling empty and estranged from his family and society. Sweden is changing. Today's crimes don't happen in an Agatha Christie world but in a day of "postindustrial capitalism, Eastern European mafia, and the collapse of Sweden's financial regulatory system in the 1990s." Hjelm and his new colleagues clash as they probe the business connections, leisure activities and social lives of the murdered men and try to identify a pattern that will point to the next victim. On their way to discovering the killer, they change as they learn more about each other and themselves.

Stockholm

Misterioso is the first of 11 novels in Arne Dahl's Intercrime series. It's the only one so far to be translated from Swedish into English. Other than including too many confusing street names, Dahl's writing style is clear. Tiina Nunnally's translation is smooth. The plot involves a challenging crime and good detective work, but most of all I liked the A-Unit detectives. Hjelm, whom we know best, is a little alienated and confused, but he's on the sweet end of the lone-wolf spectrum of fictional detectives. He doesn't drink, brawl, beat up suspects, chase skirts or break rules for the hell of it. He's more like Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander (subtract 90% of Wallander's gloom) than Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole (subtract 100% of Harry's alcohol abuse and 85% of his crazy derring-do). Arto Södestedt, the A-Unit's pale Finn, is a particularly interesting guy, a defense attorney before he became a cop. He decries the new capitalists of nonproductive business ventures, "money-movers whose wealth benefits no one but themselves, either in the form of job creation or tax receipts." In addition to social commentary, there's also some enjoyable commentary about America's fascination with serial killers. This is a great book and reading the next Intercrime book to come out in English will go on my list of New Year's resolutions.

Rick Gavin's Ranchero is the first book in a series, was published in 2011 and contains a main character who's feeling like a duck at a chicken fight. Other than these similarities with Misterioso, they're as different as a waltz and a kick in the pants.

Here's how Ranchero begins:

I met Percy Dwayne Dubois after a fashion at his Indianola house. I'd come to collect his television and was explaining to his wife that they'd gone three months delinquent on their rent-to-own installments. He eased up behind me––I heard the joists complain––to offer commentary with a shovel.

The narrator who's been clobbered is repo man Nick Reid, former deputy sheriff in the eastern Virginia uplands. He spent most of his time there sorting out the same couple of dozen people. When their children came of age to be sorted out too, Nick decided he hadn't done a speck of good and needed to leave. He moved to the Mississippi Delta, where the terrain was about as far from the Virginia "hillbilly hollows" as he could get.

The Delta is famous for its blues music and rich agricultural land. It was farmed by back-breaking hand labor, first by slaves and then by anybody the planters could entice to the property. Their hiring resulted in a population, culture and cuisine that are ethnically diverse in a way that the South in general isn't. Today, a planter can run a large soybean or corn operation with a few tractor drivers and combine operators. The towns are still standing but many people have left. Life for those remaining in the Delta demands "sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness."

Moseying back to our narrator, Nick, who's lucky he isn't dead. The Duboises (pronounced DEW-boys) are notorious cracker trash and Percy Dwayne's wife Sissy is a Vardaman, "whose folk had migrated to the Delta because the folks back home in Kentucky weren't malicious enough to suit them." Sissy and Percy Dwayne grab their baby and drive away in a pristine calypso coral 1969 Ranchero. This is the Ranchero Nick's landlady had insisted he borrow when his car broke down. Nick had promised to return it without a scratch. He recruits his best friend Desmond and they hit the road to get the car back.

This is an absolute joyride of a book. It's full of unexpected twists and turns, black humor, sharp social commentary and unique characters. Here are four to give you an idea: Nick's boss K-Lo, a hot-tempered Lebanese rental shop owner whose prized possession is a stuffed catamount he likes to brag he killed himself (neglecting to mention he hit it with his car); Nick's best friend Desmond, who can't fit behind the wheel of his Geo until he shoves the driver's seat far back off the rails to make "a kind of fainting couch"; Nick's landlady Pearl, a "relentless insister by disposition," with a son in New Orleans who lurked "just out of insisting range"; and a cop named Dale, "a musclehead who appeared to live on supplements and Skoal" and liked to beat up civilians. I'll leave you the fun of discovering the other backwoods characters Nick and Desmond encounter.

I'm totally psyched to learn that Beluga, the second in Gavin's series, was published last month by Minotaur. Books by Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey and Joe R. Lansdale (his Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series) share some similarities in southern noir and comic flavor but Nick's narrative voice is unique. Beluga goes on my resolutions list, too. Now, if only all my resolutions were this fun and easy, I'd be a new woman in 2013.