Buckle Up for a Wild Ride of Murder and Snort-Your-Coffee Humor with Karsten Dusse, MURDER MINDFULLY

The classics of darkly funny crime fiction are feeling a bit dated -- who reads Donald Westlake's caper mysteries now? Of course, there are a lot of murder clubs and sleuth clubs overlapping into public television, but a lot of the humor there comes from the slightly worn-out trope of elderly ladies snooping around (hello, Miss Marple) and younger ones tumbling into chaos.

So hurrah for German lawyer and TV writer Karsten Dusse, whose 2019 book Achtsam Morden arrived on the US market this year, thanks to translator Florian Duijsens and Soho Press. Even the title is a very funny tease: MURDER MINDFULLY.

Björn Diemel is a very harassed attorney. Working for a big firm where he's responsible for successful criminal defense of violent offenders and psychopaths (sociopaths? both??), he's clear-eyed about his career: "Even my wife occasionally found my work rather questionable. But explaining our legal system to other people wasn't my job. My job was to exploit that system using every trick in the book. I made my money doing good for bad people."

Even though he knows he's doing exactly the work he's supposed to, and excellently, Diemel gets stressed by all this. Now his wife's fed up, but giving him one last chance -- which he'll grab, because he's desperate to have time with the little daughter he adores (and who he rarely sees already, due to Work).  

Which puts him into sessions with a mindfulness expert, for the sake of all that. Because even when he can spend time with his daughter, his mind is racing for work issues.

Joschka Breitner is more than willing to teach Diemel to pull himself back together through intention, focus, true mindfulness. But you know that thing about unintended consequences? It probably applies. After his first lesson, which even eases the tension in his neck, Diemel is fully appreciative:

"It was to be several weeks, however, before I realized that what Breitner revealed next would become the mantra for my first murder."

After all, when you're responsible for a shady criminal who sees accidental murders along the way as your problem to solve -- and he's "not only a brutal pimp, but also a big drug and arms dealer" -- and Dragan Sergowicz starts interfering with all the commitments to mindfully parenting and being courteous to the menacing mother of your child -- well, what tools are at hand for resolving things? 

It turns out that mindfulness coaching can lead to some very effective solutions! Of course, they might not be legal. Or morally great. But if they work?

Half the fun of this European farce of almost 400 pages is realizing, just a second ahead of Diemel, how he's going to apply his latest mindfulness lesson. Clear the calendar for the weekend, for this very entertaining page turner.

BIG NEWS: MURDER MINDFULLY is a debut, but Soho Press has clearly been working hard at catching up -- and the translation of the next book in this Mindful Murder series,  MY INNER CHILD WANTS TO KILL, will release in August. By then, you may be ready to apply more of the lessons that you and Diemel are painstakingly learning!

 

Brief Mention: Deluxe Edition of THE THIEF by Fuminoro Nakamura

THE THIEF is a remarkable work of crime fiction built on postmodern narrative, issued by Soho Crime as a powerful translation from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. Our review from 2012 is here.

Now Soho Crime (an imprint of Soho Press) has reissued THE THIEF in a deluxe edition that includes a new introduction by Duane Swierczynski to put this thriller into perspective. There's also an afterword by the author to mark this 10-year retrospective.

If you're intrigued by how crime fiction maneuvers across language and culture, this edition definitely belongs on your shelf.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Haunting Norwegian Historical Fiction, EYES OF THE RIGEL by Roy Jacobsen

It's sometimes said that the great literature offers two great themes: "A stranger comes to town" and "Someone leaves on a journey." In EYES OF THE RIGEL, Roy Jacobsen weaves together both of these, as new mother Ingrid Barrøy calmly announces she is leaving her island for a while—with her mysterious and calm dark-eyed baby.

It's soon clear that Ingrid is seeking the father of her child. How this little one came to arrive at the end of the long war, how much love is involved, and why her father's gone are mysteries from almost everyone. Perhaps Ingrid herself isn't sure how this journey has come to be. But she is determined to make it, without questioning whether she can complete it and find Alexander. 

Yet, aside from rowing away from the island and landing on Norway's mainland, she has little idea of where to go. That is, she doesn't actually know where to look for Alexander. So her initial impetus is seeking signs of his passing. For this, nearly speechless, she holds up the child, Kaja, whose dark gaze is unmistakably his. Others meeting the baby's gaze seem compelled to point to the faint trail ahead.

From this book of slow and evocative revelation, here are some key moments:

[p. 90] They made some food and ate it to the sound of snoring from the next room, in what Ingrid considered would have been an oppressive atmosphere, had they not had Kaja, who was sitting on the table between them and laughing at their playful fingers, she was so serenely marble-white and oblivious to both war and peace that Ingrid was able to reassure herself—once again—that the journey had not only been undertaken because of Kaja, it couldn't even have happened without her, without a child to lug around, this most divine of all burdens.

[p. 106] "You're walking along a road of bad consciences, my dear."

"Hva?" Ingrid said.

Hübner answered—as far as she could make out—that the Occupation of Norway had been of a special kind, in many places it had been more like co-operation, it had tainted people, now they were washing away the stains, the country is cleaning its hands. Yes, even many of those who did do something of value know that they could have done more, and they would prefer not to be reminded of it.

[p. 110] Ingrid ... realized she would have to resign herself to not understanding what she was doing, and not let it worry here, as if it were possible to think in a way which was unthinkable. Or stop feeling what she felt. What are you doing to me, little one, she thought, and pressed Kaja to her body.

The translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw evokes the languages of Scandinavia, but also of isolation and desperation. EYES OF THE RIGEL—the eyes are those of the child, and the Rigel was a ship that Alexander served on—offers the most elusive of mysteries, with delicate clues to their solution, and a finale as wide open as the ocean itself. Readers of mysteries by James Benn, Charles Todd, and Fuminori Nakamura may find much to enchant them in this slowly compelling adventure.

This is the third of a series that Biblioasis brought to America in translation; the previous volumes were The Unseen and White Shadow. When you order Jacobsen's work from a local bookstore, as them to check the Consortium list in the US, or the University of Toronto Press in Canada.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

News! English Translation of BLUE NIGHT, Excellent Police Procedural from Simone Buchholz

German author Simone Buchholz began scooping up major awards in European crime fiction a few years ago, and has an armful of titles -- and US readers this weekend can finally access one in English (lively and smooth translation by Rachel Ward). BLUE NIGHT is one of the most intriguing police procedurals I've read. It caught me within the first few chapters, not for the plot twists (although there are plenty), but for the piercing portraits of what friendship among big-city investigators can mean: having each other's back no matter what, celebrating together, and struggling to endure a high-stress and often high-alcohol life with little sleep and rare praise, in the midst of risk and loss.

Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley loves her job - but she's boxed out of it for now, demoted for having accused a superior of corruption and firing her weapon. So when we meet her trudging away from her broken-down car on a highway, her mood stinks for multiple reasons. It looks like she has an assignment though, if she can get back to the city: A smashed-up man in a hospital, pretty clearly the victim of a criminal-network beat-down, is unconscious and without identification. Her assignment is to figure out who he is and what happened, so the wheels of justice can start to grind.

First, of course, she'd got to find a way back in the darkness. She calls a friend, Faller, who agrees to collect her, but it will take at least an hour for him to reach her, which is why, disgusted and puffing on a cigarette, she's heading west on foot. She admits to herself, "I feel like a cowboy whose horse has been shot." Lucky thing Faller's own beat-up vehicle is temporarily running.

Chastity Riley's friends are mostly messed up right now: Faller himself is clearly having a midlife crisit, Calabretta's in mourning for a departed girlfriend, Klatsche -- whose bed she often shares -- has barely gotten to sleep after a long night at his bar, the Blue Night, and her buddies Carla and Rocco don't drive (and anyway, they're supposed to be taking care of Calabretta in his horrible depression).

When the man in the hospital wakes, he's clearly not interested in helped Chas solve the crime that landed him there. Of more concern is that Faller's midlife crisis seems to be heading into revenge mode, chasing the head of Hamburg's biggest crime/drugs syndicate.

As a group of seasoned investigators, Chas and her friends know Faller's in trouble if he's trying to become a superhero avenger:

I sigh; we clink bottles.

'You're worried about Faller,' [Klatsche] says.

'He's starting to crack up,' I say. 'He feels too strong. It's not good to feel too strong. You forget to take cover. I mean, we've been through all that. ..'

'Has he done anything that could be dangerous yet?'

'No idea,' I say. 'According to Calabretta, he hinted that he's planning something soon.'

Once Chas wins a few words from the man in the hospital, she begins to suspect his beat-down could be related to the same crime operation that her friend Faller is trying to target, run by an Albanian who humiliated Faller in the past. Unexpectedly, the powers that be allow her to step back into a bit more action when they send her to connect with to another police operation, one tracking drugs through the East German badlands, all the way to the Czech border. Yes, overlap, again. Big time.

Buchholz inserts short passages of character comments on their situations, including ones from the criminals involved. Interestingly, they don't slow the pace -- they just deepen the wrinkles and show how the plot is twisting yet again. Looks like Chastity Riley's irascible hospital patient is determined to take a role in the showdown, wheelchair and all. With a little help.

This is a slim crime novel, only 182 pages, but memorable and worth a second reading, too. Many thanks to Orenda Books for bringing it across the Atlantic, and giving us hope of more adept translations of Buchholz's dark and popular Hamburg police investigations.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Italian Mystery Series Debut from Mario Giordano, AUNTIE POLDI AND THE SICILIAN LIONS

What a great trend, to have European mysteries being translated at a newly rapid pace to bring fresh settings and attitudes to American readers! AUNTIE POLDI AND THE SILICILAN LIONS was written in German, even though Mario Giordano is the son of Italian immigrants to Germany. So its arrival in "the States" via Houghton Mifflin Harcourt meant translation by John Brownjohn (deftly!), with healthy dashes of Italian exclamations left in place. This confusion of heritage also means there's a lot of varied culture packed into the book, and the first few chapters are tough going -- Aunti Poldi, known formally to her new neighbors as Donna Poldina, is from Bavaria, a "free state" of Germany, and her formal name is Isolde Oberreiter. After some years of sorrow -- a challenging marriage, then widowhood and abrupt loss of funding, and some chaos in Africa that we never quite learn about -- Poldi has opted for a fresh start, near the sisters of her late husband, in Sicily. And with a view of the sea.

Adding to the mild confusion in the book's opening is the author's choice of double narrators: both Poldi herself in "third person," and her would-be writer nephew, to whom she is explaining what's taken place whenever he's back to visit her. After a while, I settled into the routine, and by about one-third through, I was totally in Poldi's pocket, eager to see how she would assess a crime scene and simultaneously open doors for her own passionate sense of life as crammed with love and erotic delight (or pierced by the lack of them!). How do the two narrations work? Here's a snippet, as Poldi's seaside walk leads her to the corpse of the missing hired helper Valentino she's been searching for:

When Poldi came nearer a cloud of flies rose from the remains of his head.

With a groan, she knelt down beside him. Just crouched beside the corpse, whimpering softly as if that age-old song of grief could bring him back to life. The big pebbles hurt her knees, but she scarcely felt the pain. She grasped his left hand, which was as cold and hard and dry as the stones on the beach.

"Oh, Valentino, why did you never say a word?"

She fondled his cold hand and stared at the sea and the rising sun, to avoid having to look at him. It wasn't her first dead body and she wasn't easily shocked, but the sight of the mangled face affected her deeply. She turned her head away and tried to concentrate on his hand, on his dirty fingernails and the familiar tattoo.

At length, however, she forced herself to look.

"That was when I made Valentino a promise," she told me later. "An almost automatic process was at work, that's why. It was genetically conditioned."

"You mean a kind of ... criminalistic hereditary reflex?" I asked, remembering the psychology course I'd dropped out of.

"Bullsh**. It was the hunting instinct." She looked at me. "Either you've got it or you haven't."

From here on, Auntie Poldi is hunting for the killer.  It won't be easy -- she's making friends in her new neighborhood, but she's still a ways from feeling accepted by Sicily, and her outbursts of Bavarian language (and insight) aren't always welcome. With a marvelous cast of characters, from the sexy (but unable to commit) police investigator, to the wealthy landowner obsessed with the German poet Hölderlin, to her new French friend Valérie, to her helpful and eager sisters-in-law, Poldi plunges into Sicilian entanglements. And crime solving -- she's determined to be the first to reveal the killer. (Uh-oh.)

Even during the slow first few chapters, something about Poldi and her nephew pulled me into this "amateur-sleuth" mystery -- and by the second half of the book, I was scooting away from other work on the flimsiest of excuses, just to catch up with Poldi's next charge forward. I liked the clever chapter openers, too, which hinted at what would emerge. And I found the ending delightful -- including its clear opening for more Auntie Poldi books ahead. (This interview with the author reveals that two more are already written.)

I already have three people in mind to whom I'd like to give a copy of this rollicking, passionate, and engaging mystery -- perhaps the best metric of how good a book is.  Looking forward to more. Forza, Aunti Poldi!

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention, Medieval Mystery by Oliver Pötzsch, THE PLAY OF DEATH

Three reasons to read number six in Oliver Pötzsch's "Hangman's Daughter" series, THE PLAY OF DEATH:

1. You collect the reading experience of mysteries set in Bavaria.
2. You like fiction set in the 1600s.
3. You're planning to see the Bread & Puppet Theater in action in Vermont (or treasure having done so in the past, especially in the 1970s and 1980s).

At the heart of this somewhat awkwardly translated mystery (reminds me of the translation of P.J. Brackston's books, also set in Bavaria) is the annual passion play in Oberammergau -- which in many ways is a precursor to the grand spectacles that Bread & Puppet created. The second strand is what life is like in a caste-conscious society when you're part of a hangman's family.

And the third, of course, is a murder and finding the dangerous criminal responsible.

I'm not going to cover this one in depth -- seems to me if you have one of those reasons, you'll pick up the book, and otherwise, skip it -- but here's the formal description from the Munich-born author's website:

It is 1670 and Simon Fronwieser is in the town of Oberammergau to bring his seven-year-old son to boarding school. As he bids his boy a tearful farewell, news comes of a shocking murder: the man who was to play the part of Christ in the town’s Passion play has been found dead, nailed to the set’s cross. As there is no doctor in town, Simon is brought in to examine the body. The opportunities to spend more time with his son and to investigate the murder quickly convince him to stay.

Soon he is joined by his father-in-law, Jakob Kuisl, the Schongau hangman, and the two begin piecing together the puzzle of the actor’s death. Was he murdered by a jealous rival? Are the recently arrived and unpopular immigrant workers somehow involved? Or is it a punishment from God for the villagers’ arrogance in trying to schedule the play four years earlier than prescribed by ancient custom? Once again it looks like it is up to the Kuisls to unravel the mystery and bring a town’s dark secrets to light.

Brought to the US by Mariner, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt press. (A quick note: Yes, I realize that strictly speaking the 1600s are beyond the medieval period. But trust me, not in this landscape.)

 PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention, CRUEL IS THE NIGHT, Karo Hämäläinen

Did you enjoy the plot, characters, twists, and finale of Gone Girl? If so, race to your favorite book-buying route and get a copy of the CRUEL IS THE NIGHT. It's translated from the Finnish, and struck me as closer to Chicago crime than to the usual form of Scandinavian noir that I've read lately ... but the moment I compared it in to Gillian Flynn's runaway success, I knew why this new book from Soho Crime seemed hauntingly familiar in a sort of parallel-universe way. Here's the publisher's synopsis:

Prizewinning Finnish author Karo Hämäläinen’s English-language debut is a literary homage to Agatha Christie and a black comedy locked-room mystery about murder, mayhem, and morality in our cynical modern world.

Well, yes, now that you mention it, "black comedy" and "cynical modern world" effectively tag CRUEL IS THE NIGHT as noir. It's also highly entertaining, as the author's multiple points of view reveal the frictions, resentments, and "frissons" of attraction and repulsion among four people -- two couples reconnecting after years of estrangement, ostensibly to celebrate one couple's striking success.

Pick this one up for the challenge of a puzzle mystery. It's quite an effort to work out the ending before the author takes you there! Hats off to translator Owen Witesman, who propels plenty of page-turning dialogue and action onto the English-language pages.

From Soho Crime, where international crime fiction thrives.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

The book, the movie, the book: THE GERMAN DOCTOR, Lucía Puenzo

Sometimes the whole book process gets very complicated. Established Argentinian scriptwriter Lucía Puenzo wrote The German Doctor,  which has been published in 10 languages -- then she directed and produced it as a dramatic thriller film. Now IPG (Independent Publishers Group, in its Trafalgar Square Publishing imprint) is releasing the translation in America in November.

The thriller fits into that narrow subgenre of material rooted in history, but taking place in what may be "the present." At first, all we know is that the doctor is hiding in Argentina, and is obsessed with racial purity and his experiments; he has brought his notebooks and even some samples with him, and he has a particular fondness for examples of how racial interbreeding causes genetic disasters (to his mind). And, oh yes, he's also obsessed with twins.

If you've delved into the dark horrors of the Holocaust, you already know who "José" resembles: the notorious Josef Mengele, a physician whose experiments in the concentration camps ignored scientific method and truth, and instead caused maximum distortion and pain. He's known to have fled Germany in 1945, arrived in Argentina in 1949, and when hunted by those seeking justice, he relocated first to Paraguay and then to Brazil.

In Puenzo's dark and very creepy narrative (Mengele is seducing Lilith, a 12-year-old girl who suffers from dwarfism, and he and she both are thrilled by the process), we meet José at his departure from Buenos Aires, about to cross the desert to a more welcoming and protective community of Nazi German refugees in Paraguay. The rigors of the journey provide entry for him into the not-so-innocent Lilith's family, just in time to assist with the survival of prematurely born twins.

At stake: whether Lilith will resist or encourage the final seduction, which turns out not to be sex but science; what's being perpetrated on the twin babies; how the community will react to recognizing the wicked doctor in its midst; and even a hint of suspense around whether the German doctor has any humanity in him (a Native resident sees his hollowness).

David William Foster's translation is smooth and quirky at the same time, conveying the formality and awkwardness of German into Spanish, upper class to lower, and more. Here's a sample, from the doctor's point of view as he starts to cross the desert:

When he was advised to leave Buenos Aires immediately, they had promised him at the same time that the south of Argentina was as close as he could get to German Switzerland. They spoke to him of trees, lakes, snow-covered mountains. You people were not the only ones who did a good job of cleansing, they said. They told him stories of Indian attacks that had dominated the same arid lands he was now crossing at a snail's pace, with his eyes glued to the three small blonde heads examining him out of the corner of their eyes ... He felt anguish crawling up his legs like spiders.

Whether José's sadism will be recognized, along with his unmodified facial features, continues to raise the ante; so does the arrival in the area of a Nazi hunter who knows this doctor all too well.

It's a grim book, admirably paced, and steps into one of the nastiest aspects of Argentine and world history adeptly -- we know how the doctor's story will end (he died in 1979 and was buried under a false name; his remains were verified in 1985), but this crime novel lingers within the potent years of his life in the New World. Puenzo creates Ultimate Creepy effectively, complete with dolls (see the book cover?), and tells a powerful story that, unfortunately, I will probably never forget.

And oh yes -- coming to a theatre near you. Watch for its Spanish name, too: Wakolda.