Jeffrey Archer’s Nothing Ventured

 

Jeffrey Archer’s Nothing Ventured

 

At last!  My heart be still!  A detective novel that doesn’t cover the floor and walls with the blood of the guilty and innocent comingled.   Listen to me, novelists!  Please listen!  You can write a wonderful story, wound and bound in mystery, intrigue and villainy without the crack of the pistol, and the plunge of the knife.

 

Jeffrey Archer’s Nothing Ventured is explained as: Not a detective story, but a story of the making of a detective.  Yes, there is villainy galore and nefarious crimes, but these are cases that enlighten you with the dark sides of the art world, stolen masterpieces, fabrications, crosses and double crosses, matrimonial disharmony and true love.  This is an exciting tale, laced with rye British humor and very few annoying clichés.

 

Detective Constable William Warwick is a rank beginner in the business of becoming a policeman, but he’s bright, well educated and in no time is plunged into the world of stolen art and the department at Scotland Yard dealing with Money Laundering, Arts and Antiques.  It’s a perfect place for a university graduate whose major was art and art history.

 

Yes, there is a place for art history majors to earn a living and Jeffery Archer has found a place most intriguing.  The son of a noted barrister, Warwick is more than familiar with the law, but he’s also able to grate the nerves of superiors by often being outspoken and correct.

 

You may have found, as I have, that large organizations tend to be stifled by the happiness of contending with the same old problems in the same old ways. The organization finds fresh ideas as uncomfortable as announcing the king has no clothes.  And Detective Constable Warwick is a prince of new ideas.

 

So intriguing to watch him keep his balance and find his way through the dark and dusty halls of bureaucracy. 

 

Nothing Ventured is a new adventure in detective fiction that relies heavily on real personalities, humor, and ingenious plots, as Jeffery Archer’s creation, Detective Constable Warwick, weaves his way across the breath of Western Europe and through twists and turns of English justice, all without sloshes of blood and murder. 

 

I read this book rapidly.  It’s one of those stories that begs you to read just one more chapterbefore turning out the bedside lamp, then to read just one more chapter before your first morning cup of coffee.

 

Happily, Nothing Ventured is just the first volume of three in the adventures of Detective Constable Warwick. I’ve already ordered the second book!

The Murder Man: A Max Wolfe Thriller by Tony Parsons

This novel isn’t just a page-turner.  The pages will be flipping so fast you’ll feel the wind in your face.  Part of it is the blazing plot, wrapped around a horrible rape from years ago.  Life moves on, until finally, vengeance comes back to life in a murderous rampage.  Shifting the plot into high gear is a sharply etched detective, certain to become an icon.

Max Wolfe is an English cop who’s given the job of sorting things out.   He sees things clearly.  While others hesitate, Wolfe acts, regardless of politics, or personal feelings.  That can piss people off, especially Wolfe’s superiors, and especially when he’s right.

It’s not a question of shooting first and asking questions later.  Wolfe’s a thinker, a careful observer.  Nor is it ever a case of Wolfe covering his ass.  His ass hangs out all the time.  It doesn’t make him comfortable, or well liked.  And, he’s not a lone Wolfe!  (pun intended) He has a lot to lose.  No wife.  She walked out on him and his young daughter.  Those are difficult dynamics that lead to an even stronger attachment between the ones left behind.  Wolfe feels those ties that bind.  They cut into his concentration, they put his emotions to the test, but they don’t stop him.

It’s worth mentioning what I don’t like in a detective/mystery novel.  A tear dripping, double portion of angst.  Drinking problems and wife problems are such clichés that only a master writer (such as Robert B Parker) can use them to good effect.  In my opinion, even some well known craftsmen spend too much time dwelling in depths of simpering worry, like the friend we all know who can’t stop crying in his beer over the marriage that died five years ago.  We get it.  You still love the bitch who broke your heart and head.  Shift that plot into sixth gear and move our asses down the road.

The Murder Man skillfully weaves personal trials into the matters at hand:  the search for a killer who kills with a purpose and leaves no clues.  The suspects are many, the reasons a wriggling mass of snakes, and it sometimes seems Wolfe will be the next one bitten.

One of the things that draws me to this English crime thriller is empathy.  Not that I’ve wrestled with similar circumstances, but the author writes with such a keen edge that the reader is always at the center of the action, surrounded by possibilities and subject to vicious thrusts of the knife.

I began to read this book, standing in a library, waiting for my significant other to select her armload of Scottish kilted, wronged heroine, quest for ancestral lands romances.  When I picked up The Murder Man, I got lost in Wolfe’s world and had to be jogged back to reality.

“Honey?”……”HONEY?”  ….. “HELL-O!  Anybody home???”

“Oh…yeah…I mean…just one more page…”

Foot patting.  Impatiently waiting….”HONEY?”

The Murder Man is that kind of twisty-turny-mystery that lets you ignore the scary scorn of a wife who is ready to go….and I mean now! Just gotta get to the end of this chapter…

Berlin Noir: Nazis, Russians, and a taste of war

Sometimes when I read I just want to be mindlessly entertained.  I get tired of analyzing brilliance and working what Poirot calls “Ze leetle gray zells,” or what high-brow publications call literature.  A little violence.  Sex to the breaking point. A plot that dares me to put the book down.

But, mindless does have its limits. Please don’t make me suffer through TV shows of endless teenage angst, or sports show experts who’ve already used their ration of live brain cells and are working on the dead ones.

Yes, there are books that stoop to the same level of ignorance.  Here’s an example:

“He walked into the house, carrying a large bag.  It was almost too heavy and he didn’t want to carry it, but he carried it into the house.  It was not a large house, but the bag was not as big as the house. “

Ok.  Got that.  Big bag.  Carried it into the freaking house!  Now, move it along, Jo-Jo.

I’m broadminded, but willing to shoot and dismember the man who wrote that and his brain-damaged editor.  I may keep it up, Torquemada style, until the entire editorial staff confesses to long-standing love affairs with Alsatian Wolfhounds.

No.  When I say mindless, I’m talking about well-placed sentences that easily lull me into enjoyment.  Pleasant and effortless.  A book I can read, while sitting on the beach with a large and juicy tumbler, almost toxic with alcohol.

Gotta have prose that flows.  Gotta have characters that don’t make me want to fling the book against the wall.  Gotta have a plot that grabs me in a vulnerable portion of my anatomy and makes me scream for the next page.

Is that so hard?  Not for Phillip Kerr, in his mid-1930s trilogy, Berlin Noir.  The three book package takes the reader through Germany during the rise of the Nazis, into the heart of the war era, and forward to the uneasy peace that followed.

Bernie Gunther is a former Berlin policeman who got fed up with having to choke down the Nazi bile and went out on his own as a private detective.  

Takes some careful treading to solve a crime when the streets already run red with blood, and concentration camps overflow.  You have to be careful whom you question and which questions you ask.  And, you damn sure better watch your back.

The heart of these novels are not the crimes per se, although Kerr’s plots drive things at the speed of heat.  The real guts of these mysteries are the interweaving of three societies and how everyone is affected by the turmoil and change. 

Society One:  March Violets.  The Nazis taking over, enforcing new rules, with raw vengeance.  Gives you a glimpse of how the Nazis were anything but a cohesive group.  Thugs and warlords here and there vied for political favor and the attention of the dictator.  If someone patted you on the back, best to make sure he didn’t have a knife in his hand.  To do one high official a favor was to piss another official off.

Society Two: The Pale Criminal.  Germany is at war. Still, the intrigues continue, along with the crimes.  Shortages of almost everything turn everyone into a suspect, all for their own reasons and needs.

Society Three:  A German Requiem.  The war is over, or is it?  America and the so-called allies jockey for power in a Germany that is now a vacuum. Renegade Nazis scurry into the shadows, but still pull invisible strings. No one trusts anyone and even within the same nationalities, intelligence services guard their territory like rival gangs, exposing little, hiding much.  Russian, American, and Germans tangle in a web of power and deceit.

Through all of it, Bernie Gunther has to make his living, solving crimes, getting the information he’s paid to get, keeping his soul intact and his head above water.  It’s not enough to merely follow the trail, ask the questions, and get the answers.  He finds people want to use him and his services for their employers, for own their countries, and especially for their own purposes.

Bernie has to find the cheese, but he’s not only in a room full of mousetraps, but he’s often the mouse.

I’ve had it with wishy-washy novels where everyone is equally guilty and “who can really judge?”  Give me some solid villains and at least one guy who’s a straight shooter.  If he bends the rules, it’s only because it’s best for everyone.  If he kills, he has a reason.  And don’t give me this ‘gone rogue’ bullshit.  Bernie is a man and a great detective.  If he walks a fine line, so much the better. He trusts few, but believes in himself.

My kind of guy.  My kind of detective.  My kind of books.  The Berlin Noir trilogy connects the dots, from the rise of the Nazis, to the war, and into the raw beginnings of the cold war.  Puts you in the middle of it all. Makes you feel as if you lived in Berlin through some of the most vicious times of the last century.

When you finish reading Berlin Noir, you’ll be searching for Philip Kerr’s other Bernie Gunther novels.  He’s a man with a gun and a mission to bring the light of truth into the darkest of corners.  If he’s lucky, he won’t get himself killed.