J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, “Empire of the Sun.” Ballard’s astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, “Kingdom Come.” In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the “perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25″ to find out who murdered his father. It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery. But this is Ballard. It will not be cosy.
“The suburbs dream of violence,” Ballard declares as we enter the blandly menacing town of Brooklands. Among this “placid sea of brickly gables” Richard searches his father’s flat for clues to the life — and violent death — of a parent he barely knew, a pilot who had “flown millions of miles … and then died in a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall.” Three others died, and the suspected gunman, a mentally unstable local, is arrested but then released. The police, the family lawyer, the doctor who treated Richard’s father — all appear to be hiding something, while many respectable Brooklands residents seem to have formed a fascist militia.
When Richard first witnesses a racist attack, he concludes that “a new kind of hate had emerged”; its hub is the Metro-Centre, the mega-mall in which his father was killed. During one visit, Richard sits beside the mall’s manmade beach, where Julia Goodwin, his father’s doctor, has arranged to meet him. “The wave machine had been turned to its lowest setting,” he notices, “and a vaguely gastric swell, like a suppressed vomit reflex, flowed across the colorized water.” This languid, sickly image could only be Ballard’s. No other writer so effectively alienates his readers — and his protagonists — from an everyday reality that he reveals to be shifting, often nightmarish terrain.
At the same time, he soothes us. In “Kingdom Come,” as in Ballard’s short stories and in novels like “Crash,” the rhythmical balance of the sentences has a tranquilizing effect, like the shushing roar of the ceaseless traffic on the motorway outside Brooklands. Richard, too, seems oddly numbed as he probes his father’s involvement with local thugs, falls in love with Julia Goodwin, and is increasingly drawn to the Metro-Centre and to the figure of David Cruise, the mall’s TV celebrity.
The novel’s pace quickens as violence spreads and the Metro-Centre comes under attack. “Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons” as screams are drowned out “by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air.” Soon the mall becomes a fortress, hostages are taken, and the wave machine churns up a corpse. Emerging from the wreckage, Richard predicts that “In time … an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.” In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.
The Catalan poet, playwright and essayist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003) was also a crime novelist who was acquainted with crime: political and recreational. Jailed for four years under Spain’s fascist Franco regime, the leftist writer cultivated an understandably — and exquisitely — ironic view of zealots in particular and humanity in general. Indeed, it is easy to see Montalbán in the detective he created, Pepe Carvalho, an intellectual, ex-Communist veteran and gourmand who is at home only in his beloved Barcelona.
Carvalho is at the center of 19 novels, many of them set in post-Franco Spain. His youth and his glory days are behind him. As one character in “The Angst-Ridden Executive” observes, they were “the best years of our lives — if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality … and the darkness ruling the country.” Such cynical humor peppers this lean thriller in which Montalbán strikes the perfect balance between European cerebral and American noir. He also reins in the lengthy political and philosophical digressions that deflate other Pepe Carvalho novels: “Murder in the Central Committee,” for example, and to a lesser degree “The Buenos Aires Quintet.”
“The Angst-Ridden Executive” may be dark but it is also sprightly, shuttling as it does between the USA and Spain while Carvalho investigates the death of Antonio Jauma, a Spanish industrialist. By chance, he knew the man. Carvalho and Jauma once met on a transatlantic flight, discovered tastes in common, and shared an unlikely American road trip with an enigmatic German business associate of Jauma’s. Now Carvahlo recalls scenes from this American odyssey — California, for example, with its “beautiful Anglo Saxons, white as the sand on the seashore, and always casually dressed, as if life for them was always casual” — as he attempts to track down the businessman’s murderer. He is assisted, as usual, by Biscuter, a rough Catalan version of Jeeves, and by Charo, a prostitute girlfriend, both of whom are more cartoon figures than characters.
The novel’s murder suspects, however, and even its minor corporate and political figures are convincingly menacing, while the murder mystery itself is complex but not outlandish. It leads Carvalho not only into the past — an inevitable destination in post-Franco Spain — but almost prophetically into the future. This may be the 1970s, but the riots in the streets, the desperation of the poor, and the combined heft of the state and the corporation seem eerily familiar. “Democracy cannot permit the use of a strong hand,” a loutish entrepreneur tells Carvalho, “but in order to succeed it needs terrorism in the background, a dirty war, which drives people into the arms of stabilizing forces that appear to have clean hands.” And this, it turns out, is where the key to Jauma’s murder lies: in the foul territory ruled by corrupt politicians and patrolled by uniformed thugs, the seasoned variety who have the ability “to pass from a blow to the forgetting of that blow in an instant, in the confidence that the person on whom it landed has no choice but to play along.” Another breed that Montalbán seems to have known only too well.
Nobody concludes a novel quite the way Mo Hayder does: with a revelation that leaves the reader staring at the page, poleaxed, willing more words to appear or flicking back to see just how she did it. Hayder’s astonishing 2007 horror novel “Pig Island,” for example, ended with the stunned narrator, framed for murder, watching his nemesis depart and “something coiled and dark, like smoke or a spirit, lifting itself out of the car and hovering near the roof…” Now, on the final page of “Hanging Hill,” a mother lovingly watches her young daughter and a friend drive off to the Glastonbury Festival. “The van turned left. Not right, the way she would have gone…. Leave them alone, she thought…. You just can’t go on worrying about your children for ever.” Worrying: a quaint, domestic impulse; utterly redundant in the terrifying world that Hayder creates.
Here, as always, a Hayder plot that seems straightforward is masterfully skewed. In Bath, England, Lorne Wood, a privileged teenage beauty, is found horribly murdered beside a canal. Detective Inspector Zoe Benedict is led, by instinct as much as evidence, to suspect a connection to the sex trade and Internet pornography, a realm that Hayder evokes in all its dankness. “[M]ost of the time they’re doing it because it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day,” one avuncular pornographer tells Zoe of his “models.” Less benign are fetishistic practices “all about humiliating the woman.” As one jaded dame explains, this is what sells “by the shedload … Makes you wonder about human nature, don’t it?”
Zoe doesn’t wonder anymore. She has seen too much. And she has secrets of her own. But that is another story, one of a handful that Hayder expertly steers on parallel tracks as she shunts the murder investigation forward, then makes it stall or veer, all the while heightening our sense of dread. While Zoe courts danger by revisiting her past and pursuing Lorne’s likely killer, Zoe’s estranged sister, Sally, becomes the housekeeper for a nouveau-squire who exudes criminality and violence. Divorced, somewhat clueless, and mother to teenage Millie, Sally has little choice. She does, however, have a shady lover who reveals that Sally’s employer is involved with the Ministry of Defense, the UN mission in Kosovo, and sex trafficking.
These are filaments that flicker at the periphery of our anxious vision while Zoe and Sally demand our attention. Especially Zoe, who, like many female Hayder protagonists, is both wounded and feral. Slumped in a toilet cubicle, for example, her own blood dripping onto the floor, she resolves to “…take some time off work…. Sleep rough and drink Guinness out of the can.” Fueled by desperation more than courage, Zoe is as startling as the cinematic action scenes that Hayder so expertly stages. Shocks intensify — a nail gun comes into play, a body is dismembered, foul sex committed — while the tidal pull of Hayder’s intersecting narratives churns up tangled evidence that could incriminate Sally’s vile employer, a local drug dealer or a lovesick teenager. Toward the end, the sisters traverse moonlit farmland — “Two lonely figures casting long blue shadows…feet shushing the dead corn” — to confront Lorne’s killer and the final horror. Which is not, of course, the end at all.
Eli Gottlieb’s “The Face Thief” opens with a hurtling descent — a woman falls down a lengthy staircase — and ends with a smooth takeoff as her transatlantic flight leaves New York. We don’t know, until the novel’s denouement, how she fell or whether she was pushed. We are never told where her flight will land. But between these two events, Gottlieb constructs a sublime thriller that might have been subtitled “A portrait of the con artist as a young woman.” On a deeper level (and there are many) “The Face Thief” is also an elegant and profound novel of memory, perception and reinvention.
“The real reason we have faces,” Margot Lassiter observes, “is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” Margot’s business is deception, and Gottlieb, appropriately, reveals her life in fragments as he advances the plot in flashbacks, causing time to stutter as it loops back on itself. This is how Margot’s damaged memory returns, gradually and fitfully, as she recovers from her fall in hospital and rehab, under the eye of a besotted cop. Yet Gottlieb never indulges his cleverness. We are not dazzled by his style. We are instead seduced, from the moment that Margot sights the first of two victims, men we come to know intimately as she reels them in and leaves them floundering.
She meets Lawrence Billings at a seminar he leads on “The Physique of Finance: The Art of Face Reading and Body Language for Professional Advantage.” (Gottlieb’s ear for business-inspirational rhetoric is flawless). Billings, 53 and married, has a gift for decoding human behavior. “Even as a boy, he’d understood the commonness of lying. People did it as naturally as singing.” But Margot, a young volunteer from the audience who soon requests private instruction, teaches Billings a new lesson in the old game of seduction and extortion. “She leaned toward him … He was feeling his own thoughts turning slow, syrupy …” Billings will pay, of course, and far more than he imagines.
John Potash is, for Margot, an easier mark. Middle-aged and blissfully remarried in California, he wants to believe that his substantial nest egg will be significantly enhanced when invested in the firm represented by “Janelle Styles.” Greenleaf, after all, is not some hedge fund but “a consortium of forward-seeking investment advisers and analysts from elite business schools who roamed the world seeking the latest cutting-edge sustainable products.”
Gottlieb so deftly directs the parallel dramas of Billings and Potash that each has the compressed urgency of a short story. The textures of his characters’ lives — of even minor characters such as Potash’s mother in the Bronx or the eccentric P.I. he hires — rise off the page with tactile intensity. Potash opens “the heavy vault of the fridge door…” A bedside television flickers and drones on “… for hours without consequence, like a drunk at a bar.” Then there is Margot — one of crime fiction’s most mesmerizing grifters — reinventing herself first as a Smith College student, then as a Manhattan style magazine “editor at large … superalert, usually in heels, and gunning it, hard.” Gottlieb draws us so completely into Margot’s mind and the minds of her prey that the identity of a possible avenger (remember those stairs?) seems almost incidental. But he leaves no loose ends as he smoothly accelerates into the final curve, where deed and consequence silkily merge.
In his latest thriller, “Trackers,“ South African novelist Deon Meyer casts a gimlet eye on his native land and fellow countrymen. One narrator, for example, fulminates against “Rich Afrikaaners” who live “… behind high walls and alarm systems … with a Mercedes ML, two quad bikes, a Harley, and a speedboat squeezed into their triple garages” and who “… bitch about how bad things are in this country.” Another contemplates suburbia: “Luxurious cold houses without character … all these rich white people, but not a book in the house.” Meyer’s crime fiction has from the outset vividly illuminated life in post-apartheid South Africa. But “Trackers” — his most ambitious and political novel to date — exposes not only domestic but also international skulduggery in a plot that weaves together organized crime in South Africa; the smuggling of arms, diamonds and wildlife; the uneasy alliance between South African intelligence and the CIA and — in a sensational twist — al-Qaida terrorism.
“You know you’re trouble,” Lemmer, a freelance bodyguard, is told after he kills a crime gang boss. “I know,” he replies, “but I don’t go looking for it, it comes looking for me.” Lemmer, last seen in Meyer’s “Blood Safari,” remains haunted by his poor-white past and by his own crimes and conscience. Gloomy but fearless, he now finds himself assisting in the smuggling of a pair of black rhinos from Zimbabwe. Both the cargo and the mission are, however, more lethal than he imagines: Lemmer is soon desperately searching for the wildlife tracker (his female counterpart in many ways) who has stolen evidence that could frame him for murder.
Meyer, as always, choreographs the action and heightens the suspense with elegant efficiency. He also keeps us guessing how Lemmer’s story fits in with that of Milla, the first protagonist we meet in “Trackers” and the one we care most about even when — especially when — she disappears. She is one of Meyer’s finest creations, and his subtle evocation of her marriage and its aftermath draws us into a quiet story that gradually becomes an espionage drama. A Cape Town housewife who finally summons the courage to leave her odious husband, Milla finds an apparently dull job with a government intelligence agency just as a sinister shipment, perhaps linked to al-Qaida, appears to be heading toward Cape Town. Local crime gangs and smuggled diamonds from Zimbabwe are somehow involved, and while South African intelligence and the CIA scramble to intercept the plotters, a maverick adventurer further complicates the puzzle and transforms Milla’s life.
“You, who made this country,” she rages at her new protector, “this mess of hatred and envy, crime and violence and poverty and misery.” All of which inundates Milla’s safe, ordinary existence as the hunter becomes the hunted and as one revelation after another completes Meyer’s intricate jigsaw. Milla’s adventure ends abruptly — with her armed and calling the shots — as Meyer takes us inside the life of Mat Joubert, ex-cop turned private investigator, who tackles a seemingly mundane missing person case. The pace slackens, yet the tension increases as we strain to glimpse the connections between this episode and the preceding dramas. By the novel’s fittingly prosaic conclusion, Meyer has cunningly turned us into trackers, too.
Almost 30 years ago, in his novel “Gorky Park,” Martin Cruz Smith introduced us to Arkady Renko, the Moscow homicide investigator who arrived on the page almost fully alienated — from his past, from his profession and from the Soviet system. In “Polar Star,” the man apart became the man adrift, working on the “slime line” of a Russian factory ship. Each Renko novel seemed to propel its hero further to the margins; the newest, “Three Stations,” finds the investigator shocked by his own irrelevance and advancing age. “Who was this graying stranger,” Renko wonders, “who rose from his bed, usurped his clothes and occupied his chair at the prosecutor’s office?”
Even a dwindling Renko is, of course, a brilliant cop. But in this slim, almost ephemeral novel that fitfully illuminates the new Russia of oligarchs, drugs, sex slavery, decadence and degradation, he is also conscience and memory. It’s a memory increasingly at odds with his native city. “This wasn’t Arkady’s Moscow anymore,” we learn as Renko navigates an old bohemian neighborhood now frequented by “leggy women with Prada bags who circulated from Pilates class to tapas bar, from tapas bar to sushi, from raw fish to meditation.”
Those are, of course, the lucky women. In “Three Stations” we get to know the unlucky ones: Maya, sold into child prostitution, and Vera, found murdered in a filthy trailer. Vera’s murder forms the core of the plot as Renko, disobeying orders and facing dismissal, stubbornly follows a trail that leads him to the truth — if not to justice. “You have no authority and no protection,” Arkady’s drunken colleague, Victor, tells him, “What are you looking for? Blood on the sidewalk and a round of applause?”
It is Maya, however, who constitutes the novel’s heart. We meet her on the first page, on a train, a traditionally fraught venue for any Russian heroine. She has a baby and she is on the run. “Maya had been the youngest prostitute at the club … off the menu, for trusted members only,” her only retreat the abandoned bus shelter across the road on whose defaced walls “… Maya could still make out the faint outline of a rocket ship lifting off the ground, aspiring to more.”
Robbed on the train, a distraught Maya arrives in Moscow where she meets Zhenya, the vagrant teenager who is the closest thing that Renko has to an adopted son. Like countless other, more feral, youths, Zhenya is a denizen of Three Stations, the city terminus where railway lines and chaotic traffic, both motorized and human, converge. Here the novel chiefly dwells, among the lost children of Russia. One runaway, for example, recalls a childhood home that was “like a listing ship, filthy clothes and empty bottles rolled to one side, bills underfoot.”
As Cruz Smith draws his parallel plotlines together neatly if a little hastily, he creates bold sketches of a previously grey world thrown into sudden, garish disorder. “We were the idiots who put this lizard in power,” a billionaire oligarch complains of Vladimir Putin, who is seen as betraying his paymasters. In a Russia that now spawns killers with “eyes deep as drains,” even political corruption is not what it used to be.
"Three Stations" by Martin Cruz Smith 