Mystery Monday: Introducing Two Overlooked Mystery/Suspense Veterans

I'm always on the lookout for authors who are able to blend mystery and suspense in intelligent ways, creating a book that I just can't put down. And in recent months, I have finally succumbed to a friend's urging and picked up some novels by Michael Robotham, an Australian who is basing his mysteries in England, and have gone back to re-read others by Charles Cumming, an English author whose books are sold in the United States but remain relatively under the radar, it seems to me. The two are quite different in their style and in the subjects they highlight, but both are capable of crafting what I like to refer to as "thumping good reads."

The first book by Michael Robotham that I read was Shatter, one of his first to be released in the United States. It features Joe O'Loughlin, who, when we first meet him, is standing on the Clifton suspension bridge outside Bristol, charged with keeping a terrified, naked woman from jumping to her death. Oddly, she seems to be talking on a telephone, and pleading with someone -- and then she jumps, taking the mystery of her death with her, or so it seems. But when her teenage daughter shows up on O'Loughlin's doorstep to insist his mother's fear of heights made it unlikely she'd ever commit suicide that way, Joe investigates, and finds his own suspicions mounting that something drove Christine to her death -- or rather, someone, someone particularly evil.

Does this sound a bit formulaic? Well, sure. Let's face it, O'Loughlin is a flawed but appealing hero, wrestling with the onset of Parkinson's disease and his family relationships, even as he struggles to do his best to obtain justice for Christine. Will he catch the bad guy before he can destroy more lives? Will O'Loughlin figure out where he went wrong in time?  And yes, the bad guy is appallingly bad, the epitome of an evildoer, almost a caricature. But Robotham dials up the suspense so much that I ended up simply not caring all that much about the book's flaws -- I just wanted to find out what happened next. 

The next  book featuring Joe O'Loughlin is Bleed for Me, which I promptly sought out after finishing Shatter. O'Loughlin's world has changed since the previous novel, and he's trying to maintain a relationship with his two daughters, especially with teenaged Charlie. Then Sienna, Charlie's closest friend, shows up at his family's home, covered in blood and unable to speak -- and Sienna's father is found dead. Is she responsible for this crime, but driven to it? Or is she being set up? Once again, the twists and turns had me second- and third-guessing my original assumptions about what was going in Sienna's life, and making this another unputdownable novel.

Charles Cumming doesn't delve into the gritty psychological suspense terrain inhabited by Robotham, but that doesn't make his spy thrillers any the less compelling. I began to read them when they started to appear -- including the two novels featuring Alec Milius, a British spook. But Cumming's most recent books have taken his work a notch higher.

Take The Trinity Six, for example, in which Cumming plays with the theme of the Cambridge spies -- the group that included Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, all of whom spied for the Soviet Union for decades within the heart of the British establishment. (Blunt was the curator of the queen's art collection...) Historian Sam Gaddis stumbles over what could be the coup of a lifetime when a journalist friend tells him that a possible "sixth man" by the name of Edward Crane is not only still alive (despite reports of his death 15 years previously) but ready to spill the beans. Cumming does a great job of generating tension without having to resort to 007 or Mission Impossible feats of derring-do; the suspense comes from the characters and situations, and the unravelling of the complex puzzle. That's just fine by me; I don't need action adventures to keep me reading, but I do need suspense, and Cumming delivers plenty of it in this nicely complex novel. Nope, he's not a new LeCarre -- but who is? (Incidentally, you can pick up the Kindle version of this book, released last year, for a mere $2.99 right now.)

At last week's ThrillerFest VII, Phillip Margolin argued that a suspense writer needs to “get rid of anything that will slow the action down.” I'm not sure I agree with that. I've read plenty of books with non-stop action (James Patterson? Steve Berry?) and while they can generate a lot of adrenaline, they ultimately are about as satisfying as being offered cotton candy or ju-jubes for dinner when you haven't eaten all day. The sugar rush may be fab, but it doesn't last. I need character, and uncertainty, and something ominous lurking in the background. (For more on ThrillerFest, see this report from Library Journal.)

All of these are present in Cumming's newest novel, which will be published in the United States early next month. When the newly-appointed head of MI-5 takes an unexpected holiday before taking up her new post, and then vanishes from the hotel where she is supposed to be staying, a recently-disgraced agent is yanked out of compulsory retirement and sent to figure out what is going on -- discreetly. The secret of Amelia's disappearance is quickly resolved, but only leads to a larger puzzle. The first half of the book does move a little too slowly for my taste, but it picks up dramatically in the second half, as agent Tom Kell uncovers an astonishing counterespionage plot on the part of one of Britain's ostensible allies. Again, compared to many books of this kind, there's little dramatic action, but what there is is just the right amount and in the right place in the book. While I didn't like it quite as much as The Trinity Six, it's definitely a thumping good read.

All of the books above I would rate at 4 stars to 4.3 stars. With the exception of Shatter, which was a LibraryThing Early Reviewer book, all are books that I have purchased and own.

A book to which no review could do justice...

Every so often, a book comes along that is so unique and distinctive - and so good - that it makes me stop and catch my breath; a book worthy of being added to my list of all-time favorites or a hypothetical list of 100 books that I wouldn't want to have missed reading. Rondo is one of these, and it's a crime that it is going overlooked relative to some of the other authors that Europa Editions has introduced to English-language readers, such as Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog) and Laurence Cosse (A Novel Bookstore) both of whom have generated a lot of buzz in the last year or two. But Brandys casts them into the shade...

In Rondo, Brandys spins a complex narrative, and simply following it is both a challenge and infinitely rewarding. When I picked up the book intending only to skim the first few pages, I was immediately drawn in by the narrator's voice as he begins his tale, and couldn't put it down. From the opening words, in which the anonymous narrator informs his hypothetical reader -- an editor at a journal that has just published what purports to be an account of a part of the Polish resistance movement to the Nazi occupation in World War II, a group named Rondo -- declares his intent to set the record straight, I was gripped. There was no point at which I could bear to put the book down, and before I knew it, I had read 50 pages, following "Tom's" attempt to convince his reader that Rondo was only an invention; indeed, that it was his invention. No, he assures his readers: "I am not a maniac, I do not suffer from hallucinations and I have never sent letters to magazines before."

Thus begins a complex tale that takes some 350 pages to recount in full, even though he often leaps forward, as if assuming that his readers are familiar to some extent with him and his postwar history. So we know he survived, we know that after the war he was interrogated (by unnamed officials) about his involvement in the resistance, and as we turn the pages we learn more and more details, dropped into the narrative almost casually but which dramatically change the way we understand "Tom" (to give him his nom de guerre) and his story. The story is a bit like peeling an onion: you remove one layer of the story, and there's another one, containing deeper truths, just below. There is a new character inserted almost incidentally; a major event referred to in passing; a foreshadowing of some future cataclysm even though we, the readers, don't learn what that is until much later.

The complexity, far from daunting me, actually enriched the experience. I actually found myself reading more slowly - deliberately so - to prolong the experience and fully relish Brandys's writing and the wealth of detail that he provides, all of which ends by conjuring up a vivid sense of Warsaw in the years leading up to and during World War II. I am quite convinced that all of these characters exist somewhere in the world - Tola, the woman with whom "Tom" is obsessed and on whose behalf he invents Rondo (he wants to keep her from becoming dangerously entangled with the "real) resistance; his old friends from college, some of whom end up playing increasingly disturbing roles in his life; the brusque military officer who leads the Home Army underground of which "Tom" is a part; the actors he works with; his father... all of them are vivid and individual. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly Brandys's style, which is to provide immense levels of detailed description. For instance, when, during the early years of the Nazi rule, a café opens where theater types can gather, Brandys doesn't just mention that it opens and describes it. He tells us how its owner got a backer, and that the backer was a Pomeranian landowner who earned his money from a marmalade factory in Warsaw, and who collected art. Warsaw itself he describes vividly in war and in peace, including during one particularly bleak period as being dark "as if drenched in the winter dusk."

The real suspense in this novel doesn't kick in until about halfway through, when the fictional Rondo falls victim to the internecine squabbling among various resistance factions - a foreshadowing of the postwar conflicts between East and West. "Tom" has made of Rondo something far too convincing, and his creation spins out of his control and turns on him, a bit like a Frankenstein monster. "Tom" becomes cynical as various sides of the conflict seem to him to be formulating political theories and certainties that he finds it increasingly hard to relate to. "I stopped believing in facts - I knew how they were fabricated," he tells his reader(s). After all, hadn't he invented Rondo, only to have a professor, decades later, write a wholly fictional account of the organization and its roots in a tone of the utmost scholarly certainty?

Indeed, one of themes of this novel is the line between fact and fantasy - what is it that is "real" and what is invented is blurred. What, "Tom" wonders, was his real motivation for creating Rondo? "Perhaps I was craving fiction, looking for something higher than everyday life, for a more complete composition and more harmonious rhyme. Existence was not enough for me," he muses. He considers his passion for Tola, the actress who has become famous since he first met her. "Wasn't it, all along, my self-creation? Sometimes it occurs to me that I invented the affair only to measure myself against it." It's a story about emotional growth and maturity, of "Tom" moving slowly but steadily from a rather aimless drifting through life (motivated purely by his love for Tola) to a state where that emotion becomes the catalyst for other kinds of commitment. But above all, this is a novel about memory; rapidly, it becomes clear that "Tom's" reason for writing what turns into a prolonged response to the article about Rondo has less to do with setting the record straight in the public eye, and a lot more with trying to recapture the facts of the matter and set them in order in his own mind. "Perhaps the need to reminisce has been with me for a long time?" And, of course, there are no easy answers - hence the length and complexity of his recollections, and their scattershot nature.

This is a brilliant novel, and one that deserves a wide readership. I first discovered it at the library, and realized that I wasn't going to be satisfied not owning the book and glancing back through it over the years to come, so I ordered a copy for my shelves. It isn't simple or straightforward; the language is rich and complex and following the narrative requires attention. But Brandys never reneges on his side of the deal: he's a storyteller, recounting a compelling and very human tale of several complex characters, "Tom" and Tola chief among them. If you pick one novel to read this year that is slightly off the beaten track, or even out of your comfort zone, make it this one. I wish I had discovered this author long ago, or that I read Polish so I could hunt down any of his other works in print. I also wish Amazon provided an option for a sixth star!