A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Hardcover, 688 pages Published Oct 2nd 2014 by Riverhead Books Orig Title A Brief History of Seven Killings (ISBN13: 9781594486005)

This book is not brief; it has many more than seven killings; it redefines what a novel is. As a reader I was gratified to read in the Acknowledgements that James himself didn’t know this was a novel, either, until someone pointed to possible parallels for the style in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. James drew inspiration from Roberto Bolaño, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Gay Talese among others, and the work is staggering for sheer inventiveness.

The storyline is anything but simple, told from multiple viewpoints, but basically some people killed ‘the Singer’ and nobody knows why. But while we are looking for answers, we get a whole lotta reasons for why people want to be close to the Singer or are jealous of him or are afraid of him. And it is these things that become the story.

I began by listening to the HighBridge audio production of this novel, performed with enormous skill by an exceptional actor ensemble, but soon found I wanted to see the text. James had me in such awe of what he was doing that I wanted to see the overall structure, introduction, dedication, every little thing. It is a game-changing piece of work. It won’t change most novelists work—James is in the master class—he changes how novels function.

And his voice…it is hard to describe the seeing-ness of his voice. It seems almost trite to say he got the woman thing. He got everybody’s thing. James says Nina Burgess was the voice that most clearly expressed what he as an author was thinking, but it was Kim Clarke speaking in February of 1979 (the first voice in a section called Shadow Dancin’) that broke my heart in two.

The violence…James says "violence should be violent"... and he obliges. It is a reflection, hard to believe, but a reflection of how we do not have to live. Set alternately in Jamaica, New York, and Miami, this is what happens, what we have in store with bad judgement and poor leaders. The book is very violent, and the language is both terribly funny and terribly ugly, the emphasis on terrible. It is gut-punching, air-sucking, awe-inspiring terrible. Shocking.

I am not entirely sure the book needed to be so long, but the sheer genius of the characterizations meant we didn’t really care if it was all meant to be there or not. It was a ridiculously over-the-top banquet with lots of extras. It is a little hard to get one’s arms around the novel, what with all the pyrotechnics, but like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, who the heck cares?

There are references to Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in here when the CIA operatives were speaking, as well as other nefarious activities and dirty tricks by representatives of other countries, but James warns us not to read this work as history. It is fiction on a framework of research into a time that was interesting to James.

In the 2016 Charlie Rose interview James makes the comment that Jamaica’s racism is very different from America’s: “In Jamaica [racism] is endemic. We never faced it, but we didn’t have to, if everyone was bleaching their skin & trying to get their skin whiter and whiter until we’re full free.” That interesting and provocative comment doesn’t entirely explain the differences between the slave legacy in America and colonialist racism in Britain, but gives us something to ponder.

In an interview with Kima Jones and reprinted on her blog, James tells us that the post colonialist mindset and unconscious racism has been picked up by white women:

"I have very little patience for…stories and…movies [that use white characters to legitimize the experience of black characters]. The traditional ‘white guy goes through a three-dimensional experience served by one-dimensional black people.’ Funny enough, the people who are doing it a lot now are white women. I’ve spoken about this, and I’ve never been shy to talk about it. I had a Facebook post where I said, ‘White women, please don’t become the new Orientalist, because we didn’t like it when white men did it.’ This sort of ‘I had my three-dimensional, life-changing experience surrounded by all of these Negroes or all these Asians or all these people from the South Pacific.’ Enough…I didn’t want the existence of my white characters to be validation or justification or proof of the existence of these other, many Jamaicas within Jamaica."

See what I mean? Provocative. Interviews with Marlon James have left me like a deer in the headlights, too stunned to complete my next thought straight away. I am more used to his answers to common questions now, but he can still be utterly surprising and completely absorbing. A few links to some of his interviews, all of which are interesting, are below.

Indie Wire, Dec 24, 2015

GQ Review, Oct 13, 2015

Rolling Stone Review, Jan 6, 2016

Charlie Rose interview, Aug 25, 2016

The Guardian , October 14, 2015

The Telegraph, Oct 13, 2015

Kima Jones Blog, undated.

NYTimes, Sept 21, 2014

Vogue, Oct 28, 2105



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid

Hardcover, 383 pages Published December 1st 2015 by Atlantic Monthly Press (first published 2015)

This ninth novel in the Tony Hill & Carol Jordan series written by Scottish mystery writer Val McDermid brings us a serial killer who preys on opinionated women who take principled stances embodying feminist ideals, e.g., outspoken against domestic violence, deadbeat dads, the living and work arrangements of serial rapists. The police at first dismiss the vituperative online trolls who respond to these womens' blogposts—"it is only words"--until some of those outspoken women end up dead.

Hill and Jordan are long-time McDermid subjects, and the stars of a BBC TV series called The Wire in the Blood, a popular six-season (2002-2008) police procedural starring Robson Green as Tony Hill and Hermione Norris as Carol Jordan. Every two years since the TV series finished, McDermid published another Hill & Jordan mystery. In all that time, Jordan had left the police force and has started drinking far too much far too often. This story began with Jordan refitting an old barn on the outskirts of Bradfield, Yorkshire to live in.

McDermid’s character of Tony Hill always seemed to me far less autistic than Robson Green’s interpretation. Hill does play computer games to give his subconscious time to develop ideas, and he does have a tendency to insert himself into Carol Jordan’s orbit. In this story, Hill intervenes in Jordan’s drinking habit, forcing her to recognize her dependency.

While Jordan is drying out, Hill suggests she think over a problem that so far has not been identified by anyone else as a problem: those outspoken women were dying, presumably at their own hand, in the manner of famous feminists who had committed suicide in the past. Each of the suicides even had pages of books written by the different women they were emulating…so many women, so many role models, different deaths but all with the same idea. It started out as a time-consuming mental activity to keep her from drinking and then links started to appear…

Insomuch as McDermid's crime series also employ elements of police procedurals, this is a delightful look at the top cops who have a meeting early in the action. They sound so much like a group of Shakespeare’s hags around a black, round-bellied pot hanging over a campfire one can practically hear the “Boil, Boil, Toil and Trouble” refrain. The old white men discuss offering Jordan her own shop under their aegis but outside the shop. The team she ultimately assembles has some terrific, familiar characters.

One of those characters, a computer whiz from an immigrant family, is sleeping with a handsome but shallow fellow officer who is always seeking the best path to his own personal aggrandizement. When the computer whiz discovers her main squeeze is leaking information from her investigation, she takes the sweetest revenge—I laughed aloud to hear it. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but believe me, you won’t want to miss it, and you wouldn’t want it to happen to you.

McDermid is so smooth and natural in her writing by now in her Gold Dagger Award-winning career that she makes churning out these psychologically dense personality profiles look easy. Scottish by birth, McDermid now splits her time each year between South Manchester and Edinburgh, where lives with her partner and her son. She began as a journalist and playwright and, inspired by American women crime writers including Sara Paretsky, she developed her own crime-writing style. If you have never seen her speak, you are in for a terrific treat. She has a big personality and clearly enjoys her work on most days. Just type in “Val McDermid interview” in YouTube’s search bar and you will hear many hours of fascinating stories, mostly true.

My personal favorite in these interviews is a short one in which McDermid is interviewing Sofie Gråbøl (embedded below), star of the Danish production of The Killing, a wildly popular multi-season TV hit throughout Europe. If you haven’t yet seen it, do not mistake the American re-do of the television screenplay for the original Danish production, which was mesmerizing. McDermid mentions the sweater Gråbøl wore in the show which became a hit also, spawning an industry.

Also note that one of McDermid’s most famous books, A Place of Execution, was made into a TV mini-series, three parts of which are also available for free on YouTube. I haven’t watched it yet, but you will recognize some of your favorite actors. My favorite is Lee Ingleby, but Robson Green is there also. Enjoy!

I listened to the audio production of this book sent to me by Goodreads FirstReads, narrated by Gerard Doyle and produced by HighBridge Audio, a division of Recorded Books. I still don't understand how the title fits in, though. I never caught the reference to that. If anyone out there figures it out, please leave me a comment.




You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

Olen Butler tries something unique with this wartime spy novel set in Veracruz, Mexico in 1914. World War I was beginning in Europe, Mexico was in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, the United States occupied Veracruz after a diplomatic dispute, and Germans used money and influence to encourage the Mexican government to respond militarily to the U.S. Reporting on all this was “Kit” Christopher Marlowe, newspaper journalist and son of an aging Hollywood actress.

Using a style made famous by Humphrey Bogart in ”Treasure of Sierra Madre” and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, this noir novel follows Kit as he digs for stories in the German connection. He ends up meeting Pancho Villa and falling for a beautiful and talented muchacha but the story only seems to be getting going when this episode ends. With so much political intrigue in Mexico in the early twentieth century, it’s ripe for novelistic exploitation. This series could live a long life.

I listened to the HighBridge audio of this book, read by Ray Chase. Chase does a wonderful job of speaking Chandler-ese with a Bogart swagger, and accelerating with the action so that some chapters of fighting and tension raced. The Kit character is a likeable one, but in the beginning his journalistic seen-it-all irony and sarcasm made it difficult for me to sympathize and identify with him. The story itself was intriguing enough to pull us along until we could see Kit’s other talents.

Kit’s other skills involve the other meaning of “Marlowe,” which would be a reference to the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. He can fight and he can act, all of which he needs before the end of the novel. There is character development to spare here, which is why I imagine it to the first of a series. Olen Butler has chosen his area well, as it is underserved in the literary mystery series market and there is as much intrigue as in any major port during wartime.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill

Cotterill, author of the unique Dr. Siri series set in Laos and beginning with The Coroner’s Lunch, writes a new series for us. This time he features a youngish Thai female reporter, scouring the southern countryside for crime stories to place in the national newspaper she had to leave behind in Chiang Mai. She has kept her distance from predatory men by declaring herself lesbian, but she is no such thing. In a country where sex and sex changes are advertised, declaring herself homosexual elicits from her family no more than a sigh of regret for the children she will not have.

Cotterill seems to be trying a little harder in this series to channel a young, hip newspaper reporter, but it does make this reader wonder again how he managed to create the incomparable Dr. Siri, who must have been at least as distant in age and background. Two mysteries intertwine in this first book of the new series and both are satisfactorily resolved in the end, though both are so unlikely that they are probably drawn from life. More importantly, Cotterill gives us a group of characters so rich, varied, and full of life that we long to see them again soon.

I listened to the audio of this book, produced by HighBridge audio and read by Jeany Park. Ms. Park’s over-the-top reading gives each of her characters distinctive voices, including one that sent me reaching back in time. If you’ve ever seen the television production of Brideshead Revisited, you will remember a character with an unforgettable speaking voice: Joseph Beattie played the flaming homosexual Anthony Blanche. Ms. Park manages to resurrect that voice for the gay policeman so completely, one is charmed. Add to that our main character’s transvestite sister, a mother with Alzheimer’s, a body-building brother, and a set of Buddhists. But my favorite character might still be the wily old granddad. He barely had a speaking part, yet managed to see around corners and several steps ahead on resolving a difficult case.

Cotterill has such a deep understanding of Southeast Asia that one is always interested to see which thread he will pick to weave his story. Whichever it is, each story is so infused with the life and culture of his subject country that one feels positively transported. I will always want to read what he comes up with next.


You can buy this book here: Tweet