Tag: pop lit

Fleshmarket Close

We were sitting at the local watering hole a few weeks back and mentioned to friends from the UK that we were going to visit Edinburgh this summer for the first time. Immediately one said “Oh, you must read Ian Rankin before you go. I’ll lend you a couple!” Sure enough a day or two later her significant other dropped off two novels at our front door on his way home from work. Fast service!

I’ve not read many detective novels or police procedurals or mysteries–I’ve dabbled in noir now and again, and did read the first Simenon Maigret novel in French last year. But I figured it would be an interesting way to get a taste of Edinburgh in advance without relying on Rick Steves for once, so I dived right into Fleshmarket Close.

I was a bit concerned to begin reading a series at about volume 23 or 24, but the novel stands alone quite well. The detective central to the story is John Rebus, who is being pushed aside by his superiors and sent off to pasture in a shoddy department in a squalid neighborhood. Rebus is an attractive type, familiar from the genre–a gutsy guy, tough-minded, unsophisticated in his tastes and not academically inclined, but eclectic. He likes an enormous variety of niche music from jazz and folk to punk and techno. He likes a pint and a malt perhaps too much, and has an ex-wife and estranged daughter who probably featured prominently in earlier volumes. He’s read Dostoevsky. He tends to intuit things other detectives miss, and instead of thinking linearly about a crime he builds up a huge amount of context and finds all sorts of intricate leads to trace. This frustrates his superiors but he gets results.

In Fleshmarket Close the murder of an immigrant leads to a thriving underworld of criminality involving drugs, Irish milita, human trafficking, slumlords, racism, salacious and carnivalesque right-wing media, celebrity lawyers, and pornography. Rebus and his younger partner Siobhan Clark eventually piece together a vast conspiracy. It’s quite satisfying, and Edinbugh is a character in the story just as much as Baltimore is a character in The Wire. In fact, this novel has some substantial similarities to The Wire Season 2. And, I’d note, Edinburgh as portrayed in this novel has some similarities to Baltimore.

It’s fun to see Detective Rebus struggling with “woke” culture as it began to accelerate, and to note his adapting to “new” tech like laptops and mobile phones and DNA tests. And of course it’s interesting to read a pre-Brexit UK novel which shows a lot of the media agitation which led to anti-immigrant and anti-EU sentiment. Rebus comes from Polish immigrant stock himself and he is not pleased by where he sees Scotland and the UK headed. I’d certainly recommend this to fans of the genre, who might perhaps prefer to start with the first novel instead of one of the last? But also to those who don’t really read this sort of novel as an interesting look at the dark underbelly of a famous tourist destination.

Warlock by Oakley Hall

I adore the NYRB re-issues–high quality paperbacks with great cover design and kick-ass introductions

When it comes to fiction genres, I’ve got my faves. As a young dude those were horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Over the years I drifted away from all of these only to check in now and again on the hot new thang. Occasionally I’ve dabbled in mystery/thriller stuff, but never have I been a reader of Westerns (unless one includes Cormac McCarthy in that category).

I bought a remaindered copy of Warlock probably 20 years back and only just pulled it down off the shelf. Glad I did, because it’s a banger! Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven it’s a rather sophisticated deconstruction of the myths associated with the American West and gunslingers and cowboys. The hero of the story has a morally ambiguous past and when hired to be Marshall of Warlock struggles with the ethics of his situation. Is he a murderer for hire, or a representative of law and order? What is a government other than an agency dictating behavior via the threat extreme violence? Can citizens have a sense of peace and freedom without a killer to back up those ideals? How is a hired gun who kills to keep the peace different from a blackguard who kills to take money from a stagecoach?

The novel features some historical figures and also transposes mythic characters from the OK Corral into thinly disguised avatars. There are IWW prototypes working the mines and rebelling against brutal treatment, there are cross-border skirmishes between cattle rustlers in the US and Mexico, there are Apaches, there is the US Cavalry and a half-crazed senile general. Whores, saloon keepers, merchants, deputies, judges, and rugged outlaws eek out a living in a land where law is dictated by force and mob rule. There is the outlaw turned deputy who, like the hero, tries to do the right thing but cannot always navigate the complexities of the myriad relationships and power struggles. And there is revenge; a LOT of revenge.

The novel surprised me often by subverting standard genre tropes familiar from TV and film. The writing was elegant and Oakley Hall created engaging and multifaceted characters and situated them in an intricately detailed setting.

My one critique involves a love scene which descends into bodice-ripper cliché. But overall I thought Warlock was excellent and it pulled me inevitably to its satisfying conclusion. Thomas Pynchon called it one of America’s greatest novels–it’s certainly better than anything he wrote (excepting perhaps The Crying of Lot 49).