You have been sent this message from
andrewty@i-manila.com.ph as a courtesy of
washingtonpost.com
Personal Message:
Thanks to Mark Sullivan of Rara-Avis for bringing this
up. The final section of this talks about the new Woolrich
anthology.
From Cuban diamonds to Italian bagmen -- a gazetteer of
violent dustups. By Richard Lipez
By Richard Lipez
When the Action Was in Havana
The brave, truth-telling Cuban crime writer Jose
Latour, who moved to Spain in 2002, made his name with
beautifully noirish renditions of low-life behavior at all
social levels in Fidel Castro's Cuba. In Havana World Series
(Grove, $23), Latour goes back to a time that's a natural for
desperate intrigue and score-settling: a week that comes six
months before the fall of the rancid Batista regime, when the
inevitability of the rebels' triumph had dawned on some
government officials, while other Batista skunks and their
American gangland cohorts remained clueless.
In this flavorsome, exactingly calibrated
caper-yarn-cum-thriller, Latour has Meyer Lansky, the
real-life elegant New York goon who ran the Havana casinos,
explain to a small gathering of mobsters why there is no need
for concern: "I have faith in this country. Cuba will become
the U.S. playground because of its beaches, casinos, hookers,
music, and national spirit. . . . Who wins is irrelevant in
these little wars, because all the winners want is to become
millionaires as quickly as they can." Lansky is not just
projecting here; he's speaking from personal experience up
and down the Western Hemisphere.
The mob kingpins remain so confident that they will
hang on to Havana as their profitable plaything that, back in
New York, Joe Bonnano, who wants to muscle in on Lansky's
Caribbean vice empire, sets in motion a scam to embarrass,
and as a consequence weaken, Lansky. Betting in Havana is
heavy on the 1958 Yankees-Milwaukee Braves World Series, and
the plotters aim to rob a Lansky casino of more than half a
million dollars in betting proceeds, a spectacular score back
then.
Most of the cash will go to the Cuban gang of five who
will carry it out -- for Bonnano the project is a loss-leader
-- and much of the appeal of Havana World Series lies in the
likable assortment of upwardly mobile thieves who just want
to come away with enough cash to establish a foothold in the
Cuban lower middle class. Melchor Loredo plans to open a
three-cent espresso stand. Fermin Rodriguez wants to run a
"disease free, respectable brothel where drugs, 8mm porno
films, and multiple sex would be taboo." The mechanics of the
heist are cunningly worked out, and the operation itself is
reminiscent of the movie "Ocean's Eleven," not the charmless
Rat Pack version but the recent Steven Soderbergh neat
job.
The complications Latour throws in are priceless -- for
one, Pope Pius XII dies, and the devout casino managers shut
the place down early one night out of respect -- and, not so
surprisingly, Meyer Lansky is shown to be a man in his
moment. He had risen to mob prominence pioneering the notion
that "crime was just business," and his way of dealing with
this unexpected challenge is worthy of a Halliburton
operative with an MBA from the University of Sani
Abacha.
Baseball fans will have a fine time with the
day-by-day, play-by-play of the games, which serves as a
suspenseful ticking clock in the narrative. (The Yankees take
the series in seven.) Habitual bettors, though, might not be
so entertained by Latour's knowing portrayal of casinos,
where the "supreme goal" is to leave "clients picked clean
but pleased about it."
Italian Intrigue
The mercenary and the political are also sinisterly
intertwined in Michael Dibdin's new Aurelio Zen mystery,
Medusa (Pantheon, $23), the ninth entry in a series that
becomes more and more assured each time. In this one, the
wry, accident-prone Rome police detective investigates the
discovery by spelunkers of a corpse in a World War I tunnel
in the Dolomites. The dead man is soon identified as an
Italian soldier from an elite unit who was reported to have
died in a plane crash in 1973. The Ministry of Defense keeps
placing palazzo-sized obstacles in the way of Zen's
inquiries, which only makes him testier and more
determined.
Dibdin, a Brit who now lives in Seattle, is not shy
about calling the current Italian head of government, Silvio
Berlusconi, a crook, and those who agree can read Medusa and
have a good time grinding their teeth over passages like this
one: "Despite Italy's economic prosperity and impeccable
European credentials, not to mention the glitzy 'open
government' stance of the current regime, its public history
remained riddled with the secret networks of events
collectively dubbed the misteri d'Italia. The wormholes
pervading the body politic remained, but the worms had never
been identified, still less charged or convicted."
Dibdin's presumably fictional plot, centered on a
secret plan to establish an Italian military dictatorship in
1973, provides an opportunity for Zen, and Dibdin's grateful
readers, to move up, down and across Italy as Zen
investigates. He meets the widow of the dead soldier's
commanding officer, and "there was something unwholesome"
about Paola Passarini, "like fruit picked green that rots
before it ripens." Among the other long-ago acquaintances of
the dead man who might know something about the Medusa tattoo
on the soldier's arm is Luca Brandelli, an aging lefty
journalist whose glory days are past but who is happy to have
Zen discreetly collaborate on one last "scandal to end all
scandals."
While much of the pleasure of reading Dibdin derives
from his palpable love of Italy's culture and people -- his
portrait of Zen's new girlfriend, Gemma, is especially
affecting -- he is hardly a pushover for Italy. Like his
mouthpiece Zen, Dibdin clearly finds the politics wretched.
And he seems to share the disapproval of another of his
characters for Italy's plummeting birth rate, manifest in "a
bunch of flashy yuppies with one spoilt designer child in tow
like a pedigree dog." Dibdin is essential reading for those
who love mysteries and Italy without illusions.
Remembrance of Brutalities Past
The invaluable Robert Barnard is on time with his
annual well-chosen gift to mystery readers, this one set in
present-day London and in the Australian outback of 1938. The
"dark" in A Cry From the Dark (Scribner, $24) is Bettina
Whitelaw's past. She is a fondly appreciated octogenarian
London novelist who first made her mark with the
semi-autobiographical "The Heart of the Land," about growing
up in a remote New South Wales farm town, Bundaroo, a place
of "open landscapes and closed minds." While working on a
nonfiction memoir of her youth, Whitelaw discovers that her
flat has been broken into, and later her housekeeper, Katie
Jackson, is beaten senseless while sleeping in Whitelaw's
bed.
Whitelaw fears that these events may be connected to
the post-school-dance rape that led her to abandon distant
Bundaroo as a teenager and to return only for family
funerals. Her attacker, who was never identified, might
somehow be aware of her speculations on the event in her
memoir.
Barnard shifts adroitly back and forth between the
London of literary salons and Covent Garden operatic evenings
and the pre-World War II rough life at the bottom of
civilization. A not especially well-liked prodigy back in
Bundaroo, Whitelaw is perfectly at home in London. She wants
to finish the memoir because she is weary and a bit cranky,
with a good bit in her life to be tired and cranky about.
There's the break-in, and also her nephew has landed from
Australia. Young Mark is a "lumbering mass of muscle and
self-love" who wants to act but works mostly as a "personal
something-or-other to people with more money than sense."
Then there is Clare Tuckett, Whitelaw's literary agent, who
is convinced someone is after the old lady's wealth. Peter
Seddon is a former lover, a London Transport driver who used
to scandalize the neighbors by parking his bus outside
Whitelaw's flat overnight. Hughie Naismyth is Whitelaw's
childhood pal who became a London writer and critic speciali!
zing in aboriginal art. Whitelaw's biological daughter turns
up, too; Whitelaw had put her up for adoption at birth after
ending her brief marriage to a World War II soldier who
charmed her briefly and then bored her out of her mind.
A well-plotted mystery, A Cry From the Dark is also an
absorbing novel of character about raising and lowering
emotional barriers, and about how old age is no excuse for
refusing to face hard truths about people and about oneself.
Whitelaw is a woman "who held her opinions obstinately," and
yet she discovers the strength of character to alter her
opinions if the price of self-delusion is high enough to
include both attempted murder and messing around with her
literary output.
Dealing in the High Sierra
The best part of High Country (Putnam, $24.95), Nevada
Barr's 12th mystery featuring National Park Service Ranger
Anna Pigeon, is a terrifying low-speed chase through the
wilderness near Yosemite National Park that goes on for days.
Hiking alone, Pigeon has stumbled upon a couple of homicidal
drug dealers who have been looting a crashed plane loaded
with high-grade marijuana. They shoot at her, wounding her in
the foot, and she drags through the snowy forest just ahead
of the killers, her only weapon being her skills in outdoor
survival. There's an amazing scene in which Pigeon, starving
and exhausted, doubles back on her pursuers, sneaks into
their tent at night, and has to decide whether or not to bash
their heads in with an ax. Another, later, similar scene is
literally eye-popping.
Squeamish readers should probably stick to Park Service
brochures about Yosemite. But High Country is guaranteed to
keep the pages turning, and the stomach too. The always
companionable Pigeon has been assigned to Yosemite to work
undercover as a waitress at the old Ahwahnee Hotel. She's to
try to learn why four young seasonal park employees vanished
eight days earlier. A number of these kids did or dealt
drugs, so that's a possible lead. And then there's the head
chef, who screams at Pigeon and seems psychotic, as well as a
waitress supervisor who is a "dried-up wisp of a woman with
the energy of a hundred monkeys, all of which, if put in a
barrel, would be no fun." Pigeon's law-enforcement supervisor
is an incompetent drunk, and among the other difficult
Yosemite regulars she must contend with is the ex-husband of
one of the missing workers who is determined to get hold of
his ex-wife's apron, of all things. Pigeon seems to be the
only Park Service employee in America any! one can
trust.
Tales by a Forgotten Master
Cornell Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins has put
together 20 previously uncollected stories by the
mid-20th-century master of anguished noir in Night and Fear
(Carroll & Graf, $26). I talked to a mystery fan recently
who wasn't sure who Woolrich was. The novels aren't read much
anymore, but most mystery lovers know the movies made from
his stories, most notably Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and
Truffaut's "The Bride Wore Black." Nevins's collection should
remind readers that Woolrich was a powerful original who
seemed to believe that violent psychopathology exists not in
a human-behavior compartment but on a spectrum, and that
under the right circumstances all decent people are capable
of beastliness.
In "You Bet Your Life," a man in a bar bets another he
can choose anyone at random on the street outside and lead
him into committing murder. That's far-fetched, even loony,
yet Woolrich writes with such style and conviction -- he was
a tortured, self-hating alcoholic himself -- that you suspend
disbelief and stay gaga with apprehension. In Woolrich,
innocent people often meet hideous ends at the hands of
bumblers or of "fate." An unintended victim dies in both
"Cigarette" and "New York Blues."
Woolrich's live-wire prose -- with lines like "His
breath sang in his chest like a windstorm" -- isn't as
impressive as it once was. But the overall effect is amazing.
Woolrich was a sorry mess, and he turned whatever went on in
his troubled heart into fiction that pulses with angst and
controlled terror. •
Richard Lipez writes mystery novels under the name
Richard Stevenson. "Death Trick," the first book in his
Donald Strachey private-eye series, was recently
re-released.
Would you like to send this article to a friend? Go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?contentId=A8784-2004Feb26&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle
Visit washingtonpost.com today for the latest
in:
News - http://www.washingtonpost.com/?referrer=emailarticle
Politics -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/?referrer=emailarticle
Sports -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/sports/?referrer=emailarticle
Entertainment -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/eg/section/main/index.html?referrer=emailarticle
Travel -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/travel/?referrer=emailarticle
Technology -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/technology/?referrer=emailarticle
Want the latest news in your inbox? Check out
washingtonpost.com's e-mail newsletters:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/email&referrer=emailarticle
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Feb 2004 EST