So! We're back to another installment of the First Officer's Log, and, following through from my last post (apologies for the long delay - madness has ensued), I'm going to mention a handful of European and Asian mystery writers who have caught my fancy. I mentioned a number of Americans whom I am quite taken with, but I admit that I've found some non-American authors more interesting.
The few Europeans who have caught my eye tend to be British in flavor. Val McDermid, still a favorite after all these years, wowed me when I was a teenager with her exquisitely twisted serial killer novel "The Mermaid's Singing". While I find a few quibbles with the novel now (mostly with regard to characterization), I still find it a deliciously twisty turny mystery, featuring a criminal profiler who meets his match in a killer who is never quite what he seems. Her follow up, a stand alone called "Killing the Shadows", could be read as a response to her own genre: the serial killer and criminal psychologist profiler story line. While it's become a bit cliche in this day and age, McDermid wrote an excellent novel with "Shadows", where the victims of a serial killer are those very writers who create novels in which profilers triumph over all evils. McDermid is such a good writer because she seems to grasp the flaws in her own genre and is not afraid to show them to the public. Of her novels, "Killing the Shadows" still reigns as my favorite.
John Connolly, whom I've mentioned before, gets another nod on this list of favorites. His Charlie Parker novels, marvelously eerie and elegantly written, portray a man who faces evil head on, with the full knowledge that the farther he progresses into his series, he is slowly becoming the very thing that he hunts. Connolly's novels get eerier and more sinister with the telling, and his stand alone novel "Bad Men" might be amongst the best novels I've ever read, simply because it never goes in the direction you expect. A murder occurs, and a good island police officer dedicates himself to finding out what has happened, with results that leave the reader (well, this reader at least) alternately flabbergasted and filled with pride, secure in the knowledge that there is one author in this world who is unafraid of playing in the darkness, and somehow coming out with his hands more or less clean. Connolly's novels all take place in the American NorthEast, though he is an Irishman. His prose captures the haunting atmosphere of Maine and the villages on the coast, relating the stories of men who have fallen into the depths of a place between life and death, and perhaps somewhere in between.
It is a difficult thing, determining who my favorite mystery writer is, but between Connolly and the American Dennis Lehane, I'll never be bored.
Two more authors I'd like to bring to your attention, both Japanese, a man and a woman, who write about Japan as it is now, from the 1970s to the chilling present.
Ryu Murakami's (no relation to Haruki) books came to my attention last summer, when I decided that, since I didn't know much about Japanese literature, that I should dive into it head first, without looking at the pond depth. Murakami is an engaging writer, with a voice that plays and twists with your expectations. "In the Miso Soup", probably his best known novel in the states, takes place over three nights in Tokyo, as a young Japanese man leads an unusual American on a tour of the red light district. Along the way, the young man begins to suspect that his client is a serial killer. The story alternates between horrific and laugh out loud funny, but when the conclusion arrives, it is bittersweet. "Coin Locker Babies" is a sharp detour, a novel about two young teenage boys, abandoned at birth by their mothers and left to die in subway coin lockers, who survive and become reflections of the 1980s. One becomes a punk rock singer, the other a student, but they remain friends and decide to find the women who abandoned them and seek revenge. It is not a gentle story, and might leave you feeling uneasy, if only because Murakami writes about shattered youth so well, so refreshingly, and with an understanding of youth culture that American writers don't seem to grasp as well.
The last writer I want to introduce to you is Natsuo Kirino, a mystery writer who writes about women and men and the terrible, sometimes desperate, things that pass between them as they attempt to survive. Her first novel translated into English "Out" is a brutal thriller, while "Grotesque" is a terrifying journey into the life of a woman who has no regrets. Her newest novel, "Real World" is about teenage girls in Japan, and what kind of a life they occupy and represent. It is as much a novel that seeks to educate outsiders about teenagers in Japan as it is a novel about teenage girls, and the things they think they want despite their youth. It is a message that crosses cultures. Kirino strikes me as a woman who gets women, actually understands the horrors and the terrors that women still face, and isn't afraid to talk about them. From this stance, I admire her, for while I can't always agree with what she writes, and I can't always read it with a strong stomach, I can read it and understand that she is telling a story, a painful but brilliant story. For this reason, I love her books.
Well, many thanks for allowing me to ramble on about mysteries I like. Does anyone have a suggestion of a mystery writer I should check out? American or European? What mysteries get under your skin or make you think?
Until next week, fellow bibliophiles.
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