Chandler, Wife & City

Raymond Chandler is one of those writers whose books call out to me every couple of years, the answer to which is taking down one of his seven novels or several books of stories and submerging myself in the dank shadows of his landscape—Los Angeles, circa 1940s.

A few months ago a friend in Los Angeles recommended a book on the subject of Raymond Chandler. The book is one called, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, by Judith Freeman; published in 2007. It is a strange and captivating tale Ms Freeman tells, and it is as much about the city of Los Angeles as it is about Ray and his wife, Cissy Pascal. Geography, setting and corruption are central characters in the work of Chandler, and influenced his writing as much as the presence of his longtime wife. In telling her story, Freeman wraps the city and its tarnished personality securely around her human characters.

From early on Freeman realized that the mystery couple, Ray and Cissy lived a peripatetic lifestyle grounded in something central to their city view, to their understanding of the city’s first-of-a-kind development throughout the years from 1913 to 1954. During the years of their marriage (1924-1953) the couple never left California, while living a few months in one rented apartment or house, before moving to another. Freeman researched and visited most of the thirty-six places the couple lived.

The life of Raymond Chandler, as well as his writing were strongly colored by the woman he loved, a beautiful woman eighteen years older than he. From the beginning to the end, Cissy’s true age was a hidden secret, and it was some years before Ray realized he had married a woman almost old enough to be his mother. But to her credit, Cissy was far more than a pretty face; a woman of intelligence, talent and wit enough to bedazzle Ray Chandler. Not a storybook or fairy tale match, but one that included devotion and love, as well as need.

The Long Embrace gives the Raymond Chandler fan a bounty of ideas on how the stories and novels were conceived and written. We also see how an alcoholic bookkeeper fired from the oil business became the creator of Philip Marlowe, the iconic private eye. Freeman uncovers what was almost an umbilical cord connecting Chandler’s adopted home to his story settings.

‘A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.’ — THE LONG GOODBYE

The Long Embrace is ostensibly about a writer and the woman in his life, but it is in every way also a book about the city of Los Angeles between 1913 and 1954, and it is a fascinating read. A big thanks to Shelby for the recommendation. I got the book first at the library, but ordered a copy to keep before I was halfway through the library copy.

Dark Streets

A friend recently passed on to me a big thick paperback, a trilogy of novels called collectively Berlin Noir. The book is a 1993 Penguin paperback that includes March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991). Long a fan of hard-edged mystery stories in the noir style, this collection was quick to grab my interest. Not my usual practice to write about a book before I’ve finished reading it through to the end, but I am making an exception this time because my comments will stay pretty much with the book’s setting.

What exactly is noir fiction? It describes a style that is lean and direct with a fair serving of gritty realism, a further development of the hardboiled crime story made popular by Dashiel Hammett and refined by Raymond Chandler. Noir fiction took its name from “film noir,” dark dramas of hardboiled stories. Jim Thompson is a paramount name in noir, but what many have failed to notice is that Patricia Highsmith was the ultimate of noir writers. Though Raymond Chandler may be more accurately described as a writer of hardboiled fiction, the darkness of his Los Angeles streets and the characters who inhabit them is very definitely a noir characteristic.

The Chandler descriptions of Los Angeles make up the element that many of his readers look for in each of his books. The city becomes a character as much alive as any of his human characters. And it is that point that connects him to Philip Kerr and his trilogy, Berlin Noir. In March Violets, the Kerr book I am now reading, the city of Berlin, circa 1936 is recreated so finely, and with such completeness that it makes me believe the writer must have had photographs and maps tacked up all around his writing desk. He writes of dark, wet streets and you feel that darkness and wetness as though you were standing there on Alexanderplatz in east Berlin looking up through lamplit drizzle at Berolina Haus and Alexander Haus. Kerr does for Berlin what Chandler does for Los Angeles. Here is Kerr in an interview:

‘Yes, I tried to make Berlin a character in the same way that Los Angeles is a character in Chandler, which is probably where people get the idea that I copied Chandler. I do admire his descriptions of places and have always used them as an example of excellence that I set myself. It seems to me that a sense of place is essential in all good fiction. I like to think of myself as being rather similar to a painter in that I describe pictures of places.’

Kerr is so successful in his descriptions of Berlin 1936 that holding the book open in my hands I almost feel as though I’m wearing a trench coat, a wide brimmed hat, cheap leather shoes, with a Luger stuffed in my pocket. Only halfway through March Violets, I am reluctant to say more about the book. But for those readers with a special penchant for noir, and especially pre-World War II Berlin, Philip Kerr and Berlin Noir is the ticket.

Bang Bang You’re Dead

Very likely that anyone who considers him or herself a fan of writer Raymond Chandler will be familiar with his seminal essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The essay was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, and was a response to Howard Haycrafts’s 1941 book, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, a work which celebrated the Dorothy Sayers-Agatha Christie model of detective fiction.

The style in this essay is very different from Chandler’s mystery stories and novels, and his criticism of British mystery writing razor sharp. The essay has become almost required reading for Chandler fans, and for anyone else hoping to understand how the genre has evolved.

Chandler argues in his essay that all too often—especially in the examples cited by Haycraft—the mystery writer makes an intellectual game of the story. He goes on to attack the contrived situations, the simplistic and improbable characterizations, and solutions devoid of ambiguity. To Chandler it lacks the messiness of real life, and he insists that fiction in any form must be realistic. In an amusing quip, he lambasts some of the famous names in British detective fiction, saying: ‘Personally, I like the English style better…The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ (Chandler lived in England until the age of twenty-four.)

A good part of “The Simple Art of Murder” is given to praise of Dashiel Hammett, explaining that Hammett, with his dialogue, characterizations and hard-boiled settings exemplifies the reality-realism necessary to lift the genre to a higher level.

The essay closes with what could be an almost point by point description of Chandler’s famous character, Philip Marlowe, a man operating in the reality of his (and our) society…

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

“He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

Moving forward a few years and looking at a modern writer who surely displays the Chandler legacy, we can see in Michael Connelly’s L.A. shamus, Harry Bosch, a man easily recognizable as the hero Chandler describes in “The Simple Art of Murder.”

“The Simple Art of Murder” complete essay here.

Dusty Pages of Another Season

Journal entries: June 2006 - September 2007

MONDAY 12 JUNE 2006

Telephone call from Moriyama-san at Fullhalter, the new Pilot Custom 823 fountain pen is ready for pick up. The work wasn’t scheduled to be finished before 8 July.

SATURDAY 17 JUNE

Restaurant in Oimachi called the Sun Room, with Kumiko after picking up the Pilot fountain pen. Pen in hand and full of Montblanc black ink (a very old bottle from 1985). Always thrilled with a new pen from Moriyama-san, this one is no different. As smooth as cream, the nib a perfect width and the whole thing a comfortable size and weight in my hand. The old Montblanc black ink is a surprise—a happy surprise. It has a sumi-like shade that I like. Everything feels just right with both pen and ink.

MONDAY 19 JUNE

Flashback to a memory from early days in Japan when I saw almost every day young businessmen on the way to work wearing the familiar dark suit, and snowy white socks inside black or brown dress shoes. Fast forward 25 years and it’s no longer old-fashioned white socks, but the hugely popular low-cut sport socks which almost everyone wears now. Look at the feet of young businessmen on the train these days and you will see those ankle high socks in dress shoes. Statement on the Japanese male’s sense of fashion?

SATURDAY 24 JUNE

At de feet o’ Jesus,

Sorrow like a sea.

Lordy, let yo’ mercy

Come driftin’ down on me.

At de feet o’ Jesus,

At yo’ feet I stand.

O, ma precious Jesus,

Please reach out yo’ hand. —Langston Hughes, 1932

TUESDAY 19 DECEMBER

Doutor for lunch, but luck is against me this time on my cherished 3rd floor. No sooner do I sit down at my favorite table, then here comes a herd of giggling, chattering housewives who quickly slam 3 tables together, pull down all the shades to erase the flood of sunlight and launch into loud banter.

In the middle of 3 books now, and depending upon where I am the book changes. Sitting at the kitchen table it’s book 13 in the Aubrey/Maturin series, slumped in the big blue chair it’s the book about Japanese student soldiers in WWII, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. The 3rd book, and the one in my bag now is Dickens’ Great Expectations, also the one I read on the train or bus.

MONDAY 8 JANUARY 2008

“Coming of Age Day” in Japan. 20 year-olds are celebrating their new ADULT status. Tokyo cold, as it always is on this day of the year. Passed an enjoyable afternoon with Sawane-san in Shinjuku yesterday. Been a long time since I had walked about the area just east of the station, and the changes surprised me—though they shouldn’t have, since no city anywhere tears down and rebuilds as much as Japan. The old oden restaurant Isuzu that a friend and I went to almost every Friday night for 2 or 3 years is now a Starbucks. Too bad, since the building was pre-war and the inside of the bar-restaurant all of that period. Everything has changed, everything.

Sawane-san and I went to the fountain pen clinic at Isetan, but it turned out to be a slight disappointment. Sawane-san was unable to get his Sailor King Cobra repaired.

MONDAY 26 FEBRUARY

Looking for something to read and rummaging through the book closet, I uncovered something I don’t even remember buying, a rather handsome 1st edition hardback of Donald Richie’s Japanese Literature Reviewed (2003). It is a collection of his reviews written over the years for his weekly column in The Japan Times. Happy to find that.

SUNDAY 4 MARCH

Done with a workout at the health club and in Doutor now for a spot of iced coffee, some scribbling and hopefully some moments of quiet here on the 3rd floor. Such a warm, warm March day for Tokyo, especially for a day barely out of February. Read a good bit of Shiga Naoya while riding the stationery bike at Tipness. Almost 20 miles in 60 minutes and 4 Shiga short stories. Thinking I might do a Shiga story in the lit classes at the university during the 2007-08 school year. Maybe some Shiga, maybe some Miyazawa Kenji, and maybe a selection from Ecclesiastes in the Bible. Need to think too about finding a replacement for the dear-to-me E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake.”

SUNDAY 4 MARCH

Reading Raymond Chandler these days. Talk about ‘economy of expression,’ Chandler can say more in 4 words than most can say in 24. Interesting essay by Chandler called “The Simple Act of Murder” that prefaces his collection of stories with the same name. Love what he said about famous English mystery writer Dorothy Sayers. She: ‘The detective story does not, and never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement.’ Chandler: ‘I do not know what the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers.’ —‘A male cutie with henna’d hair drooped at a bungalow grand piano and tickled the keys lasciviously and sang “Stairway to the Stars” in a voice with half the steps missing.’ —Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

MONDAY 12 JUNE

Saw something on the Classic Fountain Pens website last night I’m going to buy. It’s a cleansing cream to remove ink from hands and fingers, and do I ever need something to get the ink off my hands. Most of the time my fingers look like a Technicolor screen test.

Enjoyed the movie I saw yesterday in Kichijôji. Bloody spectacle of 480 BC, the Spartan stand at Thermapolae. The fight and battle choreography was excellent, and almost like a bloody ballet with spears, swords and shields. Have to laugh at the critics who get so uppity about 300 being nothing but a shallow and bloody mishmash with no historical veracity. Are they trying to fool themselves with such pretentious claptrap? It’s a Hollywood spectacle, for God’s sake, a film treatment of a graphic novel. What the critics missed was the director’s faithfulness to the format of narrative told through a series of frames on a page. Again and again in the film you see characters in a ‘comic book’ pose. This is especially true in the lush and bloody fight scenes. Freeze the frame and move it straight onto the page of a graphic novel or comic book. Well done and completely over the head of the critics. Same kind of technique in the Japanese movie Ping Pong, which also originated as a comic book.

SUNDAY 30 SEPTEMBER

Rainy and slightly chilly day in Tokyo. Some might call it autumn weather, but to me it doesn’t have that feeling. The air is different. What we call autumn in Tokyo has an entire vocabulary all its own, and there’s none of that in this last day of September. Nonetheless, I wear an autumn-intended pullover despite the contradiction of my sockless feet in a pair of Rockport deck shoes.

Rise and Fall

The name came up in something I was reading and though I never saw any of her movies I recognized it as that of an old movie star. Who was she? It turned out she was a hard luck actress.

One night in 1961 a reporter for the New York Post was having a drink in the bar of New York’s Martha Washington Hotel and recognizing something familiar about the barmaid asked, “Have you always been a waitress?” The barmaid replied, “No, I was a movie star.” The barmaid was Veronica Lake, one of Hollywood’s biggest and most glamorous stars in the 1940s.

Constance Frances Marie Ockelman was born in Brooklyn in 1919. Her father died in a work accident when she was thirteen and her mother remarried and moved the family to Montreal. Constance attended a girls’ school for two years but her strange behavior led to expulsion and diagnosis as a paranoid schizophrenic. They moved to Miami but a year later relocated once more, this time to Hollywood.

With some small success as a beauty queen back in Florida, Constance began to daydream about acting and enrolled in an acting school at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. She tagged along with a friend to an audition for a bit part in the film Sorority House (1939) and got a part in a crowd scene. As Constance Keane she followed that with other bit parts, leading to a small part in Forty Little Mothers (1940), directed by Busby Berkeley. That same year she married her first husband, art director John Detlie.

During a screen test for a supporting role in 1941 her long blonde hair kept falling in her face obscuring one eye. The problem turned into a bonus when the producer liked the look and gave the young actress the leading role and a new name, Veronica Lake. The movie was I Wanted Wings, starring William Holden and Ray Milland and was a big hit. It made the newly christened Veronica Lake a movie star.

A petite four feet eleven inches tall, Lake was a perfect co-star for the famously short Alan Ladd and the two made six films together in the 1940s, becoming one of the most popular film couples of the decade. After making So Proudly We Hail in 1943, Life Magazine named her the top female box office star of the year.

From the beginning of her stardom, Lake’s peekaboo hair style covering one eye had been copied by thousands of female fans. So many fans were copying the “Veronica Lake Look” that eventually, because long hair sometimes got caught in machinery, the government asked the actress to cut her long hair to inspire safety among the female workers in defense plants. Lake ultimately agreed, but her patriotic sacrifice spelled doom. The new look of shorter hair was unbecoming to the actress and her career declined steadily.

Lake’s marriage to John Detlie produced two children and a divorce. In 1944, she married director Andre de Toth. Lake was earning $4,500 per week with Paramount but was drinking heavily and people began refusing to work with her. The studio cast her in a string of forgettable films, a notable exception The Blue Dahlia in 1946, once again with Alan Ladd. Disgusted by her condition and poor performance, screenwriter Raymond Chandler often referred to her as “Moronica Lake.” About her own talents, Lake once said, “You could put all the talent I had into your left eye and still not suffer from impaired vision.” Paramount declined to renew her contract in 1948. This brought on an increase in Lake’s drinking and by 1951 she had made only one more film with a different studio. The government seized the remainder of her assets for unpaid taxes and she divorced Andre de Toth. In 1955 she married a songwriter and fellow drinker.

Abandoning Hollywood, she and her third husband lived in a Greenwich Village apartment mostly fighting and drinking until their divorce. Alimony was not enough to cover the bills and Lake was evicted. She went on tour in a musical earning very little money but suffered another setback when a dancing partner fell on her leg and broke it. Unable to work, she ran out of funds and relied upon friends for food and other necessities. In time, the one-time movie star was drifting from one cheap hotel to another in Brooklyn and New York, arrested more than once for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

Living at the Martha Washington Hotel for Women in New York City, she took a job in the hotel lounge as a barmaid in order to pay the rent. It was here that the newspaper reporter recognized her and wrote a widely distributed article for his paper. This led to a television job and later the part of an aging movie queen in the 1963 off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward starring Liza Minnelli. Hoping to revive her film career, Lake made two low-budget movies but both received poor notices, doing more harm than good. With her physical and mental health in decline she hid out in Hollywood, Florida claiming the FBI was stalking her. She later spent a short time in England where she appeared in two plays and married her fourth husband, Robert Carleton-Munro. But soon enough Lake filed for divorce and returned to New York, where she was immediately hospitalized. After her release from the hospital, the alcoholic former star was often drunk and broke.

Veronica Lake passed her final days in the Burlington Vermont Medical Center signing autographs and enjoying her notoriety. None of the Hollywood friends who had once showered her with love and attention attended her funeral. She did however get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and today her autograph and memorabilia continue to command high prices.

In the Lamplight

Unusual in my often laid back life here at the beach, but this Saturday has been a non-stop day, leaving me little time to muse upon those things I most love. No thought for ocean scenery, for local color or fountain pens; no spare seconds for book browsing or dabbling in ink.

The usual pattern of my days more often than not allows me to read throughout the morning, corral some thoughts, and give most of the afternoon to writing or researching a topic relevant to a story or other writing project on my work table. That wasn’t in the cards today, and too much of the day has been taken up with issues that even now in this quiet solitary corner dominate my thoughts and scare off the quiet contemplation I am used to.

With a minimum of planning and too little to color in the details, here is a list of books that I have enjoyed, books that have not been previously reviewed or commented on at any length in past pages of this blog. In most cases the books listed below are titles I have either read more than once, or would happily do so.

Some exceptional books that have enlivened my love of reading.

NOVELS:

1. The Voyage by Philip Caputo

2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

3. The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

NON-FICTION:

1. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

2. The Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill

3. The Elements of Style by William Strunk & E.B. White

SHORT STORIES:

1. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

2. Things You Should Know, a Collection by A.M. Homes

3. “All Boy” by Lori Ostlund in Best American Short Stories 2010

POETRY:

1. Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems by Charles Bukowski

2. ten poems to change your life, compilation and commentary by Roger Housden

3. Bashô, The Complete Haiku by Matsuo Bashô, translated by Jane Reichhold

MYSTERY OR SUSPENSE:

1. Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

2. Burning Angel by James Lee Burke

3. The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and to hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare. —Yoshida Kenkô, Essays in Idleness (1340)

The Gentlemen’s Hour

Back in 2008 southern California crime writer Don Winslow published The Dawn Patrol and along with a bang up story, gave readers the ultimate in San Diego surfing culture and history. As much as James Lee Burke has made south Louisiana a vibrant, living and breathing character in his novels, Winslow has done the same for southern California and that stretch of ocean and beach around San Diego where American surfing was born. The Dawn Patrol also introduced a cast of characters that probably had most readers begging for a sequel. Chief among them was Boone Daniels, surf bum-ex-cop-private investigator, and the most laid back ultra California cool guy on the planet. The sequel wish came true for British readers in 2009 with publication of The Gentlemen’s Hour, but for mysterious reasons we here in the US had to wait until July 2011 to get the book. It was well worth the wait.

Winslow is possessed of a special idiom and style that embraces a story not a whit less than such well-known California crime writers as Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly. In an earlier review of Winslow’s 2010 novel Savages, I described his economic prose as ‘short haiku-like paragraphs…a lesson in spare, lean prose rich enough to eat with a spoon.’—The impression is no different in The Gentlemen’s Hour. This is a writer who knows how to say everything needed in a stretch of three words, and leave nothing out. It is an impression that holds together even when Winslow is off his beat and aping the style of another writer, as he did earlier this year with a Trevanian remake called Satori, an effort that might have been better left unwritten. But looking at a cross-section of Winslow books, from California Fire and Life to this latest work proves that he is a master of different styles, able to switch them like the baseball caps he likes to wear.

Boone Daniels spends most of his time surfing and when the waves aren’t cooperating he does a little private investigating. This time he has two cases on his hands, neither one to his liking. A longtime buddy is looking to get the goods on a wife he thinks is cheating on him, and the possible results are not something Boone wants to discuss with a friend. Unrelated to that, he has been dragged into a murder investigation that crosses lines of friendship and threatens to isolate him, leaving him without all his lifelong friends. It has all the trademarks of an open-and-shut case. A local rich kid admits to killing a well-loved San Diego hero, a man much respected and admired by Boone and his Dawn Patrol surf buddies. One case threatens his life, the other a loss of all his oldest friends. Everything points to a partying wife in the first case, and everyone, including witnesses believe that a spoiled rich kid killed the local hero, but something about it all doesn’t smell right to Boone Daniels. Winslow has hung his hugely likeable protagonist up on a cross and every turn in the story winches his bonds tighter.

One of the most colorful characters in the book is another returning from The Dawn Patrol, a real bad dawg who goes by the name of Red Eddie (real name Julius) but a man with unbreakable loyalty to Boone for saving his son from drowning years back. Eddie has dyed red hair, a dozen or more tattoos, a degree from the Wharton School and a drug empire. He also entertains guests with crazed and unrestrained biting fights with his pit bull. But Red Eddie is not the only standout, The Gentlemen’s Hour has at least half a dozen other supporting characters, each with his or her distinctive style of cool.

All the ingredients are there: style, characterization, story, setting, tension, romance, action and suspense. Don Winslow at the very top of his game—The Gentlemen’s Hour.

Murder Japanese Style

Mystery writers in Japan enjoy a wide audience. Translations of well-known western writers in the genre fill shelves of Japanese bookstores, but most of the readership is given to a homegrown list of Japanese writers who crowd the bestseller lists. For years writers like Seichô Matsumoto, Jirô Akagawa and Natsuo Kirino have been writing books that achieve blockbuster sales in the murder mystery vein. It all started with Edogawa Rampo (a playful rendering of Edgar Allan Poe) sometime in the 1920s, whose ‘mysteries’ caught the attention of young readers. Jirô Akagawa was my first turn at a Japanese style murder mystery but struggles with the language probably dulled my appreciation of his story. Some time later I came upon another mystery writer in English translation and was floored. The impact of Natsuo Kirino’s 1997 mystery Out was so strong that I read it a second time in the same week.

Currently, one of the top-selling names in Japanese mystery writing is Keigo Higashino. He won the Mystery Writers of Japan award for a 1999 book titled Himitsu (The Secret) and after five earlier nominations, in 2006 he won the Naoki Prize for his novel, Yôgisha X no Kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X), which became the second highest selling book—fiction or non-fiction—in Japan. The Naoki is roughly equivalent to the National Book Award or The Man Booker Prize. In 1985 Higashino quit his engineering job at 27 after the success of his first book, Hôkago (After School), a book that won the Edogawa Rampo Prize, awarded annually to the year’s finest mystery book. Since then he has written thirteen bestsellers.

Browsing in Borders last week I came across a just released English translation of his prize winning book, The Devotion of Suspect X. I bought the book without a moment’s hesitation, hungry for some Japanese-style murder, familiar settings and recognizable character types. No disappointment with that purchase.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother and when her abusive ex-husband turns up in another attempt to extort money from her, he ends up strangled on her apartment floor. Yasuko’s next door neighbor hears the commotion, guesses the outcome and offers to help. Ishigami, the neighbor is a high school teacher and something of a mathematical genius, but one with romantic interests toward Yasuko. Not only does he dispose of the body but he also plots a cover-up to misdirect the police. Unable to find any holes in Yasuko’s alibi (concocted by the math teacher), detectives still have a feeling something is wrong with the story. The head detective calls upon a university friend, a physicist with a knack for unraveling police puzzles. The interesting twist is that the physicist is also an old classmate and friend of the math teacher. It becomes a high level battle of wits between mathematician and physicist, but one with a murderous twist.

True with many Japanese mystery stories, the ‘who and how’ aspect of The Devotion of Suspect X is given up in the first twenty-five pages of the book. The book’s tension derives from trying to figure out if and how the police will crack the case, meanwhile showing the murderer and her accomplice in a mostly favorable and sympathetic light. There is a simple elegance to the way mathematician (accomplice) and physicist (sleuth) come to grips in their struggle toward lack of proof and proof positive. We need no special knowledge of either field—Higashino keeps his story mathematical in the layman’s sense.

There is no striving for ‘literary fiction’ in Higashino’s writing, nothing like what we might encounter in the work of Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith or Dorothy Sayers. But this is by no means a negative observation, and Keigo Higashino does things with his style that we don't find in other mystery writers. Spare is the word that first comes to mind in trying to describe it. Economic is a word I like, and when that is achieved along with tension, momentum and sympathetic characters in a mind-twisting dilemma, well then I’m hooked.