Boldtype | August 2008


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August 2008:: issue 58

Books This Month
1.	Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
2.	The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace
3.	The Likeness by Tana French
4.	The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
5.	The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon
6.	A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
7.	Teun Hocks by Teun Hocks and Janet Koplos
	Interview: John Banville Interview: Akashic Books, Johnny Temple Book News Credits/About Us

Mysteries

We're leaving no stone unturned in our search for top-shelf whodunits this month. We do things in style with a John Banville interview about writing hardboiled fiction under his Benjamin Black nom-de-plume. We also chat with publisher Johnny Temple about the vision behind Akashic's City Noir series. Meanwhile, we found time to vet some books for you this month — rising star Tana French offers a crisp literary thriller, Tom Rob Smith creates an atmospheric Stalin-era page-turner, and Mohammed Hanif reimagines a famous assassination. For those who like mysteries that don't involve a corpse, there's a more genteel forgery-whodunit surrounding the world's most expensive bottle of wine.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

FICTION

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith


Published:	April 2008
Pages:	439
Publisher:	Grand Central
Links: Newsweek review NY Daily News review New York interview Guardian interview

“Apt comparisons have been made to Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 classic, but Child 44 is wholly original — a page-turning thriller that stunningly evokes an era of near-inconceivable repression.”

Review
From page one of his well-hyped debut novel, Child 44, Tom Rob Smith makes full use of his experience as a screenwriter, combining razor-sharp pacing with precise, informative dialogue that never becomes dull or gratuitous. Apt comparisons have been made to Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 classic, but Child 44 is wholly original — a page-turning thriller that stunningly evokes an era of near-inconceivable repression.

In 1953 Russia, obedience to the state is paramount. Hardworking yet destitute citizens struggle to survive in Stalin's totalitarian society, an environment in which even the most insignificant speech or action against the government can result in a lengthy trip to the Gulag camps. Leo Demidov, a dedicated agent for the MGB (later to become the KGB), demonstrates his patriotism by arresting "dissidents," many of whom are law-abiding citizens. But after a demotion, and a concurrent series of murders he thinks are connected, Demidov must fight against the system he worked so hard to uphold. His search for the killer could attract the full wrath of the Stalinist regime, endangering not only his own life, but also those of his wife, his parents, and hundreds of innocent people.

Keep reading »

NONFICTION

The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace


Published:	May 2008
Pages:	319
Publisher:	Crown
Links: Economist review NY Daily News review USA Today review

“The central deception was based upon an illusion more appealing than the wine itself: the imagined indulgence of exclusivity.”

Review
On December 5, 1985, publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes purchased a bottle of 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux (said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson) for a record-breaking $156,000. The extravagance of the purchase sent shock waves through the wine world — but none that would match the collective gasp when, years later, the vintage was called out as a forgery. In The Billionaire's Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace re-examines the scandal's mystique, masterfully unraveling a fast-paced tale of power, deception, and oenophilic excess.

Wallace carefully sketches out the various circumstances surrounding the sale, suggesting that the central deception was based upon an illusion more appealing than the wine itself: the imagined indulgence of exclusivity. Despite seemingly obvious clues to the contrary — the bottle showed suspiciously little evaporation; Jefferson's scrupulous records never made mention of the wine in question; and the seller, Hardy Rodenstock, wouldn't disclose the antique's origins — the wine's legitimacy was supported by one of the world's foremost tasters, Michael Broadbent, before Forbes bought the bottle. It wasn't until years later that Rodenstock was felled by the same status-seeking penchant that drove his success: following the sale of four other allegedly Jeffersonian bottles, a wary client — Florida oil billionaire Bill Koch — launched an all-out investigation, spending more money cornering the German dealer than he had originally spent on his wares.

Although Wallace's book has the feverish momentum of a page-turner, the real-life case's lack of resolution leaves a subtly dissatisfying aftertaste. Still, The Billionaire's Vinegar is a mystery to be savored, offering an unprecedented portrait of a case that rocked an impossibly exclusive world to its foundation. As for the precious Bordeaux, the spotlight's glare turned out to be literally too much. Forbes was more interested in the cachet of his purchase (its supposed lineage) than its actual contents — so, rather than store it, he put it on display in a brightly lit case. By the time the heat-shriveled cork fell into the dusty bottle, the prized liquid had turned to vinegar.
- Chelsea Bauch

FICTION

The Likeness by Tana French


Published:	July 2008
Pages:	480
Publisher:	Viking
Links: Author website Book trailer Author interview

“Themes that might be subordinate (or even nonexistent) in a lesser novel share the stage with the whodunit at the heart of The Likeness.”

Review
When it comes to keeping readers satisfied, no novelist has a smaller margin for error than the writer of so-called "literary thrillers." It's like trying to have one's literary cake and eat it too: snobs will indulge in a finely tuned police procedural only if spared the infelicities of genre prose; mystery addicts with little patience for belletristic snooze-fests are wary of buying product cut with subtlety, insight, and a lack of adverbs. It's no wonder Booker winner John Banville decided to write his mystery novels under a pen name: it was a pre-emptive strike against haters from both sides.

The latest author to pull off this delicate balance happens to be Banville's countrywoman (most of the pre-eminent writers in the subgenre are, notably, European), and the state of affairs in contemporary Irish life is very much in the foreground of Tana French's writing. The narrator of The Likeness, which picks up six months after the events of French's Edgar-winning In the Woods, is Cassie Maddox, a murder detective who played a supporting role in the first book. She is thrust into an undercover assignment based on a highly implausible (but immensely compelling) conceit: a body is discovered that looks exactly like Cassie, with an ID bearing the name Alexandra — aka Lexie — Madison, an undercover alias Cassie used years before. Her bosses see an opportunity to solve the mystery of both this woman's identity and that of her killer by seamlessly inserting Cassie back into Lexie's life, as if she'd survived the attack. When Lexie returns to the decrepit mansion she shares with four fellow graduate students, they look like they've seen a ghost — and with good reason, it turns out.

As the story unfolds, themes that might be subordinate (or even nonexistent) in a lesser novel share the stage with the whodunit at the heart of the book, ranging from the shadow cast by Ireland's colonial past to the tensions between individual, community, and society. In the end, these concerns and the procedural conventions of the plot feel equally organic and necessary — everyone gets their cake, but no one goes hungry.
- Chris Parris-Lamb

NONFICTION

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi


Published:	June 2008
Pages:	322
Publisher:	Grand Central
Links: Atlantic Monthly article Onion A.V. Club review

“Preston's eye for detail and his wry notion of human foible make this an endlessly readable history.”

Review
For first-time visitors, the pace of Italian life takes adjustment: dinners last three hours or more, a trip to the shop involves twenty minutes of chatting and five minutes of buying, and any post-Renaissance architecture in Florence is called a "new building." While this mellow lifestyle and reluctance for change can charm outsiders, it presents certain difficulties for Italians with less relaxed agendas.

Take, for example, the central problem of youthful hormones. Out of conservative cultural custom, young Italians often find themselves living with their parents well into adulthood, so, for decades, Florence lovebirds would drive to the rolling hills outside the city to get busy in their cars. And yet, between 1974 and 1985, an ominous shadow was cast over these sexual dalliances, when seven such couples were murdered in a gruesome fashion. After shooting his victims at point-blank range, the killer would mutilate the body of the female — stealing her sexual organs. These crimes shocked the Italian public, and the killer became known as "The Monster of Florence."

When thriller writer Douglas Preston moved to Florence in 2000, he had no idea his quaint farmhouse stood a stone's throw from one of the murder sites. When Preston met legendary Italian crime journalist Mario Spezi, however, he learned the history of the case — a Wagnerian opera of endless plot twists, unreliable witnesses, tales of satanic cults and orgies, bombastic public prosecutors, and, of course, conspiracy theorists. Preston soon became obsessed, and the two men embarked on their own investigation, hoping to succeed where three decades of police work failed. This is easier said than done in a country where tradition counts for more than logic; angry at their intrusion, prosecutors went so far as to put Preston and Spezi themselves under investigation.

The Monster of Florence is a perfect storm of a true-crime book. Preston's eye for detail and his wry notion of human foible make this an endlessly readable history. As the line between the storyteller and his tale is breached, the book turns into a fascinating examination of the dark, slow-burning Italian public psyche. Under the Tuscan Sun this is not.
- Paul Whitlatch

FICTION

The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon


Published:	2006
Pages:	216
Publisher:	New York Review of Books
Links: Complete Review review Paris Review interview Guardian author bio NY Times author profile

“When a gunshot finally cuts through his stupor, Loursat reluctantly decides to learn why adolescents are out murdering in the depths of his mansion.”

Review
Georges Simenon wrote over 400 novels, sold about 550 million copies of them, and, just ahead of Pope John Paul II, is one of the world's most-translated authors. When he retired in 1973 to dictate his memoirs (21 more volumes), he was among the best-selling authors of all time. With numbers like these, it would be easy to write off Simenon as a hack — but think again: André Gide spoke for many when he pronounced Simenon's existentialist masterpieces superior to those by Camus.

With recent acclaim from the likes of John Banville, Luc Sante, and Paul Theroux, there are plenty of reasons to get into Simenon, and his novel The Strangers in the House (first published in 1940) is a great place to start. Strangers is one of Simenon's romans durs (he only wrote 117 of these), books far more bleak than his popular, feel-good Inspector Maigret stories. Squat in Strangers' center sits Hector Loursat, an overweight, middle-aged lawyer with nothing but money and time. He's so wrapped in drunkenness and isolation that he can't be bothered to notice when his teenage daughter and her friends turn his mansion into a den of sin. When a gunshot finally cuts through his stupor, Loursat reluctantly decides to learn why adolescents are out murdering in the depths of his mansion.

Keep reading »

FICTION

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif


Published:	May 2008
Pages:	323
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: NY Times review Washington Post review Author bio

“Hanif's multivocal mystery offers glimpses into intersecting everyday lives in modern Pakistan, while also holding a mirror up to the tentacles of the US military-industrial complex.”

Review
Mohammed Hanif's exciting first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, begins at the story's end. Pakistani president Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's plane explodes, killing him and several advising officers. The book reimagines the truth behind this historical event, which has already been fictionalized in Salman Rushdie's Shame and adapted for the screen in Charlie Wilson's War.

Military dictatorships go hand in hand with coup conspiracies, and Hanif skillfully plays off Zia's disillusioned advisors and confidantes to create a ragtag cast of plotters. These range from a token mango farmer-cum-radical and an obligatory insider terrorist to suspicious American CIA men, a pot-smoking, effeminate drill sergeant, and even Zia's wife. Their machinations unfurl against the president's mounting sense of insecurity and erratic behavior, as he draws statecraft instructions from daily readings of the Koran and condemns a blind woman to death by stoning as punishment for rape. Hanif's multivocal mystery offers glimpses into intersecting everyday lives in modern Pakistan, while also holding a mirror up to the tentacles of the US military-industrial complex. A torture facility hidden under the picturesque Lahore Fort anticipates Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

The tale is told from several perspectives, but the most consistent narrator is Pakistan Air Force Academy cadet Ali Shigri. He is engaged in a secret homosexual relationship with his bunkmate, Obaid, and has a grudge to bear against the president over the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father's death. At one point, Shigri asks Obaid why he continues reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold despite knowing the protagonist's doomed destiny. Obaid simply responds, "To see how he dies." This clever allusion to Mangoes' own reverse chronology underscores the book's allure: theories and suspects may swirl with increasing promise, but ultimately it's not what, but how that propels the plot.
- Robyn Hillman-Harrigan

ART

Teun Hocks by Teun Hocks and Janet Koplos


Published:	2006
Pages:	95
Publisher:	Aperture
Links: Artist website Artist gallery ARTINFO.com interview

“The artist's attention to detail (and his aversion to titling) makes each work a self-contained, unanswerable mystery.”

Review
A man working late into the night is beset by personal demons — little pitchforked ones. They swirl over his head, competing for his attention with winged angels carrying harps, all of whom he attacks with the indiscriminate application of a flyswatter. That the man and these manifestations of good and evil all share the same physiognomy doesn't deter him from wielding his wooden weapon.

Regardless of his determination, there seems little promise that the hero is involved in a winning battle, though he's too slight of a figure to incur real demonic wrath anyway. This blend of whimsy and defeat appears throughout this collection of Teun Hocks' painted photographs. In image after image, there is hope (a struggling sapling rising from a rocky ground), labor (a watering can encouraging it forth), and, finally, concession (a rope coiled around the sapling, ending in a noose). A singular figure — the artist himself, but dubbed the Everyman in the introductory essay by Art in America editor Janet Koplos — pits himself against nature, as represented by a dark Dutch landscape, or against his own physical and mental shortcomings, with a steadfastness that borders on lunacy.

Koplos writes that the essence of Hocks' work, "like a good political cartoon," can be captured by a pithy sentence or two. While this is certainly true on one level, the artist's attention to detail (and his aversion to titling) makes each work a self-contained, unanswerable mystery. Is the painter who turns an idyllic landscape into a scene of violent turbulence revealing a troubled conscience, or quixotic dreams of escape? Whose smoking rifles protrude menacingly from an otherwise pathetically weather-beaten shack? It is in these questions that Hocks makes the viewer, too, an everyman — after all, few qualities are as universal as uncertainty. And it is here that the displacement of Chaplin farce to a Bruegel field turns disquieting, fascinating, and deeply touching.
- Grace Labatt

INTERVIEW John Banville		After winning the coveted Man Booker prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, John Banville made a mysterious move. Eschewing the elaborate style that brought him fame — and that routinely garners comparisons to Nabokov, Beckett, and Proust — he instead churned out a trio of hard-boiled crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black. Recently, Banville answered some questions from Boldtype's Michael Romano, discussing his latest stylistic excursion, his love of pulp fiction, and his career-long fascination with mystery. Boldtype: Who is Benjamin Black, and why did you become him? John Banville: Benjamin Black does not exist. In 2004, when I had finished writing The Sea, I began to read Georges Simenon for the first time — not the Maigret books, which I don't much care for, but what Simenon called his romans durs, his hard novels — and I was tremendously impressed by the effects he could achieve with such spare materials. I had a television script, which was not going to be made into a film, so I decided instead to turn it into a novel. I took the pen name merely to alert my readers to the fact that Christine Falls was not an elaborate postmodernist literary joke, but a straightforward crime novel in which "what you see is what you get." At the time, Benjamin Black seemed no more than a jeu d'esprit, but looking back now, I think John Banville needed to be shaken up a little, in order to break the long trail of first-person novels I have been writing since the early '80s. BT: What are the differences between Black and Banville? JB: Speed, for a start. Banville writes very slowly indeed; Black is scandalously fluent. On the morning when I sat down to begin Christine Falls, I was not at all sure that I could do it, but by lunchtime, I had written 1,500 words, to my amazement. Banville would be pleased to get 150 words done in a morning. Of course, there are profounder differences. Black is a craftsman and proud to be so; Banville tries to be an artist, whatever that is. BT: You say you began writing the first Black novel, Christine Falls, shortly after finishing The Sea. Did The Sea mark the end of something? Keep reading »

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INTERVIEW Akashic Books, Johnny Temple		Brooklyn Noir started off as a love letter from Akashic Books founder Johnny Temple to his beloved borough. That 2004 mystery anthology was such a success that Akashic embarked on a multi-city Noir series. Each anthology is comprised of original noir stories written and edited by authors who feel a kinship to their particular city — from DC to Dublin, and Los Angeles to London. Boldtype's Diana Metzger chats with Temple about his favorite cities, what makes a story particularly "noir," and which modern-day politician he thinks is straight out of a noir novel. Boldtype: How did the Noir series come about, and what first drew you to the project? Johnny Temple: It was never initially intended to be a series. It was originally a single book: Brookyln Noir. This collection of stories began through conversations between myself and [editor] Tim McLoughlin. There are so many diverse neighborhoods within Brooklyn, so we first thought about it as being several books — each focusing on a different part of Brooklyn. Then it morphed into us turning it into a compilation of stories. Brooklyn Noir became a huge success for us; the New York Times wrote a big feature on it, and many of the stories were in that year's edition of The Best American Mystery Stories. The stories really seemed to capture the voice of Brooklyn. We wanted to extend that idea to other regions and cities. BT: How would you classify a story as being "noir"? JT: We, at Akashic Books, define it pretty broadly. I'd say a noir story is one of dark fiction. There's a prominent crime and/or criminal element within each story. I like to think that the protagonist is always in trouble and it just gets worse. Our noir stories are broad and unique because of the broad range of contributing writers. BT: How do you find the authors and editors for each collection? Keep reading »

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
To catch a Shakespearean thief (Slate)
Following the discovery of a stolen 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare, Slate's Paul Collins explains why stealing Shakespeare is even stupider than it sounds.
Choose Your Own Adventure: 2.0 (Guardian)
Choose Your Own Adventure books — widely popular among sci-fi and fantasy geeks in the '80s — have been revived and revamped for a new generation of interactive readers.
America's new Poet Laureate (NY Times)
Kay Ryan has been appointed the 16th US Poet Laureate.
Booker revisited (Guardian)
Following Salman Rushdie's Best of the Booker win, the Guardian's John Mullan looks back at some of the Booker Prize's lesser-known winners.
Lost in translation (AP)
An English translation of Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial novel The First Circle will be released in its entirety, 40 years after it was originally published.
Pessoa's letters spark debate (NY Times)
The heirs of Portuguese poet and national hero Fernando Pessoa have announced their controversial plan to auction off his correspondence with British eccentric Aleister Crowley.
Books aren't going anywhere (Telegraph)
Despite fears of their imminent extinction, the Telegraph's Paul Gent makes a strong case for the longevity of bound books.
Poe gets a makeover (Washington Post)
Edgar Allen Poe's Bronx home — where he spent his final years — will have its first full renovation.
I <3 txting (Guardian)
Linguistics professor David Crystal argues that texting improves reading and writing among youngsters and will not dstroy lnguage as we knw it.
Secret sale of rare Iraqi books (Middle East Times)
An Israeli newspaper recently reported that approximately 300 books confiscated by Saddam Hussein from Iraq's Jewish community had been secretly bought by a Jewish heritage foundation and smuggled into Israel.


CREDITS Managing Editor Toby Warner Deputy Editor Chelsea Bauch Contributing Editors Jennifer Chen Chris Parris-Lamb Paul Laster Doug Levy Mark Mangan Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors Scott Esposito Robyn Hillman-Harrigan Grace Labatt Eric Liebetrau Diana Metzger Michael Romano Paul Whitlatch Production & Design Jessica Bauer-Greene Sascha Lewis Tom Starkweather Andrew Steinmetz Daphne Yang Cover Art Teun Hocks Untitled, 2000 Oil on toned gelatin silver print 50 3/8 x 67 1/4 in./128 x 170.8 cm Courtesy Aperture, New York All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill publishes a series of online magazines, covering ART, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. Coming soon: STYLE/DESIGN and FILM. Subscribe now. ADVERTISING PARTNERS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive advertising partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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