The next case was a young man arrested for grievous bodily harm. He pleaded guilty. A policeman told the court that he had struck his wife in the face with a glass while under the influence of drink. Desmond entered a plea for leniency. He spoke in low tones so that Gordon had to strain to hear what he was saying. He said that the young man had been motivated by jealous rage, that the young woman had indulged in relations with another man. He called it an occasion of adultery. He did not wish to condone the young man’s behaviour but he had now forsworn alcohol and was involved in part-time duties with a Christian organization.

Gordon could see the man’s wife sitting in front of him in the public gallery. She was small and blonde. There was a vivid scar across her cheekbone and nose and she lifted her hand often to touch it. Her husband didn’t look at her. Desmond said that she had allowed herself to be seduced by an older man, a manager at her place of work. He said that her husband, an assistant in a hardware shop, had seen them together in a bar on Amelia Street. The small blonde woman looked at the ground as Desmond went back over the details of her affair as though she knew herself on trial on grounds of betrayal and subversion of a plain man’s yearning heart.

When the judge passed down a sentence of one year’s penal servitude suspended for two years, the woman rose and quit the court without lifting her head, although Gordon saw her lips move as she passed him. He thought she was counting, as though disgrace was a thing to be tallied and made account of, or that she had henceforth been pledged to a recital of the lonely offices of the unfaithful wife.

The novel is based around actual events: On a wet and misty night in November 1952 the body of Patricia Curran was discovered in the grounds of her family home near Belfast. The 19-year-old had been stabbed 37 times.

The murder of the judge’s daughter led to a major miscarriage of justice that saw an innocent man “fitted up”, as the establishment closed ranks and covered up the killing. The victim of this conspiracy was Iain Hay Gordon, a 20-year-old Scotsman who was serving his National Service with the RAF in Northern Ireland.

In the year 2000 Mr Gordon finally managed to clear his name.

It emerged that he was coerced into signing a false confession, was wrongly ruled insane, and that there were serious faults in the police investigation. In fact, Gordon was completely innocent and was the subject of a genuine miscarriage of justice.

Eoin McNamee’s fictional representation of these events concentrates on human weakness, guilt, innocence and mischief, and he delivers a consummate and beautifully written tale.

McNamee is interested in corruption – people who have been corrupted; and he is interested in death; but his over-riding obsession seems to be the atmosphere in which both of these strands are played out. He is an artist who feels that his task is to find and deepen a mystery rather than explain it; he looks for and discovers a kind of truth, but that is not revealed to us in the form of an answer.

Finally, The Blue Tango is a masterclass in observational prose.

The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirt-sleeves and Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets, and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners. Mexican types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there, too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds and a street of bars and souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and further out there were more poor neighbourhoods, though they were less crowded, and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighbourhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and sometimes, in the distance, the sillhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighbourhoods ended and the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up, with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds, all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they saw a fence that separated the United States from Mexico and they gazed past it at the Arizona desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful, walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

This is a remarkable book by any standards, and I’m so glad I wasn’t put off by its 900 pages, and took the time to read it.

Bolaño actually presents us with five separate novels and, with the exception of the last one, they can all be read without reference to the others.

2666 opens with a novel about four European literary critics, academics, who specialize in the work of a fictional German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi. Archimboldi, rumoured to be a future recipient of the Nobel Prize, is an evasive and reclusive writer who stays well away from the public eye. In fact, none of the critics who pursue him in this novel manage to track him down in person, though they seek him in several different countries, even traveling to a boom town in Mexico in their quest.

Bolaño’s subjects are writers and violence, and staying in the border town of Santa Teresa, we are introduced to Amalfitano, a professor of philosophy and literature at the local university. This text is quite different to the opening novel of the quintet, with an overt feeling of magical realism about it; Amalfitano leaves a book of geometry hanging on a clothesline in his back yard, and we slowly become aware that he is slipping into insanity. We also learn something about Amalfitano’s first wife, who ran off after a mad Spanish poet.

The third part of 2666 is entitled, The Part About Fate, and follows an American reporter, Oscar Fate, who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. There have been clues in the two preceding books, but in this one we are very aware that there are lots of cases of sexually-violated and murdered young women, their bodies found regularly in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the surrounding desert. The narrative throughout is that of hardboiled noir.

The Part About the Crimes, the fourth part of 2666, is a tour-de-force, one inexhaustible list of the hundreds of women and girls who are butchered in and around Santa Teresa. One of the characters in this section introduces us to the concept of gynophobia, which is fear of women. Bolaño describes the discovery of each body in forensic, even clinical terms, in some cases drifting over to the more hard-edged tone of the crime-novelist. As the body-count builds, and with no solution or hint of closure in sight, we begin to glimpse the extent of the deep misogyny which pervades our society and culture. Though a handful of these horrific crimes are ’solved’, most are shelved with little or no investigation taking place.

The final section, The Part About Archimboldi, ties everything together. We finally meet the German writer, follow him through his childhood and his time as a soldier in the second world war, witness the surrealistic horror of the twentieth century through his eyes as well as taking in his relationship to beauty and solitude. And we finally understand how all the other sections of 2666 relate to each other.

It is, of course, impossible to describe this novel; to understand it and what it is about there is no substitute for reading the book. So much of its greatness is in the language and in the bravado of the telling. Bolaño is a poet and his prose is always drifting, like the smoke from a cigarette; it weaves patterns in your mind and carries on working in the same way whether the book is in your hand or not. I believe it is going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Roberto Bolaño was born 28 April 1953 in Santiago, Chile and he died 15 July 2003 in Blanes, Spain. 2666 was his final statement.

Brought up in a wealthy household in Michigan, the young Crippen was surrounded by pious males and prim, though imaginative female relatives. He was steeped in the words of the Prophets, especially Isaiah, and he dreamed of escaping into a metropolis, somewhere he could experience a sophisticated urban life, where a clever man could make his fortune without risk of physical harm.

He read dime novels and the tales of Edgar Allen Poe and, of course, Dickens while he waited for adulthood to scoop him up.

Crippen moved to London with the promise of a course in Homeopathy and spent some time as a student medic in the mad house, Bedlam.

His second wife, Cora Mackamotzi, proved to be something of a challenge:

Saturday midnight in our airless bedroom on East 14th. Cora’s voice, soft and persuasive in my ear.
‘This won’t hurt.’
‘It hurt last time,’ I said.
She ran a sharp fingernail along my spine. ‘I tied the knots too tight, that’s all. It’s an easy mistake to make.’
‘My circulation was cut off. There could have been serious consequences, Cora. Remember, I’m a medical man, I’m familiar with these things.’
‘And I’m familiar with what you secretly long for,’ she cooed in my ear. ‘Never mind those silly old serious consequences. Don’t be so solemn. You like what I like. Truly you do.’
It was futile to argue and in truth she was right. I loved our games with blindfolds and neckties. Mostly Cora liked to be in control, but from time to time she begged me to tie her up and then let my imagination roam. She told me that she liked to have her hair pulled at moments of intimacy, that pain and pleasure were two sides of the same coin.
Images of her with the debauched stove manufacturer kept springing into my mind: I could not help it. In bad dreams I saw Lincoln’s fat white body lying like a beached whale on top of her. Often I woke from such dreadful moments in the small hours to find myself drenched with sweat while she slept beside me. Fighting to suppress my fear and jealousy, I used to run my hands over her flanks – and tell myself that she was mine alone. Cora would never belong to anyone else again.

Before I was half way through Dancing for the Hangman I could already understand why a husband might want to get rid of Cora, Crippen’s wife. Although Crippen himself was undoubtably something of a wimp, Cora, or Belle, as she liked to call herself, was not one to pull her punches. With her peroxide hair and her over-consumption of alcohol and food and gems, her multiple infidelities, her laziness, sour complexion and overbearing ego another, even milder-mannered spouse might have been tempted to reach for the poison vial.

Raymond Chandler said of Crippen: You can’t help liking this guy somehow. A sentiment with which Martin Edwards would concur. This fictional account of his life and death is obviously a labour of love. Always tense and increasingly dramatic, and with a final twist which, for the uninitiated, like myself, is wholly unexpected, Dancing for the Hangman is a novel to savour. Probably Edwards’ best book to date.

Martin Edwards has matured into a fine stylist. Having not visited his published work for some time, it was a pleasure to engage with this robust, unflinching prose, and to watch an experienced and self-assured author at work on the page.

Before Martin Edwards’ book came to visit I knew nothing about Dr Crippen except that he was a murderer. Now I’m not so sure.

The first edition sold out rather quickly, but the publisher, Flambard Press have already reprinted and the novel is now available again from your usual source.

The review copy was supplied by the publisher, Flambard Press.

It became more pronounced as my mother, Bobby, was dying and the tedious bureaucracy of car ownership that had been her domain went untouched. The summonses and the fines began to mount up — a year after Bobby’s death he had taken to sporting a beer mat in his tax-disc holder. Among the many elements of his estate that I dealt with after his death were over £4,000-worth of unpaid parking tickets, a wide variety of pending utility bills and a number of unresolved court cases involving motoring accidents and insurance claims. More impressively, he hadn’t paid any council tax or made any mortgage payments for eight years. Sometimes the bailiffs arrived, but his response was always the same. They would knock on the door. He would then greet them, step out of the house, close the door behind him and walk out onto the green in front of his flat, ringed by six other mock-Tudor blocks, and shout: “This man is a bailiff. He wants to take my possessions away to pay for unpaid bills and unjust fines, but he will not be getting anything.” They never did.

Since the road leading to the harbour was near, I succumbed to the Devil’s temptation, and was overcome by the excitement of seeing the arches of the workshop building where I’d spent a quarter century. This was how I ended up tracing the path that I’d take as an apprentice following Master Osman: down Archer’s Street which smelled dizzyingly of linden blossoms in the spring, past the bakery where my master would buy round meat pasties, up the hill lined with beggars and quince and chestnut trees, past the closed shutters of the new market and the barber whom my master greeted each morning, alongside the empty field where acrobats would set up their tents in summer and perform, in front of the foul-smelling rooming houses for bachelors, beneath moldy-smelling Byzantine arches, before Ibrahim Pasha’s palace and the column made up of three coiling snakes, which I’d drawn hundreds of times, past the plane tree, which we depicted a different way each time, emerging into the Hippodrome and under the chestnut and mulberry trees wherein sparrows and magpies alighted and chirped madly in the mornings.

My Name Is Red is a remarkable novel from many points of view. It is told through the first-person accounts of around twenty different characters, not all of them human. Although it is, undeniably, a historical mystery novel, together with a murderer and victims and a charismatic detective, it is unlikely to appeal to those readers who, we are told, flock to that genre for their usual reading fare.

And it is, primarily, a novel about art. Set in sixteenth century Istanbul around a community of miniaturists, it concerns itself with the nature of blindness and the influences of Western painters and ideology on traditional Islamic illustration. Pamuk is more interested in form and style and the relationship of art to morality and society and religion, than he is in the twists and turns in his plot. Though the setting of time and place is never less than convincing, and this reader found the narrative totally fascinating.

The group of miniaturists are concerned with heresy? Islam has taken a stand against figuration in general and scorns the West’s preoccupation with the portrait, with the signing of paintings, and with the whole notion of individual style. Miniatures of exempted from this because they merely decorate the text and thereby avoid any iconic standing.

The introduction of perspective into Western painting brings up the possibility that a mosque far off would be smaller than a man, or his dog, close up. With perspective, people and things weren’t depicted according to their importance in Allah’s mind but as they appeared to the naked eye.

Therefore, a murder is committed. Of course.

But for me, the most endearing strand of the novel is the love story between Black and Shekure. He is passion incarnate. She is beguiling.

My Name Is Red is a rare thing in which Western readers are given an invaluable glimpse into the everyday Islamic world and mind.

She is, perhaps understandably, withdrawn and reticent and does not seek out people or seem interested in deepening the relationship with her sister or her sister’s family. In spite of this attitude she is slowly drawn into the life of the family and into the lives of others in the neighbourhood.

The main interest here is Kristin Scott Thomas, who puts in what is quite probably her finest screen performance. She is one of those actresses who can tell a tale with a wrinkle of her forehead or the blink of an eye. The film itself is, above all, a vehicle for an actress, and Scott Thomas gives it everything she has, though in an understated, minimalist way. She is supported admirably by the direction of Claudel and the other actors, especially Elsa Zylberstein as her sister and Frédéric Pierrot as the policeman. I honestly do not expect to see a better performance from another actress this year, and if she is not recognised in the available honours she will have been robbed.

The film itself is something else. It begins as a moody piece, trembling with tension, and for three quarters of the time it is running I was completely spell-bound by the images and concepts it throws up. With the aid of Scott Thomas we are given a portrait of a woman without any usable inner animation, someone whose soul has been allowed to wither and die. An alienated being who mirrors many of our own individual horrors and suspicions about the true nature of being and identity.

And then, inexplicably, towards the end, Claudel seems to lose his courage, or perhaps find his own feet of clay, and the film dies as he allows predictability to claim the day and seeks out a wholly unworthy ‘closure’ for the Scott Thomas character, and the sense of a happy ending for everyone else involved.

Do see it, though, there is an enormous amount to enjoy. But you might get a better film if you can bear to live without the ending.

Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’
From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes.
In The New Cold War, his study of Putin’s impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that ‘capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom’.

Discuss.

It had taken years for the hedges to grow as thick as they had, but it had only been in the last few years that Balzic felt he could loaf in peace without hearing later on from God knew who about how he stood around with his hands in his pockets when he should have been out rounding up the beasties and nasties and things that went bump.
The neighbours, Balzic snorted thoughtfully. He had to ask himsdelf what their names were. He couldn’t think of it. Yurkowski, Yurhoska, something like that. Good solid squares, scared shitless of niggers, dope heads, commies, rabid dogs, girls who went without brassieres, and people who made love with the lights on. His mother told him that about them. They were always complaining to his mother, and every once in a while, when she couldn’t think up something new to put them off, she came to him and complained about them. The last time, a couple of months ago, he’d told his mother. ‘Ma, if I lock up everybody they’re scared of, who’s left? I’d have to lock up the world’ To which his mother had replied impishly, ‘You big man, you no can do that?’
He turned away from the window and was startled to see his mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She was in her flannel gown, barefoot, her swollen ankles showing under the hem, her fingers over her mouth. She looked like she’d been standing there for some moments.
‘Hey, kiddo, you still up. You sick?’ Her voice was husky with sleep.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘What’re you doing up?’
‘I ask you first.’
‘I said I’m okay. Just didn’t feel like sleeping. What about you?’
‘Aah, same thing. Ankles hurt like crazy. Back, too. I think I sleep on floor from now on. You want light?’
‘Yeah. Go ahead, turn it on.’
She flipped the switch by her shoulder and the overhead flourescent hummed and then slowly filled the room with its bluish light. His mother sat at the kitchen table and rubbed one ankle with the other.

Constantine has been quoted as saying: I hope nobody reads The Blank Page because I screwed up large in that one. Otherwise, I’m proud of the other books I’ve written, even the ones that I haven’t published.
But when a book by KC Constantine comes my way I snap it up, whatever he or anyone else has to say about it. I don’t read many crime fiction novels, but I know what I like and they don’t come much better than from an author of this calibre.
Janet Pisula is found strangled with her brassiere next to her bed, dressed only in her underpants. She has been there for about a week. There is a blank sheet of paper lying on her stomach.
She was painfully shy, apparently, didn’t speak much, and although she has been out of action for seven days or more nobody seems to have missed her.
This is a short novel, only 150 pages, and it’s not the best in the series. But it kept me turning the pages and long after I’d finished, it was dancing around in my mind.