The maximalist wing of crime fiction criticism has long held that the standard canon – Godwin, Poe, Collins, Conan Doyle, Christie and Sayers, Hammett and Chandler and so on – is too narrow and restrictive, and that pretty much anything with a crime in it – Hamlet, Bleak House, Crime and Punishment, Sanctuary, The Great Gatsby – should be recruited (or conscripted).
As well as stretching the boundaries of the genre to an unwieldy and unenlightening extent, this approach has always seemed to evince a certain cultural cringe, as if conceding that much of the genre is far from first rate and that its reputation needs bolstering by more conventionally respectable authors.
In the revised second edition to his great critical history, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons struck a careful balance between the highest reaches of the crime novel, where works of art are achieved, and writers such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald, who showed an interest in the form in order to achieve their own more complex and ambitious projects.
So no, despite it being the study of a mysterious gangster, with at least one and possibly two murders and many of the elements of noir on display, it is neither sensible nor instructive to classify The Great Gatsby as a crime novel. And despite Michael Farris Smith's work to date gracefully patrolling the borders between crime and Southern Gothic, and his new novel containing a convoluted and extremely violent subplot, it probably doesn't make sense to view Nick (No Exit Press, £12.99), an imaginative exploration of Nick Carraway's pre-Gatsby life as mystery fiction either.
What to view it as is perhaps less clear. One hundred pages in, there’s a single chapter that could serve perfectly as a gloss on Fitzgerald’s narrator: at 12 years old, Nick is baptised in the Episcopal Church; at 13 he learns the ropes in his father’s hardware store (where the famous advice about his advantages in life is dispensed); by 16, the picket-fenced path is laid: meet a nice girl at college, return to take over the family business, marry and buy a house in the neighbourhood he grew up in.
“He could see the clear vision of himself and a wife and two small children sitting at the kitchen table and there was no exit from that.” So Nick demands to go to college in the East, to Yale, “because I have to get out of here or I am going to die”. By the end of the novel, there he is on the Long Island shore, gazing across the water at a green light on a dock and a magical silhouette at the end of the pier.
These extracts are, however briefly, in harmony with their source material, and in the closing pages the prose finally seems to channel Fitzgerald’s. The remainder consists of a long section following Nick’s wartime experiences and ill-fated love affair in Paris, rendered in a style redolent of early Hemingway; and a protracted sequence set in the brothels and barrooms of early Prohibition New Orleans that reads like the fever dream backstory of a Eugene O’Neill play written by Faulkner at his plainest.
Neither of these sections feel at all necessary, but each is vividly imagined and suffused with pulsing narrative energy and an assured, atmospheric sense of period setting and speech. As a Lost Generation literary phantasmagoria, Nick is suggestive and strangely nostalgic; it might have been even more potent had we only grasped our protagonist’s identity in the nicely judged closing pages.
When a novel's second chapter begins: "Dusk was the worst. The realization that yet another day has been wasted", and its set-up involves a small, largely abandoned Swedish village, home to Liv Björnland, who unaccountably still lives in near-isolation in her monstrous father Vidar's derelict house with her teenage son, you might be forgiven for wondering whether Stina Jackson's The Last Snow (Corvus, £12.99) is not some kind of parody of Scandinavian lugubriousness.
But Jackson’s plotting – involving a pair of dysfunctional drug dealing brothers, a jealous rival and the profits Vidar has allegedly hoarded from exploiting his neighbours in numerous land deals – is bracing and sure-footed, while her painterly eye summons up a village at the very edge of a forest with dark, fairytale simplicity and menace. In a fluent translation by Susan Beard, each sentence rolls with a supple, mesmerising music; the accumulated effect is haunting and irresistible.
Repentance (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99) is the first novel by Spanish lawyer Eloísa Díaz. Set in Buenos Aires in 1981 and 2001, it positions itself at the very centre of Argentina's dirty war and its continuing ramifications.
Detective Inspector Alzada turns as blind an eye as he can to the depredations of the military regime until his revolutionary brother is disappeared. Twenty years later, the country on the brink of an economic and constitutional crisis, a perilous missing persons case confronts Alzada with his own personal culpability in his brother’s fate (in the interim, he has raised his nephew as his own), just as the corruption it reveals within the political and police establishments highlights the lack of justice accorded to the victims.
The uxorious Alzada is a compelling protagonist (even as he pushes the idea of empathy with the anti-hero to breaking point) and Díaz writes wittily, stylishly and evocatively of marriage, manners and the enmities and affections of men. A sparkling, thoughtful debut.
Another debut novel, Lightseekers (Raven Books, £14.99) by Femi Kayode, introduces investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo, recently and reluctantly returned to his native Nigeria from the US, where he has specialised in the violent behaviour of crowds.
Through a friend of his father, he becomes involved in investigating the slaughter of three young students by a brutal, unrestrained mob in a hitherto quiet university town. At once insider and outsider, Taiwo, effectively working as a PI, is perfectly placed to assess and interpret Nigerian customs and corruption through partially westernised eyes.
Taiwo is a likable, engaging presence and the interplay between him and his tough guy sidekick, Chika Makuochi, propels the action to a series of incendiary climaxes, all the while casting light on the fascinating historical and social tensions underpinning contemporary Nigeria. Occasionally loose at sentence level, and with rather too much superfluous dialogue, Lightseekers is nonetheless a distinctive, absorbing first novel.
It is 1969 in Walter Mosley's Blood Grove (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £19.99). The now teenaged Feather's long-haired uncle has come to visit, grass-smoking, free-loving hippies are sharing a house next door to the PI agency, and second World War vet Easy Rawlins is hired by a shellshocked Vietnam War survivor to investigate a stabbing he may have committed while attempting to save a trapped woman.
The confused, dreamlike nature of the case typifies the uneasy sense of drift and change that Mosley so adroitly evokes in his continuing chronicle of postwar Los Angeles. With a lurid line-gup of mobsters and femmes fatales and a bright yellow Phantom 6 Rolls-Royce Easy has to abandon because he gets pulled over so often for driving while black, this richly textured, resonant novel is classic American PI fiction at its finest.
