CrimeFile: Now 79 years young, Elmore Leonard is back at the top of his form with Mr Paradise.
The eponymous Mr Paradise is one Anthony Paradiso, an 84-year-old retired lawyer, who likes to be entertained in his mansion by nubile ladies dressed as cheerleaders. One such is high-class escort Chloe who, on a particular night, persuades her model friend, Kelly, to join her. Tough luck on both the old man and the girls, for, by the end of the evening, he has been shot dead, with one of the girls joining him. There follows a typical Elmore Leonard wry and complicated plotline, with a cast of characters straight out of the weird, wired and wonderful: two disgruntled hit men, a case of mistaken identity, an ex-con butler with criminality on his mind, an aged houseman who is definitely not what he seems, and a recently widowed cop who falls for one of the suspects in the killings. Back on home ground in snowy Detroit, this is Leonard's 38th novel, and it shows no falling off in the master's ability to be sharp, sassy and, above all, so cool.
I always feel a thrill of anticipation when a new Alan Furst novel arrives, and Dark Voyage, his eighth, is as good as the other seven, which is saying a lot. More espionage than thrillers, the books are set in Europe before and during the second World War. In this new one, his reluctant hero is Eric DeHaan, captain of the Noordenam, a Dutch freighter, which has been commandeered by the British Naval Intelligence Department for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coast. This is to be the first of many such secret missions which DeHaan, his ill-assorted crew, and the aged ship undertake, as the battle for the seas rage and Nazi Germany appears to be getting the upper hand. Furst cannot be bettered at achieving the authentic atmosphere of the time, and at creating the desperate characters that populated it, and at the same time he can posit the possibility of a true and enduring love theme existing where it has no business to exist. Wonderful books, wonderful writing. I look forward to the next!
A writer that I usually look forward to is James Lee Burke, but In the Moon of Red Ponies is a bit of a disappointment. It doesn't feature his Louisiana-based detective, Dave Robicheaux, but rather Texas Ranger turned lawyer Billy Bob Holland, now living in Montana with his ex-cop wife, Temple. Temple was once imprisoned and tortured by depraved rodeo cowboy Wyatt Dixon, who was then sentenced to 60 years in Deer Lodge penitentiary for the killing of a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Released on a technicality, he returns to harass Billy Bob and his wife.
However, this becomes secondary to another plotline in which a Native American is endeavouring to protect his beautiful state from the depredations of big business. In fact the plot meanders all over the place and, with people in times of stress forever having the time to admire the savage beauty of wind, rain, snow and forest, it keeps getting bogged down. In the end I found myself willing Dixon to annihilate the whole cast and then jump off a mountain. Not one of Lee Burke's better efforts, even though the descriptive writing is still superb.
Thirteen Steps Down is another in a long line of Ruth Rendell novels depicting stressed-out people living on the periphery of, well, ordinary life. Mix Cellini has moved to London from Birmingham and taken a flat in St Blaise House, which is owned by the elderly eccentric Gwendolen Chawcer. Cellini is obsessed by the serial killer John Reginald Christie, who lived nearby in 10, Rillington Place, and also has a hankering after the up-and-coming model, Nerissa Nash. Stalking the model, to a gym, he makes the acquaintance of another loser, a Bosnian girl called Danila, and ends up killing her. I'm not giving anything away here, as Rendell's novels are not who-done-its, but rather why was it done. Cellini and Chawcer engage in a macabre dance of death, two wounded people whose destinies were laid out early on. Not particularly to my taste, but where Dame Ruth is concerned, I'm obviously in the minority.
Whatever else one can say about Patricia Cornwell, there's no doubt that she tells a good story, with the grisly bits particularly interesting. In Trace, her series character Kay Scarpetta is back in Richmond, Virginia, five years after being sacked as its chief medical officer. This time she is consultant pathologist in the mysterious death of a teenage girl, for which there appears no obvious cause. Scarpetta's old friend Det Pete Marino accompanies her, but lesbian niece Lucy, late of the FBI and now fronting a security firm, is in Florida, while Scarpetta's lover, Benton Wesley, is in Aspen. At times, one wishes they'd stay there. However, a devious killer is on the loose and danger must be faced before a resolution is achieved. Regular readers of Cornwell will know what to expect, especially when one of the cast is named Edgar Allan Pogue!
The Tinder Box is a novella from one of the best suspense writers in the business, Minette Walters. It's a bit of a trifle really, with an Irish Traveller family living in the small Hampshire village of Sowerbridge being blamed for the murder of one Lavinia Fanshaw, an elderly resident. Murky business is revealed among the bigoted inhabitants of the village, but the Irish O'Riordans are not innocently clean either.
Mr Paradise By Elmore Leonard. Viking, £16.99
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic