Were it fiction, Rebecca Gowers' The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns (W&N, £20) would likely be dismissed as an implausibly racy Victorian-era penny dreadful.
Orphaned at a young age when his parents were massacred at Cawnpore, the young Harry Larkyns grew up to become a Raj wastrel, a feckless spendthrift who resigned his commission with the British army in India and went to fight under Garibaldi in the Franco-Prussian War, pausing only to be awarded the Legion of Honour and inspire a Maupassant short story before high-tailing it for the California goldfields, where he was shot dead, aged 31, by a cuckolded husband.
It’s a hugely enthralling story of a life richly lived, and not least because the cuckolded husband was Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering motion photographer whose experimental work was the forerunner of the motion picture industry. Larkyns, however, is the main focus of Gowers’s book, and while history has not been kind to Harry Larkyns – the thumbnail sketch is that he was a womanising grifter who lurched from one financial catastrophe to the next – Gowers provides a nuanced and endlessly sympathetic account of the man and “the wearying conflicts of his one poor heart”, as one eulogy at his funeral described his life. Gripping, cinematic, tragic and tender, The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns is a belated contender for one of the best books of the year.
The story wends its bonkers way through San Francisco's colourful underworld, embracing biological warfare, Sir Francis Drake, filthy Russian lucre and octopus DNA
Tim Maleeny’s private detective Cape Weathers isn’t sure “if he’d chosen the wrong profession or was born in the wrong century”. Set on the docks of San Francisco, Boxing the Octopus (Poisoned Pen, £8.99) begins with the heist of a security van and commissioned to investigate by the girlfriend of one of the missing security guards, Cape discovers himself embroiled in a complex tale that pulls the lid off the tourist destination of Pier 39.
Maleeny’s fourth novel to feature his laconic and reluctant private eye, Boxing the Octopus reads like a surreal blend of Raymond Chandler and Carl Hiaasen as the story wends its delightfully bonkers way through San Francisco’s colourful underworld, embracing biological warfare, Sir Francis Drake, filthy Russian lucre and octopus DNA as it goes. If comic crime fiction is your thing, Maleeny delivers in spades.
In all the panoply of Nordic noir, Antti Tuomainen is known as “the funny one”. His latest novel, Little Siberia (Orenda Books, £8.99), is set in Hurmevaara, a remote Finnish village not far from the Russian border. When a meteor comes crashing down nearby, and is afterwards valued at €1 million, the previously placid village becomes a hotbed of greed, intrigue and murder. Central to it all is Hurmevaara’s priest, Joel, although Joel – previously an army chaplain and a veteran of an Afghanistan tour that went disastrously wrong – is far happier reading James Ellroy than the Bible.
More serious in tone than Tuomainen’s previous offerings, Little Siberia is in part a Coen brothers-style comedy in which amateur crooks vie for the title of most hapless, but is also deeply rooted in Joel’s personal and professional crisis of faith, and his belated realisation that life is essentially a gradual coming to terms with “how reality seems to escape our assumptions with increasing regularity”.
Some women are born into crime, others have crime thrust upon them. Hannelore Cayre’s Patience Portefeux, translated as The Godmother (Oldcastle Books, £12.99), was born into a criminal family, but she only belatedly turns to crime at the grand old age of 53, in order to fund the purchase of a photograph of herself and Audrey Hepburn that was taken when she was a child.
Set in Paris, Cayre’s deliciously sly account of an ostensibly respectable Arabic translator who becomes a criminal mastermind peddling hashish smuggled in from Morocco is as mannered as any Ealing comedy as Patience weaves her web, in the process deceiving her devoted boyfriend, the narco police detective Philippe.
Forshaw takes us on a meandering, leisurely and digressive tour through the history of the crime and mystery novel
The crime narrative is itself the McGuffin here, however, as Cayre employs the form to lay bare the racism, xenophobia and post-colonial guilt of contemporary France (“You may call us wops, vulgar foreigners, outsiders – but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all!”). Previously the winner of the European Crime Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, The Godmother is an irreverent, brash and unrepentant noir that glories in the liberating possibilities of crime.
Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s most respected critics of the crime novel. Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide (Oldcastle Books, £12.99) is an impressively comprehensive overview of the genre, although it’s by no means an academic tome. Instead, Forshaw takes us on a meandering, leisurely and digressive tour through the history of the crime and mystery novel, opening with a chapter on pre-genre sources and origins – Cain, Sophocles, Shakespeare – before embarking upon an appreciation of the variety of styles, modes and forms available to the discerning crime fiction reader.
Loosely arranged according to era (The Golden Age) or narrative types (Hardboiled and pulp; Psychopaths and serial killers), the book offers potted biographies of all the genre’s leading lights, along with thumbnail reviews of each writer’s most important works, and – in some cases – reviews of important films adapted from those books. Forshaw admits, in his introduction, that the book is divided up “a touch arbitrarily”, but that’s all part of the charm of a collection that is hardly intended to be read cover to cover, but will instead reward repeated visits and judicious selection.
Written by the proverbial fan with a typewriter, Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide will prove indispensable to any reader new to the genre, and a useful refresher for even the most well-read buff.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Books)
