Jo Nesbo

The best recent thrillers – review roundup

The Thirst by Jo Nesbø; Dead Woman Walking by Sharon Bolton; A Dark So Deadly by Stuart MacBride; Don’t Let Go by Michel Bussi; The Special Girls by Isabelle Grey; Heretics by Leonardo Padura; Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

Barry Forshaw
Fri 14 Apr 2017 11.59 BST

Very few writers in the thriller genre achieve superstar status; the Norwegian Jo Nesbø is not only the reigning king of Scandinavian crime fiction, but is also called on as a TV pundit when reality reflects his books (as at the time of the Breivik massacres, as Nesbø had written so persuasively about the rise of the far right in his country). While enjoying prodigious sales, his last few books have not gleaned the critical acclaim of earlier work such as The Redbreast, but the weighty The Thirst (Harvill Secker, £20, translated by Neil Smith) may rebalance that popular and critical success. It’s a big-boned, Technicolor epic in the current Nesbø style, starting adagio and ending accelerando, but with the kind of close psychological character readings that distinguished his early work. The detective Harry Hole is reluctantly co-opted to track down a vicious murderer who has killed a woman after an internet date. And when a second victim is found, Harry realises that there is a connection with the one case that defeated him. Both justice and closure may be within his grasp – as well as a return to his lost childhood.

Dead Woman Walking (Bantam, £12.99) once again signals what has made the novels of SJ (now Sharon) Bolton so successful: her clever amalgamation of two genres – the crepuscular, uncanny mystery (not supernatural, but suggesting the trappings of  that genre) and the more traditional crime/thriller narrative. After a tense opening involving a plummeting hot air balloon over Northumberland, survivor Jessica Lane recognises murderer Patrick Faa, scion of a Romany family – which puts her right in the line of fire.

Stuart MacBride is a signature writer of the Tartan Noir school, but his uncompromising work is not for the squeamish. A Dark So Deadly (HarperCollins, £16.99) has DC Callum MacGregor making an egregious mistake when he covers up an error by his pregnant lover, a crime scene specialist. Demoted to a squad of disgraced coppers, he finds himself dealing with a mummified corpse discovered on a local rubbish heap. The initial response is that it is a prank, the body stolen from a museum, but MacGregor and his colleagues demur – and find they have a chance to redeem their reputations. Even longer than Nesbø, this pungent standalone finds room for an entertaining protagonist who serves as Greek chorus, commenting on the tropes of the crime field even as MacBride toys with them.

Michel Bussi Don’t Let Go

Some writers try carefully calibrated alterations on a winning formula from book to book, but offer few surprises. That can’t be said of the French author Michel Bussi, whose first books to appear in English ranged from an off-kilter saga of a plane crash to a mystery set in Monet’s garden at Giverny. That refusal to repeat himself is evident in Don’t Let Go (Weidenfeld, £12.99, translated by Sam Taylor), which is just as accomplished as its predecessors. Liane Bellion and her husband, Martial, along with their infant daughter, are enjoying the life of lotus eaters on the island of Réunion when Liane unaccountably vanishes. The police find the couple’s room splattered with blood, and Martial is in the frame. But then he and his daughter go on the run, and a manhunt ensues in which fear and racial tension infect the idyllic island.

The Special Girls by Isabelle Grey (Quercus, £19.99) offers a penetrating analysis of Stockholm syndrome in a book with a notably filmic sensibility (Grey has considerable experience in TV drama). A psychiatric registrar is bludgeoned to death near a summer camp for patients suffering from eating disorders. DI Grace Fisher is to find that the respected Professor Sir Ned Chesham, who runs the camp, is perhaps not all that he appears to be.

The Cuban Leonardo Padura’s reputation is ironclad, and if you need reminding why, pick up Heretics (Bitter Lemon, £12.99, translated by Anna Kushner) – although those seeking a linear crime scenario may be nonplussed by the book’s jostling between the modern day and 17th-century Amsterdam. Bibulous sleuth Mario Conde is now a secondhand book dealer, but becomes entangled in a mystery involving a Rembrandt portrait and his grandparents, who fled from Nazi Germany but were not allowed into Cuba. It’s as much an astringent picture of Padura’s own society as a crime fiction outing.

US writer Dennis Lehane’s invigorating Since We Fell (Little, Brown, £18.99) bears traces of his magnum opus, Mystic River. After a breakdown, ex-journalist Rachel Charles lives a reclusive life. She has, however, a supportive husband – until a chance encounter snatches away everything she holds dear. With sharply acute characterisation, this is classic Lehane. And since some of it is set in London, there’s an added piquancy for the British reader.

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Scorsese / Shutter Island

POSTERS & TAPAS

Martin Scorsese

SHUTTER ISLAND

Screenwriter Dennis Lehane Travels Down the ‘Silk Road’

Screenwriter 

Dennis Lehane 

Travels Down

the ‘Silk Road’

Michael Ladiona
OCTOBER 16TH, 2013 - 4:19 PM

The controversial online marketplace Silk Road has been the topic of a lot of news lately. The website is responsible for $1 billion in illegal drugs and services transactions, offering a marketplace for drug sales, tutorials on how to hack ATMs, forged drivers licenses, passports, Social Security cards, and at one point it was a place to buy and sell firearms. A few weeks ago FBI agents from New York and San Francisco arrested Ross William Ulbricht who claims to be the head of the digital black market. Today, in a Deadline exclusive, it was reported that 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment has hired Dennis Lehane to pen the adaptation of an article about Silk Road from Epic Website.

In 2014, Fox Searchlight and Chernin Entertainment is bringing Dennis Lehane’s debut feature as a screenwriter to the big-screen with the film Animal Rescue. However, Lehane’s written word isn’t a stranger to the cinemas, as adaptations of his novels have gone on to become huge commercial and critical successes. The word was introduced to the directing-side of Ben Affleck through an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone. Affleck also directed the adaptation of Lehane’s Live By Night. Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese have also brought Lehane to the big screen with Mystic River and Shutter Island, respectively, and the novelist has  penned episodes for two acclaimed HBO Original Series, The Wire and Boardwalk Empire.

The article that is going to serve as the basis for Silk Road is going to be written by Joshua Davis for his company Epic, which has a first-look deal with Fox to produce films adapted from articles the company publishes. Josh Bearman, Davis’s partner at Epic, wrote the article that went on to become Ben Affleck’s Argo. While producers haven’t released an official synopsis, the story will most-likely center around the Dread Pirate Roberts – that’s right, from The Princess Bride.

The Dread Pirate Roberts was the name that Ross William Ulbricht hid behind when managing the operations of Silk Road. According to an interview with Forbes, Ulbricht was handed the name from the original creator of the Silk Road online marketplace, much like the Dread Pirate Roberts was a name inherited by Cary Elwes character Westley  in The Princess Bride from the pirate captain who had kidnapped Westley, only to end up grooming him to succeed him as captain.

Ross William Ulbricht, mastermind behind the online black marketplace Silk Road

The end of Ross William Ulbricht as the Dread Pirate Roberts was fraught with much drama. At first Ulbricht was beloved, Forbes recalled members on the site referring to the Dread Pirate Roberts as “our own Che Guevara” and a “name [that] will live [on] among the greatest men and women in history as a soldier of justice and freedom.” Eventually attacks from competitors, undercover agents, and a thieving former employer would soon threaten the legacy of the Dread Pirate Roberts, forcing Ulbricht’s to resort to famously contracting a hitman through the Silk Road.

With Dennis Lehane and Joshua Davis’ combined tracked record, the Silk Roadmotion picture has the potential to be both a dark character-drama, and gritty crime-tale that will attract Oscar-worthy talent both in front of and behind the camera. 

mxddwn

DRAGON

A life in writing / Dennis Lehane
Top 10 books about gangsters
Screenwriter Dennis Lehane Travels Down the ‘Silk Road’

Top 10 books about gangsters

From The Godfather to LA Confidential, these are some of the most compulsive tales of men who live and die in the mob

Rod Reynolds

Wed 4 Jul 2018

I

t’s not hard to understand the enduring appeal of gangsters in fiction. From the romantic notion of the outlaw antihero to the caricature of the psychotic mob boss, they have been portrayed in many different lights; but the unifying theme is that they live by a set of rules alien to the law-abiding public, and that makes them fascinating. We want to know what makes them tick, to understand their world and to see it in all its bloody reality. It’s the essence of what makes a good thriller: showing us a violent existence from the safety of an armchair.

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 Casting a long shadow … Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel poses after his arrest in Los Angeles in 1941. Photograph: AP

I never set out to write about gangsters. My first novel, The Dark Inside, was based on the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, a 1946 serial-killing case. The sequel, Black Night Falling, saw my protagonist, Charlie Yates, drawn back to Arkansas, to the town of Hot Springs – a real-life mob town in the 1940s where illegal gambling and prostitution flourished. That’s when serendipity came into play: in researching the book, I discovered that Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was at that time a regular visitor to Hot Springs. Having one of history’s most famous gangsters in such proximity to my story was too good a chance to pass up, and in my new novel, Cold Desert Sky, Siegel takes centre stage.

Set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas during the construction of Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel, it sees Charlie investigating the disappearance of two Hollywood starlets while trying to dodge Bugsy. His only care is staying alive long enough to find the missing girls, but LA is Siegel’s town …

Here’s my pick of the gangster books I’ve read over the years:

Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone

1. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

MARIO PUZO'S BIOGRAPHY

An obvious choice, perhaps, but a reflection of how seminal it is to the genre. Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation is regarded as one of the greatest of all time, but the book is a classic in its own right. It introduced terms like Cosa Nostra and omertà to a mass audience and defined the public perception of mobsters for decades to come.

2. Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi

Adapted by Martin Scorsese as the film Goodfellas, Pileggi’s account of the life of mobster Henry Hill was the starting point for the modern-day depiction of the gangster. The book set the template for all that followed - from Casino and Donnie Brasco right through to The Sopranos.

3. American Tabloid by James Ellroy

Ellroy dedicates his masterpiece to “bad men, and the price they paid to secretly define their time”. Covering the period from JFK’s election to his assassination, Ellroy takes us into the world of thugs, fixers and killers on the fringes of power. It still amazes me that in 600 pages, the closest thing to a hero is a hitman who by his own reckoning has killed more than 500 people. It was accused of glorifying criminals, but I prefer Ellroy’s own explanation: this is a story of three men crushed by the weight of their own evil.

4. The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow

Winslow’s novel chronicles the first 30 years of the US’s “war on drugs”. Epic in every sense, the book lays bare the violence, futility and hypocrisy of the policy, and is made all the more striking by its grounding in true events. But this is much more than a fictional exposé of recent history; as in The Godfather, it’s the personal relationships that drive the narrative as the friendship between DEA agent Art Keller and narco kingpin Miguel Angel Barrera disintegrates into a blood feud.

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 Mob mastermind … James Ellroy. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

5. LA Confidential by James Ellroy

For my money, Ellroy’s five-book run from The Big Nowhere to The Cold Six Thousand is as strong as any crime author has put together. LA Confidentialfocuses on the LA mob scene after Siegel, but takes in LAPD corruption, institutional racism, high-class prostitution and more. Sprawling and complex, yet exquisitely plotted, it’s the pathos Ellroy imbues in his tough guys that sets this apart. That and the fact that it features the villainous Dudley Smith at his absolute zenith.

6. Muscle for the Wing by Daniel Woodrell

Woodrell’s later works such as Winter’s Bone are more famous but I love this fast and violent novel about a gang of ex-cons muscling in on a town run by the southern mob. Woodrell has never wasted a word, and this is no different: the local crime boss, for instance, “measured five foot seven standing on your neck”. You would struggle to find any heroes to root for here, but Woodrell doesn’t care about that. Pacy, hard-boiled thrillers aren’t hard to find, but ones that are written with this precision, this memorable a voice, are a rare thing.

7. The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke

Burke’s first novel in the Robicheaux series sees him running up against New Orleans crime boss “Didi Gee” Giacano. Omnipotent and universally feared at the outset, by the end Didi Gee’s got a litany of problems: the law is closing in, the cartels are moving on his turf and his health is failing. A corpulent, complacent kingpin, his story arc comes to symbolise the decline of the mafia’s underworld stranglehold in the face of newcomers with new rules.

8. Live By Night by Dennis Lehane

This is the other side of the coin: Lehane’s sweeping novel charts the rise of Joe Coughlin from the streets of Boston to Florida mob boss. Lehane’s fearlessness as a writer is in evidence here once again – not just in the change in period and setting from his earlier works, but in the ambition of the novel’s scope. By turns a gritty mobster epic, a coming-of-age story and a cautionary tale about the price of success, at its heart this is a story of love and loss – and one that seems constructed to deliver an inevitably happy ending only to sidestep it, twice, in a manner probably only Lehane could pull off.

9. The Rules of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake

Blake’s tale of Texan gun runners starts with one of the most breathless action sequences I’ve read – an arms deal at sea goes bad, resulting in a showdown with cartel killers in a pitch-black coastal lagoon. The climax sees a wounded man begging for a bullet before the crabs can eat him alive. Blake doesn’t deal in sentiment. The writing is taut and spare throughout, the tension never lets up, and this is as dark as noir gets. But there’s a literary quality to it that elevates this above the norm, and the later stages evoke Cormac McCarthy’s works set in the same border badlands.

10. After Hours by Edwin Torres

Torres’s work opens up the rarely featured world of Puerto Rican gangs in Spanish Harlem. It is the second book in the series, and this time Carlito Brigante is older and wiser and looking for a way out of the life – and anyone familiar with the genre knows that never goes well. The book hums with authenticity, and Brigante is a standout character: a killer and a survivor, but smart and thoughtful with it.

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