Budapest Noir by Vilmos Kondor

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

When “noir” is in title, I can’t help but have expectations. Dark story, surprising twists, thugs, a tough-talking detective smoking, and all the characters drinking like fish and smoking like chimneys. This mystery includes these attractions, but the investigative reporter protagonist is self-controlled, mordant, and a stereotypically Hungarian Gloomy Gus.  I felt this story was so-so — a good-enough representative of the “Europe between the wars” genre that has been so popularized by Alan Furst. But remember the dark plot clearly in a couple of months? I doubt it.

The main character is crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. The authorities are trying to sweep a prostitute’s killing under the carpet, but Gordon becomes interested in the woman’s past, the events that lead up to her murder. The reason is that he saw nude photo of the woman in a drawer in a police official’s desk. In tracing the culprit in the backstreets of Budapest, the incautious Gordon soon finds himself to be the witch of interest in a witch hunt.

Set in October 1936, just after the sudden real-life death of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, the exposition hints at the coming menace. Jewish people are under increasing pressure. The communist and fascist powers are asserting power. Still, the focus is always on the woman’s death and the investigation and interviews. Budapest’s streets, squares and landmarks are mentioned by name, which will thrill people who have lived and visited that city. Having a Hungarian grandmother, I like the stereotypes: Hungarian women are beautiful; two Hungarians will hold and argue about three different opinions; and when Hungarians want you to try their wonderful cuisine, they stuff you with viands full of fat. And paprika.

The development of the main character Gordon takes precedence over the plot, even though he is a little more than a monochrome photograph. I liked the fact that the investigator had a job other than a PI or a homicide detective. Gordon is a macho man who maddeningly stubborn and pessimistic, but he’s smart and resourceful. And sly. Not to mention the kind of BF that says things like, “Please don’t be more angry than necessary.” Mercifully, there are some normal people, such as Krisztina, the graphic designer GF of Gordon, and the comic relief grandfather, Opa, a former doctor who spends his days making experimental jams and preserves.

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The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1938 whodunnit combines mystery, romance, and novel of ideas. It’s set in a fashion house and peopled with glamorous and good-looking characters.

The mystery: an irresponsible brute of an aristo is poisoned in his own plane and this convenient death may or may not be related to a suicide whose skeleton is found by the hero Albert Campion.

The romance: three professional women must balance their successful careers with romance and marriage to suitable men. The novel of ideas: the obstacles to balancing career and love for women.

Although in our post-modern days these issues are rather dated, the book is worth reading for the character of Georgia Wells, stage-actress and femme fatale who is the illustration of Rebecca West’s observation, “The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.” Idiotic in the original Greek sense that Georgia is vain, selfish, egocentric, and childishly cares only about her own goals and pleasures. Georgia is an incredible creation, right up there with Uriah Heep and Elizabeth Bennett’s Silly Mother.

I was shelving books in the library the other day when I ran across a small volume called “Living with Cannibals and Other Women’s Adventures” by Michele Slung.  Well, I have to confess “Living with Cannibals” really caught my eye.  I know all about the old saying ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ but sometimes it happens! 

Anyway, the cover had an old photograph of a very determined looking woman wearing a skirt and a pith helmet swathed in veils, standing on top of a mountain.  I thought, anybody who could climb a mountain dressed like that is worth reading about.  And I was right! 

“Living with Cannibals” profiles 16 women adventurers; it gives a brief biography of each woman and then details the wanderings and adventures of her life.  A few of the names are familiar, such as Amelia Earhart and Dian Fossey.  But most of the women’s names are unknown, in spite of their accomplishments.  For instance, can you name the first woman to reach the North Pole?  How about the first woman correspondent to report on World War I from the front lines?  Which woman has logged more hours orbiting the earth than any other woman on Earth?  Yeah…I didn’t know either.   

Not all the women profiled here did something “first”; some of them took risks or traveled to exotic places at a time when most women seldom left their front yards.  Ida Pfeiffer, in 1842 at the age of 45, wrote her will and set off on a trip around the world.  She saw Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Cairo.  She ended up taking two more voyages around the world, and wrote about her adventures in books titled “A Lady’s Voyage Around the World”, and  “A Lady’s Second Journey Around the World.”  She had no qualms about dressing in trousers or passing herself off as a man if need be, unlike Fanny Bullock Workman.  Fanny absolutely refused to wear anything other than her skirts–not even a divided skirt.  Fanny fell in love with the relatively new sport of climbing.  She pounded nails into the soles of her boots, and ended up breaking the woman’s altitude record by reaching 23, 300 feet on Nun Kun peak in what is now India in 1906.  (In fact, Fanny is the intrepid climber on the book’s cover.) 

Adventurous women were not only to be found in the 19th century.  We also learn about Helen Thayer, who with a single Husky serving as an alarm system for polar bears, skied by herself to the North Pole in 1988.  Dervla Murphy set out from her home in Ireland in 1963 and bicycled all the way to India, alone.  In 1989, Arlene Burns realized a childhood dream by kayaking 100 miles down Tibet’s Brahmaputra River.  She then returned to land, made her way alone back to Katmandu and on to Bangkok where she swapped her kayak for a mountain bike.  She then cycled from Bangkok down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore. 

The book ends by introducing Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist who reached a record depth in 1979 of 1, 250 feet diving in a Jim suit.  She has spent hours exploring the ocean, our last frontier.  Sylvia says, “People are under the impression that the planet is fully explored, that we’ve been to all the forests and climbed all the mountains.  But in fact many of the forests have yet to be seen for the first time.  They just happen to be under water.  We’re still explorers.  Perhaps the greatest era is just beginning.” 

The wonderful thing is that just about every woman profiled in this volume wrote about her adventures; a very complete bibliography of titles is listed at the back of the book.  I have lots of new titles to search out now! 

The Cold War Swap by Ross Thomas

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

During his lifetime, other writers, critics and fans ranked Ross Thomas (1926 – 1995) as one of the top thriller writers.

In this Edgar Award-winning novel series hero Mac McCorkle owns and runs a popular watering hole in Bonn, West Germany. His pal Mike Padillo uses the bar for espionage and con jobs, two activities treated as indistinguishable in Thomas’ world view. An Unnamed Mysterious Agency sends out Padillo, a resourceful clandestine agent, to do risky and sensitive jobs.

In this case, Padillo is to drag back two American defectors from East to West Germany. Snafus occur one after the other, and McCorkle has to help Padillo ferry the unstable pair back. Strengths of the novel: snappy dialogue, cynical but likable characters, and the credible milieu of the two Germanys.

Thomas is especially savvy when he’s talking about uniforms and clothes; often his novels have funny tangents about the messages telegraphed by male fashion choices.

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The 1939 thriller kicks off when a Turkish police officer invites Charles Latimer, a former British academic now a mystery writer, to a corpse viewing. Police pulled from the Bosphorus one Dimitrios, a con man and spy. The policeman gives Latimer a sketchy account of Dimitrios’ life of crime: thief, killer, spy, narcotics smuggler, assassin and human trafficker.

Latimer, partly as an experiment, partly out of pique at being treated like an amateur by the policeman, decides to fill in the blanks in Dimitrios’ criminal history. The story narrates Latimer’s meeting Dimitrios’ former victims, marks, and henchmen. Things start to get messy and dangerous. Rum guys wonder why a professorial type should be interested in somebody whose death relieved a lot of dodgy people.

There’s no whining about the big bad world but there’s no moral or ethical ambiguity either, a point that draws me to these old suspense novels. Although all the thrillers Ambler wrote in the 1930s are worth reading, A Coffin for Dimitrios is the classic that has never gone out of print.

Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1944 mystery is a classic locked-room mystery. Set in a cabin in wintry New England woods, the characters have gathered for a séance to be conducted by a medium who is the widow of a logging baron. The baron’s spirit will announce who among the living has the logging rights to his lands, that is to say, the lands he owned when he was still among the quick. The séance gets out of hand when the baron’s spirit floats around and puts everybody, even the skeptics, into a tizzy.

The conniption doesn’t help clear thinking when the medium is murdered inside a locked room. The bloody tomahawk points to the current husband of the medium as does evidence that he flew out a window, over freshly fallen snow, to land over 100 feet away from the house. His fingerprints are on some grisly hunting trophies mounted high on a wall over the fireplace. Naturally, the characters assume that the current husband is possessed by a supernatural beast we have met in Algernon Blackwood stories, the widigo.

Critics and fans of the locked room mystery consider this book a masterpiece. Blog critic Mike Grost points out that John Dickson Carr must have influenced Talbot in that the reader is often misled about the order and significance of events and that action is mainly characters moving about, with their location being crucial to the solution of the impossible crime. Talbot – whose real name was Henning Nelms, a magician – sets an eerie tone, so weird that even we skeptical readers can go along with the supernatural explanation. At least for a time.

The incidents become rather convoluted, about on the same level as “two guns confusion” in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels. The reveal, however, is sensible and logical. Readers who like the intricate puzzles of Carr, Christie and Queen will probably like this one.

Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

During WWII Stout devoted most of his time to war work, writing for the government. But he did write some Nero Wolfe shorties. This contains a pair of novellas that first came out in The American Magazine (1906 – 1956), “Not Quite Dead Enough” in December, 1942 and “Booby Trap” in August, 1944.

Stout makes them topical, given the nation is at war against fascism, so Wolfe’s sidekick, Archie Goodwin, serves in the Army. Like Conan Doyle coyly hinted things in the Holmes stories, Stout is adept at throwing out tantalizing hints as to what Archie is doing to serve. A counter-intelligence officer, perhaps?

The WWII backdrop is unique in the canon. Archie is driven to set himself up for arrest in order to snap Wolfe out of a patriotic frenzy. The wartime fever has driven the agoraphobic and gastronomic Wolfe to actually go outside and do some brisk walking. Well, as brisk as the rotund Wolfe (and the poor cook Fritz) can manage. This will delight long-terms fans of the series, believe me.

The book has plenty of funny characters. The reveal and the ending, too, depart from the norm in that the climax occurs not with all suspects gathered in the office, but with only Archie in attendance, with Wolfe proposing and disposing. Hey, whaddaya want, there’s a war on!

I highly recommend this one to both Wolfe fans and novices