Sun, Crime and Podcasts

 

The weather is still hot and dry. 

Unbelievable for misty old Cornwall. 

We hide in the granity darkness of our sitting room. Walks have to be taken before 9 in the morning or after 7 in the evening. I was watering the vegetables in the garden the other evening  and looking up at our cherry tree saw that, to my horror, even this tall tree's leaves were wilting. Alors! What will survive this dry, hot spell.

I have another review posted on the Euro Crime site. This time it is a crime novel by Greek writer Pol Koutsakis. "Baby Blue" is the second in his series featuring self-styled "caretaker" Stratos Gazis. Greatly inspired by the American Noir films that Gazis quotes by heart, this one involves a hunt for the killer of a journalist and is set in contemporary Athens. Head to the review to find out more.

Meanwhile I am still hooked on listening to fictionalised podcasts.  Still following "Tanis" (see the "Tanis Post") I have also subscribed to PRA's "The Black Tapes" which actually preceded "Tanis" and ran for three series from 2015 to 2017. 

It's another drama played as investigative journalism. "Alex Reagan" (voiced by Lori Henry) and her producer research demons, ghosts and the work and life of the supremely sceptical Dr Richard Strand. Will the podcast return for another series? Is there a rumour out there? Whatever happens, the beauty of podcasts is that you can still listen in as they bob about in the podcast interspace!

Meanwhile The Old Man uses Wimbledon as an excuse for sitting in the dark watching telly all day.

Greydoll's Criminal Reading: "Wolf Winter" by Cecilia Ekbäck

I've been catching up on my foreign crime fiction; books I missed when they first came out, or simply didn't know about.
I came across this one on the shelves of my local bookshop - The Edge Of The World Bookshop - for which I should truly thank them.

"Wolf Winter" by Cecilia Ekbäck (Paperback, 2015, Hodder). 
Imagine you are a woman come to a remote new country with two daughters, a few goats, a cow - and crops to grow and harvest. Imagine mountains where you have known only marshland and lakes; new neighbours whose ways you don't know... and a husband who has to leave for a job on the coast many miles away. It is 1717 in Northern Sweden, territory newly claimed from the native, nomadic, Sami reindeer-herders. It is a bitterly harsh winter; one the local settlers call a "wolf winter".
One day your young daughters find the body of man in a forest glade. Everyone says wolves killed him. But you don't think so. You are stubborn and curious and you want to know the answer to the mystery. But it is so cold that you don't know where to begin to feed yourself and your daughters. One day the wolves start to howl and move closer. And then the dead man begins to appear to your adolescent daughter Frederika. Welcome to the story of Finnish settler Maija and her family.

Historical Nordic Noir? I have never tried that one before. I couldn't resist this blend of crime, historical fiction and the tingle of the supernatural.This is not only a gripping and beautifully written story but a first novel, a very impressive one. Swedish-born Ekbäck currently lives in Canada. But her family roots lie in the country where she sets this novel. Her writing and prose plunged me straight into the bitter cold of the "Wolf Winter" of the title; spelling out rules for survival in this harsh land in all their necessary detail. She also gives us insight into the life of a settler community in 18th century Swedish Lapland where the Church not only records and educates individuals but makes and enforces the law. Mutual distrust between the new settlers and the Sami (Lapp) reindeer-herders gives more room for suspense as the stubborn Maija sets out to find out who killed the man in the forest - and why. Against the background of poverty and hardship during a time of perpetual war, Ekbäck has created a blend of frontier-Western and Nordic-noir; a tense whodunit which combines the dangers of the spirit world with the privations and threats of frontier life. It is peopled by characters well-realised if not always likeable and I think it is an exciting, beautifully written and impressive first novel.

Ekbäck has said that she decided against creating a series based on Maija but came to wonder about the country itself through the passage of time, the Blackasen Mountains. I shall certainly be on the look-out for her second novel - In the Month of the Midnight Sun - to be published later this year and set in the same area of the far north of Sweden, this time in 1856 and during the heat and daylight of the Northern summer.

Grey Doll's Retro Criminal Read : The Darkest Room

It's getting to that dark time of the year for us here in the northern world... Halloween has been and gone and we are heading into midwinter ... the time for shivers and ghost stories as we close the curtains against the dark outside.

Coincidentally, I have just finished reading Johan Theorin's second "Öland" book - The Darkest Room - beautifully translated by Marlaine Delargy. Remember I did post that I was intending to catch up with earlier books written by this Swedish crime writer? I can assure you that this is just the chilling read for a stormy winter night.

The book starts with a local reference to a tradition that the dead meet to worship at a local church on Christmas Eve.... We are back on the Swedish Baltic island of Öland, midway between the Swedish mainland and the larger island of Gotland. A young family has moved into a run-down manor house with its two lighthouses at Eel Point, on the island's north-east coast. As Öland begins to face the Baltic storms and blizzards of winter, one of the family is found drowned close to the lighthouses. Add a burglary spree by a gang that likes to scout out their crimes with a ouija board.... and what follows is a moving story of grief, secrets, violence and tragic threads from the past reaching into the present.

I don't usually search out supernatural books but I can take a bit of shiver - and I have to say that Johan Theorin writes a wonderful mixture of modern crime and psychological chill. This is perhaps the most ghostly of his that I have read so far but he weaves the strands together so well that, as the suspense builds, it seems that both worlds are colliding in one tense crisis.

Grey Doll & Criminal Reading: A Retro "Johan Theorin" Read

You know that I like to travel when I read (as opposed to reading whilst I travel, because travel I don't.) Where was I? Aah. Reading in a foreign manner....

A while ago I listened to "The Quarry" by Swedish writer Johan Theorin. I liked it so much that... discovering that it was actually the third in a series of novels set on the Swedish Baltic island of Öland... I ordered up the previous two novels.
I've got the break needed to get back to them and have just finished the first in the series "Echoes From The Dead" which confirms my respect for this writer. Well-crafted, filled with convincing characters, psychology and suspense, this too has that trademark of Theorin which may not be to everybody's taste... the lightest touch of the supernatural. I don't mean Stephen King scales of horror. I mean a light Nordic touch that accepts trolls, spirits, ghosts, whatever, as inhabiting the same space as you and I and that they may or may not take part in the narrative. (Think Indridason, Kallentoft...)

"Echoes From the Dead"- translated into English by Marlaine Delargy (Theorin, Asa Larsson, and John Ajvide Lindqvist) - tells the story of a child's death on the island of Öland in the 1970s. His mother, scarred by her loss, has returned to visit her father who lives in a residential home on the island. It is some twenty years later but someone has sent a package to the old man. It contains a child's sandal. This is a moving, gripping story but what I like about this series as much as anything else is the island itself - a place scarred by the lost industries of its past and now inhabited mainly by summer visitors who have renovated the old houses and come to enjoy the sea and beaches of the Baltic.
Er.. sounds a bit like Cornwall really.
Anyway, I'm off to start the second in the series: "The Darkest Room".

Graphic Passions : "Through the Woods" by Emily Carroll

Been reading/looking at... Through The Woods, just published in the UK by Faber & Faber.

It's a first book by Canadian illustrator-comics artist Emily Carroll...(although she has contributed to anthologies in the past) and it's made up of five short horror stories which seem to be being billed as "for children".
Well... in many ways I never do grow up... so I am happy to be horrified by Carroll's black, white, red (with the occasional swish of rotting green) drawings and hand drawn text... which bring us these dark tales from the forest, where something dreadful always abides... it being a place that is an eternal source of fairy tales of the Grimm kind.

It is hard not to gallop through these stories.... OK. I gallop through these stories.... BUT I know that I will pick up the book again and savour the artwork and the lingering thoughts left by these pungent little tales of the Undead, the Other, -  and the Things which are not what they seem.
Here's what The Independent  has to say in a recent batch review.

Animated Discussions: Joseph Brett's Video for "Where The River Don't Flow" by Liz Green

Talking of where rivers don't flow... (or shouldn't).
I do jump up and down to find out that Liz Green (that most reticent of musicians) is releasing a new album of her dark, I-dunno-what-style-this-is music in April. The album is called "Haul Away" and this is the stop-motion animation video for one of the tracks by film maker/paper sculptor/animator Joseph Brett...  the promo says it explores " the themes of mortality and legacy. With skellingtons."  

Mrs D Ponders Crime: "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die" by Colin Cotterill"

Mrs D is very fond of Colin Cotterill's crime books featuring Dr Siri Paiboun.
Set in 1970s Laos, they feature the elderly Dr Siri who is both National Coroner and a late-onset shaman. As well as crime and resolution the books are witty, satirical and ... dare she say it ... have a supernatural element.

It do make Mrs D remember her librarian days in the "halls of academe" when her first humble post was as an assistant in the South East Asia Department.... long, long ago... This was not a supernatural experience in the main but ... come to think of it ... was prob'ly about the same time the admirable Dr Siri be operating.

You will find a review link to the latest in the series, "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die", over on the Euro Crime Blog.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

When I be a sprout of a teenage schoolgirl... back there in the 1960s... I did buy myself a copy of Ray Bradbury's "The Day it Rained Forever", a Penguin collection of short stories.
Where would my darker imagination be without Bradbury? My psyche rattled for years with the aftermath of "Something Wicked This way Comes". Midwest America would never be the same.

I think he be such an important influence we never knew it. Bradbury wrote "Fantasy" before it became a byword for dragons, wizards, medievalism and works that stretch into at least eight titles. His imagination be prodigious.

Never mind reading his political opinions... George Dubbya be such a good thing... yada-yada.... It will only disappoint. Well me anyway. Why do so many American sci-fi writers turn out to be such raving right-wingers?

Sigh... Good-bye Ray... and thanks for all the stories.