Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre
International Noir Fiction
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6M ago
Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books)   Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre is a thriller, a horror story, and a satire, but above all else an investigation of the relationahip of selfhood and language. The horror element comes not from an alien or supernatural source, but from the depths of human nature, with a reference not to technology but to anthropology and human history, myth, and ritual. Siddiqi’s novel occupies the fraught line between fascination and disgust, between the satiric and the gruesome. Siddiqi, like some other writers working in or adjacent to the ..read more
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William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin: The last Laidlaw (and the first)
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
 William McIlvanney's three novels featuring detective Jack Laidlaw.Laidlaw (1977), The Papers of Tony Veitch (1981), an Strange Loyalties (1991) are not only the foundation of Tartan Noir but distinctive and atmospheric additions to the crime novel as a genre. McIlvanney died in 2015, left an unfinished Laidlaw novel, a prequel to the earlier trilogy, and Ian Rankin (the other most prominent Scottish crime writer) has now finished the  book, released as The Dark Remains by Europa Editioons in their World Noir series. This is not so much a "young Laidlaw" sort of thing: instead, Lai ..read more
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More (late) summer reading: Laura Lippman etc.
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
 Laura Lippman has recently been releaseing some of her most ambitious and succesful novels: I'm thinking in particular of the new-noir Sunburn and the new Dream Girl. Dream Girl is a twisty combination of horror (a la Stephen King's Misery, explicitly evoked in the book), a literary thriller, an academic comedy, and a meditation on resentment, revenge, andn authorship. Highly recommended and both compelling and fun. The Good Turn, by Dervla McTiernan, was the kind of hidden gem that sometimes turns up on the digital galley websites, offering previews to bloggers and critics. This is the ..read more
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Giarico Carofiglio review
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nourishment-from-good-stories-on-gianrico-carofiglios-the-measure-of-time/ #lareviewofbooks ..read more
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Suggestions for summer reading: Part 1
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
 I haven't been posting much lately, so to avoid the pressure of doing full reviews of the books I've read recently, I'm going to list some books with brief comments and recommendations.: Here are the first 3: Becoming Inspectyor Chen, by Qiu Xiaolong: The story follows 2 tracks, one in the present, in which Inspector Chen faces a dilemma of conscience more profound than the murder mystery he is (covertly) investigating. The other is the detective's backstory, beginning in the miseries of the Cultural Revolution and returning frequently to a lane of traditional houses that also figures in ..read more
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Alan Parks, Bobby March will Live Forever/Jo Nesbø, The Kingdom/
International Noir Fiction
by
2y ago
 A quick review of three recent. books, all of which have a lot of music in them, but two of them have rock music as a major theme. Jo Nesbø's The Kingdom has a lot of music in it, being referred to or played in the background of the main story, but it's more of a matter of texture fot ehis book, rather than a. main theme. The Kingdom is not one of the Harry Hole books, it's a stand-alone about a pair of brothers who have endured a lot of abuse and tragedy. One has gone to America to escape amd make his fortune, the other stays on the famil's "kingdom," a farmstead (not a working farm) o ..read more
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The Transaction, by Guglielmo D'Izzia
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
The Transaction is a novel set in the 1980s in Sicily, with murder and the mafia as important (though off-stage) elements of the story. But D'Izzia's novel is less Montalbano than Pirandello, not so much a crime novel as a literary and philosophical tale. The author is from Sicily, but emigrated to Canada and wrote The Transaction was written in English (with the creative license of a writer, à la Nabokov, whose native language is not English). The story concerns a businessman from Milan, sent to a small town in Sicily to finalize a land deal that would allow his company to open a branch in ..read more
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The Second Life of Inspector Canessa, by Roberto Perrone
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
Roberto Perrone's The Second Life of Inspector Canessa is the second book in a new series from Walter Presents, which is the BBC's excellent series of crime TV series from around the world, and Pushkin Press. Perrone's novel, originally published in Italian in 2017, deals with the aftermath of the "years of lead," the period of terrorism (from the left and the right) in the 1970s and 80s, viewed from the perspective of today. Canessa, a retired Carabiniere, is suddently called back from his calm new life as a restaurateur in a remote coastal village, when his estranged brother is killed along ..read more
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Black and Gold: Two classic noir noves
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
These two noir classics are firmly placed in their time: Cornell Woolrich published The Bride Wore Black (under the pseudonym William Irish) in 1940 (it was made into a film in 1968 by Francois Truffaut). Dolores Hichens published Fool's Gold in 1958 (and it was filmed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1964 as Bande à part or Band of Outsiders). Both films significantly differ from the original novels, but that's another story. Black is a classic revenge story, though we don't know the details of the original offense until the end. The bride systematically murders the men on her list, but the police can ..read more
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New Tana French, The Searcher
International Noir Fiction
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2y ago
 My review of Tana French's new novel, The Searcher, is now live at the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/closeness-and-cruelty-on-tana-frenchs-the-searcher ..read more
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