Odd Combinations

One of the depressing truths about the lit biz is that there are only so many plots, so many narratives. To keep these venerable stories of star crossed love, revenge, redemption, and quest alive, the working writer struggles with style and ingenuity, building a brand in the contemporary phrase. Something different, something new – but not too new or too different: it's a delicate balance and a matter of taste.

Paz Pardo

I recently read two novels that approach the problem with interesting combinations. The Shamshine Blind, a debut novel by Paz Pardo, takes a standard sort of mystery – malfeasance in high places – but sets it in a truly imaginative dystopian California. 

International best seller Ragnar Jonasson's The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer is a second outing for Helgi Reykdal, a young Icelandic detective passionate about Golden Age mystery novels. Helgi's a nice chap and a sensible detective, even if he sometimes consults Agatha Christie as well as his crime scene notes. The resulting novel is a Christie type mystery gradually darkened by Scandinavian noir. 

The Shamshine Blind features the most imaginative weaponry in many years. The premise of the story is that Argentina, far from losing the Falklands War, triumphed over both the UK and NATO and now controls big hunks of North America, including California. How was this possible? Through the development of psychopigments, colored powders and liquids which work directly on the emotions.

The Gauchos, as they are known in the book, succeeded in producing mass states of panic, rage, and depression by bombing major cities with the powerful pigments. The campaign rendered big swaths of urban landscape uninhabitable. Even years after the attacks, signs warn travelers of dangerous areas where "your emotions are not your own" and everyone knows that too much exposure to pigments produces terminal brain damage. 

On top of the war time destruction is the havoc caused by careless medicinal or recreational use of positive pigments like Sunshine Yellow and the illicit manufacture of potent new colors or of adulterated medicinal pigments. This is where agent Kay Curtida and her trainee Tommy come in. Both are depressives – neurodivergent people are believed to  have a better tolerance for pigment exposure – and they are part of an underfunded police force that specializes in pigment offenses.

The scenery is great and the whole business of the pigments is nicely and elaborately worked out, but a clearer mystery plot would have been desirable. I suspect that the effort of making Daly City (outside ruined San Francisco) plausible and clarifying the politics and the weaponry of the story rather shortchanged the plot. Still, it would be interesting to see if Pardo returns with another Daly City outing for Agent Curtida.

No problems with plot for Ragnar Jonasson, who has written several well- received mystery series, and who serves up an intricately constructed missing persons story via a tape recording transcript and intercut scenes from 1976, 2005, and 2012. It is all very skillful and the characters, by and large, are at once reasonably sympathetic and slightly dodgy. Dame
Agatha would approve.

But maybe there is something in the frozen north that did not afflict the tidy market towns, fine country houses, and elegant London flats of many Golden Age stories. A plot set to wrap up with a neat resolution is shattered by an outbreak of a hatred that has simmered around the edges of the narrative. In a curious way, it appears that the characters mistook the genre they were in. They minimized a real danger until it explodes for an ending that is distinctly not Golden Age but which sets up future dramas for Helgi Reykdal. 

Ragnar Jonassan

Ending aside, Jonassan joins Anthony Horowitz, creator of the Tony and Hawthorne mysteries, and Arturo Perez-Reverte, whose recent The Final Problem employs a Sherlock lookalike, in flirting with Golden Age type plots and detectives.