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.

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Anno 1790

  

Here’s another example of something I wrote about, two weeks ago.  First, a period mystery, and secondly, a story that breaks off in mid-stride.  This is no reason not to invest your heart, but be warned.  It proves faithless, and you’re abandoned. 

The year, you may guess, is 1790.  Sweden a commercial and military power in the Baltic, an inconclusive war with Russia ended, the Swedish parliament brought to heel by the king, Gustav III.  He himself will be assassinated, two years later, and this political ferment, between monarchy and parliament, the old aristocracy, the rising merchant estates, and a resentful peasantry and urban underclass, is the engine of discontent: the French Revolution is both an inspiration and cautionary tale.  The storyline, though, is a police procedural, set in a time of unease.

A military surgeon, Johan Daadh, a veteran of the Russian war, is enlisted as a police commissioner by Stockholm’s chief constable.  The tension is political, for one, Daadh being a progressive and a rebel sympathizer (I use rebel advisedly), and his boss a royalist, and then he falls for the guy’s wife.  She, too, has a mind of her own – a midwife, she performs an abortion on her niece – but has to operate under social constraints.  The chief constable isn’t by any means unsympathetic, either.  He’s hemmed in by convention, and the law, and a patronage system that saddles him with malicious opportunists.  This is one of the reasons he recruits Daadh.  Neither the doc nor the chief’s wife, however, are anachronistic characters.  Daadh is a rationalist, but he’s still a product of the late 18^th century, and he doesn’t harbor impossibly modern ideas about disease vectors, say.  That would make the whole show impossibly dumb.

(You might not agree with me, but that’s exactly why The Name of the Rose is so insufferable, both the novel and the movie.  Nobody thought that way, in the 14^th century.)

Anno 1790 is a Swedish production, and beautifully produced it is.  The cinematography alone, shot in digital, is breathtaking; the art direction and locations are terrific; even the hair, the wigs, the rouge, appear candlelit.  We suspect these people probably smell a little ripe, and they slather on the powder and scent.  It’s all very wintry and halfway medieval, much of which is probably CGI, but that didn’t bother me.  The mysteries themselves could be sharper, and the longeurs are a little frustrating.  There could be more politics - some sedition, some conspiracy – and there should definitely be more bodice-ripping, but for the most part, it remains amiable and decorous.  The leads are charming and convincing.  I’m especially taken with Linda Zilliacus, a Finnish actress who plays the troubled wife.  Each episode is self-contained, backgrounded by the longer story arc.  My only complaint is that there isn’t more of it.  Why, with the production values and historical appeal, it didn’t get a second season, is beyond me. 

This is just one of those abiding curiosities.  How come Duster only got eight episodes?  Who pulled the plug on Island at War, or Three Pines?  We’re never going to learn if Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes is comatose moonshine, or a boat ride on the Styx.  Perhaps it’s better we don’t.