The Core Dump

David Simon is one of the creators of the fantastic HBO show The Wire. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets after spending 1988 observing three squads of Baltimore homicide detectives. Simon’s unprecedented access to the detectives as they go about their jobs resulted in a book so tight and well-written it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s not fiction.

Not only does Simon capture the lingo and banter of the detectives, but he also finds empathy and raw emotion in the most unlikely places.

As a bonus for fans of The Wire, one of the many classic scenes from that show, where the detectives use a photocopier as a fake polygraph machine, is straight from Homicide.

Even though now 20 years old, Homicide is a gripping read. It is hard to imagine that the business of murder has changed all that much in the intervening years.

Michael Connelly’s latest Harry Bosch novel, The Overlook, started as a serialized novel, and despite a serious reworking it’s less of a treat than we’re used to getting from Michael Connelly.

Apart from the length and somewhat shallow plot, the biggest problem with The Overlook is that Harry Bosch feels tired.

Not up to Connelly’s usual standards, but if you’re a Bosch fan, it’s better than nothing.

Related Core Dump reviews:

Chasing the Dime
Lost Light
The Narrows
The Closers
The Lincoln Lawyer
Echo Park

The follow-up to Dennis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War, Darkness, Take My Hand continues the story of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro and their shoestring PI agency. Like the previous novel, it is a dark tale of South Boston and the corrupt, nihilistic characters who inhabit its underworld.

Unfortunately, where A Drink Before the War was dark and grim, Darkness, Take My Hand ups the gore factor and the sheer amount of human depravity and evil to an unpleasant level. It’s a fine line to walk in noir fiction, and Lehane steps way over it in this novel—reading it is like taking a bath in filth.

On the plus side, Lehane’s prose is finely honed and crafted.

Darkness, Take My Hand is definitely only for the hard-core noir fan.

Related Core Dump Reviews:

A Drink Before the War

Adrian McKinty’s The Dead Yard is his second novel about Irish sociopath Michael Forsythe, following the excellent Dead I Well May Be.

Like its predecessor, The Dead Yard is strong and well-crafted noir, with great writing and an uncanny ear for dialog, with a generous sprinkling of Irish slang and idioms that sets McKinty apart from other writers in the genre. Coupled with a strong, fast-moving plot, interesting and gritty characters, and a convincing portrait of the protagonist, the novel builds on the best parts of Dead I Well May Be and improves on them in every way.

It’s a hard novel to put down, especially as it barrels toward the grim ending.

While it can be read stand-alone, it’s best to first read Dead I Well May Be to get the back story and understand Forsythe’s motivations better.

Dead I Well May Be

Dead I Well May Be is a new generation of hard-boiled noir, featuring a young Irishman brought over to early-nineties New York to work as muscle for a mobster.

Adrian McKinty’s strong and fast-moving debut benefits greatly from his writing style, with a strong sense of place and a great ear for the Irish dialect and idioms. The plot is fast and furious, with great pacing and inevitability. It’s one of those novels that keep you reading way too late into the night.

Dead I Well May Be does suffer a bit from the narrator’s lack of pathos, coming across more as if he’s suffering from Asperger’s than from a violent childhood in Belfast during the Troubles.

That aside, though, it’s a gripping read.

With A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane shows that he is a force in modern American Noir. The novel takes place on the mean streets of Boston—portrayed as a cesspool of racial tension, corruption, and grinding poverty—and follows two private investigators as they take on a missing-persons case that seems like it should be open-and-shut, but ends up putting them in the cross hairs (literally) of corrupt politicians and competing gangs.

A Drink Before the War starts out with a bang, but along the way it sometimes loses steam and meanders a bit, before a decently satisfying ending.

Lehane can be (if there’s such a thing in Noir) too nihilistic—almost everybody in the novel is either damaged or corrupt, and the South Boston described is a war zone without any hope. So, uplifting it isn’t. But it is tightly written, and shows a great deal of promise.

Well worth reading if you like your noir without cream or sugar.

Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir is an omnibus of three novels: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem.

All three novels follow private investigator Bernie Gunther through different eras of Nazi Germany, with March Violets taking place in 1936, The Pale Criminal in 1938, and A German Requiem in 1947.

Kerr writes in a style that is a direct homage to Raymond Chandler, and Bernie Gunther is very much a Raymond Chandler-style private dick. Of course, channeling the great master is quite difficult, and Kerr almost but not quite pulls it off. The greatest problem is that the plots require too much exposition, so things sometimes get a bit talky.

The novels do get close though, and certainly carry a lot of power, as Kerr uses the noir form to investigate what life was like for the German people during the insanity of the Nazis’ rise to power and in A German Requiem the brutal conditions after the war.

Well worth reading for anybody interested in the psychology of madness that can lead to the rise of the sickness of Nazism and the terrible cost of the war it caused.

A school shooting at a prep school in an Edinburgh suburb leaves two boys dead and one wounded, with the perpetrator turning the gun on himself.

As he shares an army background with the perpetrator, John Rebus is attached to the case as an advisor. The question the police needs to answer is why the perpetrator would attack the school and then take his own life.

But as always in an Inspector Rebus novel, the truth in A Question of Blood is much more complex.

Ian Rankin continues to impress.

Resurrection Men
The Falls
Set in Darkness
Dead Souls
The Hanging Garden
Black and Blue
Let it Bleed
Mortal Causes
The Black Book
Strip Jack
Tooth and Nail
Hide and Seek
Knots and Crosses

In Resurrection Men, John Rebus has finally stepped too far over the line and been consigned to a “last chance” course at the Scottish Police College, where he joins other dark sheep police men whose careers are at risk.

The novel continues Ian Rankin’s blisteringly moody Inspector Rebus series with its trademark complex plot, lively and engaging characters, spot-on dialogue, and grim humor.

While the title refers to Rebus and his dilapidated colleagues, it’s also a fun nod to the previous novel in the series, The Falls, where we learned that in Edinburgh’s past the men who exhumed corpses for doctors to practice autopsies on were also referred to as resurrection men.

Simply brilliant.

The Falls
Set in Darkness
Dead Souls
The Hanging Garden
Black and Blue
Let it Bleed
Mortal Causes
The Black Book
Strip Jack
Tooth and Nail
Hide and Seek
Knots and Crosses

University student Phillipa Balfour, son of a prominent Edinburgh banker, has disappeared, and most of the police frenetically searching for her believe her to be dead. As the search grows more desperate, Inspector Rebus finds what he believes is evidence of a serial killer who has been operating undetected in Scotland for a long time, and who may be responsible for Phillipa Balfour’s disappearance.

Or he could be imagining things.

*The Falls* takes Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series to yet another level, with a byzantine and realistic plot and fine-tuned and gritty details of police investigations, including the internal politics and personal relationships between the people whose jobs and sometimes obsessions are to delve into the painful secrets of other people.

As a continuation of the series, The Falls is another triumph—Rankin just keeps getting better and better. In this installation he is turning more attention away from John Rebus and shifting it to his sometimes-unwilling protege Siobhan (shi-wavn) Clarke and how she copes with being a woman in a male-dominated and testosterone-driven profession, as well as how Rebus is rubbing off on her.

Clarke is emerging as a character just as finely penciled as the enigmatic Rebus, and just as fascinating to follow.

With The Falls, Ian Rankin continues to impress.

Related Core Dump reviews:

Set in Darkness
Dead Souls
The Hanging Garden
Black and Blue
Let it Bleed
Mortal Causes
The Black Book
Strip Jack
Tooth and Nail
Hide and Seek
Knots and Crosses