There was bouillabaisse for supper, Arlette’s economical one of cod and conger-eel, but she had a good hand with the sauce; it was one of her best dishes. He ate tremendously, and afterwards he put Fidelio on the gramophone.
“I do so love this,” said Arlette when it got to the sinister rumtytum of Pizarro’s entrance.
I wish I’d eaten a soufflé made by Freeling: he must have cooked, as he writes, with a light hand.
Jason Goodwin has published four crime novels set in nineteenth-century Istanbul and featuring the eunuch investigator Yashim. The first, The Janissary Tree (2006), won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2007. The Snake Stone (2007), The Bellini Card (2008), and An Evil Eye (2011) followed. Goodwin has also published nonfiction titles. On Foot to the Golden Horn, his account of walking from Poland to Turkey, won the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize in 1993. Goodwin has also published a history of the Ottoman Empire, Lords of the Horizons (1999). Visit him online at www.jasongoodwin.info.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré (1963)
ÉLMER MENDOZA
(essay translated from the Spanish by Ellen Clair Lamb)
* * *
John le Carré is the nom de plume of David Cornwell (b. 1931), who worked for British Intelligence during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961 he published his first novel, Call for the Dead; two years later, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In all, le Carré has published twenty-two novels, including the Quest for Karla Trilogy, which is composed of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979). Other novels include The Looking-Glass War (1965), The Tailor of Panama (1996), and The Constant Gardener (2001). His most recent novel is Our Kind of Traitor (2010).
* * *
My name is Alec Leamas, and I don’t give a fuck that it doesn’t matter. I am that sad bastard, a broken puzzle dedicated to the noble profession of espionage. Since 1963 I’ve lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain, with enough kisses from Liz to make a hot breakfast and dinner. I’m strictly resolved to keep her out of my business, but the heart is a ruthless hunter, and I do not know whether it’s mine, hers, or both that change the orbit of the earth. Life is full of impossible moments, and in the end, love shows up to screw it all up. Coffee and cognac.
I’m actually Élmer, although I’m also Leamas, and at times Smiley, and at other times John le Carré, most of all when I think about the layers of an onion, when I smoke unfiltered cigarettes or when I drink one whiskey too many.
In 1969, there were nineteen things that forced me to consider the kind of life that awaited me: Neil Armstrong set foot on the rugged moon; Midnight Cowboy was voted best film at the Academy Awards (and I saw it seven times); I used acid for the last time; I moved to Mexico City; I was expelled from a communist cell because I read only novels; I loved Janis Joplin; the famous Abbey Road album came out; the Woodstock Festival happened; the Doors were heard in a Mexico City bar; the Metro mass transit opened; a robust Czech with short hair tried to hook me up with a scholarship a month after a CIA agent told him not to and I panicked; and at the end of November I tore through The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the brilliant novel by John le Carré, published in Spanish in 1964.
Taking to the streets to demand the release of the political prisoners of 1968 and the president’s resignation, I let my imagination run wild: I saw Karl Riemeck with his bicycle, shot down in front of Alec Leamas. I dreamed of an action-packed life of espionage and the turbulence of the Cold War, with its Iron Curtain and its secretive men. I spent hours suffering along with Alec’s journey of self-destruction, which even Control’s fatherly ministrations could not reduce—through his isolation, his poverty, his work in the library, Liz Gold (so lacking in charm), his illness, and the row with the shopkeeper. Fucking shopkeepers, they’re all the same, well deserving the occasional back of one’s hand. Why send the guy up the river for such a minor offense? I imagined Leamas as strong, confident, intelligent, tough enough not to care about anyone—except for Liz, who must have been a skinny old skank, pestering him with the Ronettes and their bitching song: “Be My Baby.”
Leamas again: What, you didn’t like it? Well, fuck you, you fucking faggots scared of your first time. Quiet, Alec, try this elixir of the Aztec gods. Gods? Save it for your grandmother. It’s tequila. Pfft, don’t give me any more of that crap, the Americans must like it, they’ll drink anything; why do you say that about Liz, maybe you’ve met her? What do you think? I like a little meat on the bones, some curves, and I stay away from whiners. You want to shut up? I won’t let anyone talk about her that way, not you, not anyone. You saw what I did to the shopkeeper’s face. Ford was an idiot. Yes, and you killed that guard at the hunting lodge, too. Life has its things that set me afire. What is the essential characteristic of a spy? Being a nonentity. Do you think you got this offer for being handsome or smart? I thought about it. No, a spy is someone who doesn’t exist, who has neither memories nor friends nor home, not even a thin woman who gets excited about the queer music you hear nowadays. Hey, a little more respect for the Beatles. Pfft, pour me another scotch and leave me alone, I have to do something with my life. If you want to be happy, don’t cross the wall. What, and stay here forever? You’re crazy. And if you make it to the future? I don’t give a damn. Another drink, please.
My best friend and I were living in a military boarding school where one night we ran into some hooligans eager to bust some heads—“What’s up, fuckers?” We went to eat our greasy dinner and had to retreat, harassed by troublemakers who wanted the few pesos our parents had sent us. That was when I turned to find Alec Leamas in a state of anger that made him want to quit. I watched him evade his trackers and be hateful to Ashe and defy the angel of death. Something’s driving that bastard, I speculated, and it didn’t surprise me when Kiever showed up to arrange for Alec’s defection. Of course: if the British did not want him and he could earn a few bucks with his history, fine. It was a dazzling world of false passports, name changes, public telephones, and impersonations. I liked what he did with Peters in the Netherlands and his attitude when he crossed into East Germany. I also liked that they were always eating.
I distrusted Fiedler from the beginning. During Peters’s interrogation, it becomes clear that this is part of an operation, and Fiedler makes Leamas repeat each item he’s confessed. That subtlety seemed queer; what does he have against Leamas? Why fuck with him like that? And the case against Mundt coming together bit by bit, as perhaps Fiedler hates him even more than Alec. The excitement was killing me, but I had to put the book down at that point to get some sleep before rising at six the next morning, as required where I lived.
In my dreams, Leamas walked through the door, mortally wounded. What the hell, it’s Fiedler, right? Fucking asshole. Forget it, have you seen Liz? Alec, leave that skank—no butt, no boobs, what kind of woman is that? I need to go to the library, there’s a key I need. Okay, but first I’ll take you to the Red Cross, you’re in really bad shape. Better come with me to the English hospital, they’re more reliable. We went, we took a taxi. We could still see a black car clearly behind us. Absentmindedly, I ordered the cabdriver to turn around, and he showed me a cold smile and a shining gold tooth. I woke up. I managed to read three pages before six o’clock.
There is one part, during the full confrontation before the Tribunal, where Alec says that this is the most twisted intrigue of his career. What dogs. The struggle between Fiedler and Mundt is resolved: good and evil have fought again, and Leamas has been only a piece of the vast puzzle, just like Liz, Peters, Kiever, Karden, and all the others. At this point, I am Leamas, but not John le Carré. The denouement is so brilliant that I could not imagine it, much less foresee it. At this moment, le Carré sets himself apart; he is the orchestrator, the demiurge, the genius who kept us watching the balls in motion, but also a protective shadow, compassionate and demanding, an iconic writer. Writing a maste
rpiece is a revelation that happens only one time among many, in rooms so narrow that they can hold no one else.
What panties was Liz wearing, Leamas? Because the Brazilians just invented the bikini. I’m going to rip your guts out, Élmer Mendoza. How dare you, you fucking alcoholic drunk piece of shit. Like a fuckup, I told you, I’m not staying on this side of the Brandenburg Gate. If you stay you’ll register at the Humboldt University, where you’ll be a lousy student, and you can kill time looking at the pictures of all the Nobel Prize winners (all twenty of them), or walking along the Unter den Linden. You know what? I’ve had enough. I don’t have to put up with your nonsense, I’m no idiot. Aren’t you? It doesn’t matter to me. Did you know that this year the American Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? I don’t believe it, but it would have to be one of them, they’re completely insane. The Beatles are breaking up, but a hard-rock band’s emerged that will make history: Led Zeppelin. That’s it, I’m going to smash your face in for lying. It’s 1969. Hallucinate, and I don’t have to listen to your rubbish. What’s special is that you’re going to be here forever, into the next century and longer, Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I’ll make you pay, you mangy dog, with my own hands. You want a fight? Cross the wall, bastard, and bring your old skank with you. I’ll be waiting.
Élmer Mendoza is a professor of literature at the Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa in Mexico and a member of the Colegio de Sinaloa and the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language. Between 1978 and 1995 he published five books of short stories, and two volumes of essays, and his first novel, A Solitary Murderer, was published in 1999. He has since published six more novels, including two featuring the character of policeman Edgar “Lefty” Mendieta, and won the Tusquets International Prize in 2007 for his novel Silver Bullets. He is regarded as the patriarch of north Mexican crime literature, one of the most skilled users of the slang language of Mexican criminality as a literary language, and a specialist in the subgenre of narcocultura, which examines the impact of the drug trade on Mexican society.
Ten Plus One
by Ed McBain (1963)
DEON MEYER
* * *
Ed McBain (1926–2005) was an American novelist and screenwriter. He was born Salvatore Lombino in New York, and served in the navy in World War II. In 1952 he legally changed his name to Evan Hunter, and it was under this name that he gained fame for his novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954), as well as his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” for the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same title. Although he wrote science fiction and, like many genre writers of his time, pornography under a variety of pseudonyms, it is as Ed McBain that he is most fondly remembered by mystery readers. He began using the McBain identity in 1956 for Cop Hater, the first novel in the 87th Precinct series, largely in order to distinguish his mystery fiction from any literary work that he might produce under his own name. The series, which focuses on a team of detectives in the city of Isola, a fictionalized version of New York, virtually invented the modern police procedural, although McBain disdained the term. “Never procedurals,” a character comments in McBain’s 1995 novel Romance. “And not mysteries, either. They were simply novels about cops. The men and women in blue and in mufti, their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, children, their head colds, stomachaches, menstrual cycles. Novels.”
* * *
I bought it at Don’s Book Exchange for seventy cents in 1976, when I was eighteen years old—a Pan paperback, now falling apart. There is a sniper rifle tied to a chair on the cover photograph. And the legend: “An 87th Precinct Mystery.”
It is my favorite crime novel of all time.
I love every one of McBain’s books, which have sold more than 100 million copies since their first publication. Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he wrote fifty-five 87th Precinct narratives, in addition to thirteen Matthew Hope novels, a slew of stand-alones—many under his legally adopted name of Evan Hunter—and several screenplays, of which the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds is perhaps the most famous.
I had never really tried to figure out why I admire Ten Plus One so much until I began writing this piece. I wasn’t even sure that beloved books should be dissected and analyzed: would it not spoil the absolute pleasure, that immersive, enthralling, captivating reading experience where you just get lost in the book?
I needn’t have worried.
First off, there’s the matter of “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here” (to paraphrase another of McBain’s always charming titles), his so very human, flawed, and fascinating characters: Detectives Steven Louis Carella, Meyer Meyer (“Jew on Fire”), and Bert Kling. Miscolo from the clerical office, Lieutenant Byrnes, and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Homicide Division, the wiseass pair of Monoghan and Monroe.
Then there’s McBain’s voice—the wry, ironic, witty third-person omniscient narrator that makes his books so totally unique. (This is where my biggest admiration for him as an author lies. I attempted a similar style early in my career, only to discover that I was not nearly smart and talented enough.) “Nothing is allowed to die in the spring,” he writes. “There’s a law that says so—Penal Law 5006, DEATH IN THE SPRING.”
And there is his postmodern self-reflection, self-parody, and self-reference, long before such tools were fashionable, like naming a character “Salvatore Palumbo,” and describing him as “a wiry little man,” or injecting comments by characters on the nature of crime stories.
All of which adds up to a certain exuberance, as if he really enjoyed writing and was happily fascinated by human beings and this wonderful world, particularly his fictitious city of “Isola” (“island” in Italian, but really New York, where he was born and lived for almost all his life). I think he loved the whole concept of the city as melting pot, always reflected in the variety of his lesser characters and their vocations, among them David Arthur Cohen, the gag writer, with whom he has so much fun in this novel—and for whom he wrote several original gags in the process.
But above all there is the perfect plotting of this novel, the deepening of the mystery (why is the sniper shooting people who participated in a college play twenty-three years ago?), the ever-rising suspense as the pressure mounts on the detectives. All of the crime fiction elements are there as waypoints in the superlative structure—the red herring, the certain suspect, and the sting in the tail.
South African crime author Deon Meyer is a former journalist, advertising copywriter, Internet manager, and brand strategist. He has published nine novels and two short-story collections in Afrikaans. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages worldwide. Accolades include Le Grand Prix International de Littérature Policière, the Deutsche Krimi Preis, the Swedish Martin Beck Award, and a Barry Award in the United States. Deon lives near Cape Town with his wife, Anita, and their four children. He is passionate about South Africa, Mozart, motorcycles, cooking, and Free State Cheetahs and Springbok rugby. Visit him online at www.deonmeyer.com.
The Chill
by Ross Macdonald (1964)
JOHN CONNOLLY
* * *
Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American mystery writer Kenneth Millar (1915–83), whose reputation rests on the series of novels that he wrote between 1949 and 1976 featuring private investigator Lew Archer, named, in part, after Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Set in and around Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Santa Barbara in Southern California, the books combine elements of the psychological thriller and the whodunit to create what screenwriter William Goldman described as “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.”
* * *
Writers are products of accumulation: we are the children of those writers whom we ourselves have read and loved. Sometimes, their shadows are so great that it takes us years to escape from under them, if we ever truly escape them at all.
Thus it is that, if I were to come up with a list of the writers who h
ave influenced and formed me, it would include two American mystery novelists without whom I would not be writing at all, so significant was their impact upon me. One of those is James Lee Burke, who remains, I believe, the greatest living prose writer in the genre. The other, now deceased, is Ross Macdonald. (I fully accept that, if Macdonald were alive, he might not see his influence upon me as something to trumpet very loudly. Similarly, if Jim Burke ever decides to nod politely in my direction before hurrying on his way, a faintly distressed look upon his face, then I will take the hint, and there will be no hard feelings on my part.)
Burke taught me that the language of mystery fiction can aspire to the language of the finest literature, that there really should be no distinction between the two. A genre novel is not a poor relative of literature because it is a genre piece: it is poor only if its writing is poor and its reach is so modest as to count as the barest flexing of a muscle. There is only good writing and bad writing.
Macdonald, meanwhile, is the genre’s first great poet of empathy and compassion, the creator, in private detective Lew Archer, of a man so attuned to the pain of others, so unable to turn his face from suffering that, by the final novel in the Archer sequence (The Blue Hammer, 1976), he has become almost a Christ figure, his existence defined by his capacity to take on the burdens of humanity and, in doing so, achieve some release for those in agony and a form of redemption for himself.