The older I get, the more I return to the taste I had at 15, when I wore only oxford shirts from Brooks Brothers' boys department, wide wale corduroy chinos (not that flattering on a short Jewish girl) and penny loafters or frye boots.
I’m a veteran mystery reader. I cut my teeth on Encylopedia Brown and Nancy Drew, progressed rapidly to Agatha Christie (all 100 plus of them) and, for the last 30 years or so have wandered happily through the worlds of Josephine Tey, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, J.A. Jance, Earl Emerson, Tony Hillerman and Dennis Lehane. For me, the appeal of mystery stories is not figuring out whodunit. Often I just don’t care. For me, mystery stories are literary therapy. When I feel depressed and find my world to be out of control, a couple three good mysteries provide an excellent antidote. In general, in the world of the mystery, evil is punished, good triumphs and, with the addition of a few corpses, order is restored. I find it all quite comforting.
But, I don’t like my mysteries to be too pat and so have always leaned toward tougher stories and away from “cozies.” I validated that particular choice during a recent mystery binge. The binge started about a year and a half ago when I discovered Henning Mankell.
This Swedish mystery writer was a revelation to me. I had never been a big reader of police procedurals, despite my penchant for television cop shows, but I embraced this particular cop immediately. Henning Mankell’s detective is a 50 plus provincial cop, divorced, graying, overweight, insecure. He is a dogged pursuer of leads and a fine thinker, but is plagued by insecurity and the sense of darkness that I, as a resident of dark chilly climate myself, can only attribute to the Swedish latitude and darkness. He struggles with bureaucracy, his family, the choices he makes, his political environment, pretty much everything, managing to remain decent and mostly successful, while being bruised, hurt and failing himself and his colleagues regularly enough to retain his everyman mantle. Like any true binger I gobbled up every one of Mankell’s books currently in print in English, but am still hungry for more.
Enter Robert Wilson to fill the void. Wilson is an Englishman who lives in Portugal and England. His books are set in the Iberian peninsula and Africa, each providing a richly colored glimpse into new worlds. Politics vividly color the background of the African and Iberian books, allowing them to straddle the mystery and spy genres. Wilson presents a deeply jaundiced view of humanity – a world in which most people are not as they seem and regardless behave pretty badly. The Iberian stories seem to have a more heroic hero figure; the African stories that I’ve read feature Bruce Medway, a British expat, who inhabits a sleazier more corrupt milieu.
Also in the sleazy category, Western division, is James Crumley, a Montana-based writer of dark mysteries with an astonishing body count. Crumley's books feature a pair of former PI partners who
Throughout his life, Lev nurtured a love and fascination for the Turkish, Ottoman and Arabic peoples with whom he consorted during a several month long odyssey with his father at the age of 15 or so. Fleeing the Leninist takeover of the Azeri oil capital, Baku, Lev and his father traveled in disguise and by boat, horse, camel, foot, through the Caucasus, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, relying upon the hospitality of the nomadic Islamic tribes who lived in the region. With very few exceptions, these people lived up to their reputation for unparalleled hospitality and kindness to strangers, furnishing the formerly cloistered young man with an experience that changed his life.
As a third generation American of Russian Jewish ancestry, I was particularly intrigued by this book, as it gave me a glimpse into the lives of my own forebears and their friends and neighbors.
The Last Empire is the biography of DeBeers, the company that created the diamond industry. I call it a biography because the company is treated almost like a person or a family. It is quite correctly called the last empire by the author as it exercised nearly unparalleled dominion over the global mining industry and the state of South Africa and, unlike many of the great empires of the past, managed to endure the changing fortunes, world war, political upheaval, geographic expansion and business challenges.
DeBeers is intrinsically linked to South Africa. It was founded by Cecil Rhodes, who played a central role in the colonization of Africa by the British. It remained South Africa’s most significant company from its founding to the present day and, the condition of apartheid that defined South Africa for so many years and ultimately led to its transformation into a black majority ruled state, was created in order to provide a workforce for the diamond and gold mines that provided its wealth.
The story of DeBeers is also, in microcosm, the story of Africa. The diamonds of South Africa, like the oil of Nigeria, the uranium of Congo, the other resources of other nations of Africa were discovered, commercialized, exploited to the detriment of other resources by white men ranging from rapacious to the merely canny but in every case to the total exclusion of the African natives who lived on the land for centuries. It is the tragedy of Africa in the most vivid terms and no one who reads this account can fail to notice.
