Forgotten (or Overlooked) Book Friday: RIVER OF DARKNESS (1999) by Rennie Airth

"What passing bells for those who die as cattle?"

Wilfred Owen, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'

"I'm back again from hell

With loathsome thoughts to sell;

Secrets of death to tell;

And horrors from the abyss."

Siegfried Sassoon, 'To the Warmongers'

Friday is Forgotten Book day, a weekly meme hosted by Patti Abbott at her blog, Pattinase. I simply can't believe I haven't posted about RIVER OF DARKNESS before except in brief bits and pieces as part of another post. So today this splendid book gets it own post.

Don't forget to check in at Patti's to see what other wonderful but somehow forgotten (or overlooked) books other bloggers are talking about today.

RIVER OF DARKNESS is the first novel in a trilogy written by Rennie Airth, an ex- Reuters foreign correspondent born in South Africa and currently living in Italy. RIVER OF DARKNESS and THE BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE - the second book in the trilogy, are must reads. The third, THE DEAD OF WINTER, you can skip.

Why I say this: I believe that Airth is the sort of writer who needs time to really get going, develop his plot and characterizations and last but not least, polish his style to a high gleam. He is not a 'book-a-year' guy and should not be forced to be so. THE DEAD OF WINTER is a book that seems written just to meet a deadline and the requirements of a contract. It is a poor effort which reads as if an editor wasn't paying attention.

The first two books appear to have been written in just the right amount of time needed by the author and hence, are truly remarkable. So that's why I say, read these two and skip the third - it isn't necessary.

Okay, back to RIVER OF DARKNESS:

Normally I do not like multiple points of view (as many of you know), nor do I like reading from the point of view of the killer - BUT - as is very often the case, I break my own rules when the writing is so fabulous and the story so compelling. Such is the case with RIVER OF DARKNESS.

Yes, this is murder in the English countryside. But it is as far from being a 'cozy' as it is possible for a book to get. The horrors in this book rival the grim horrors of war just recently ended across the Channel. The grisly murders which up-end the bucolic quiet of a country village in Surrey, are made even more incomprehensible by the total lack of motive. Adding to the confusion of the investigation is the complete lack of knowledge of the sort of crimes known today as 'serial killings'.

In 1921 England, just a few years after the end of WWI (the war to end all wars), Scotland Yard Inspector John Madden, himself a veteran with dark memories of his own to quell, is sent into the rural countryside to investigate the grisly murders of an entire family.

Madden is an interesting guy, he is not only a war veteran but a widower as well. He's  been through a lot and the suffering has, naturally, colored his countenance and his view of the world.

"A tall grim man with a scarred forehead, he seemed more like a monk than a policeman, the young detective constable thought. An impression that gained strength now each time the inspector's glance fell on him.  Madden's deep-set eyes seemed to look at you from another world.

He had a strange history - Billy had heard it from one of the sergeants. Madden had left the force some years before after losing his wife and baby daughter, both in the same week, to influenza. The son of a farmer, he had wanted to return to the land. Instead, the war had come, and afterwards he'd returned to his old job with the Metropolitan Police. Changed, though, it was said. A different man from before. Two years in the trenches had seen to that."

So it is especially comforting to the reader to have Madden begin to come to life again when he meets the village doctor, Helen Blackwell. (Women then were only just beginning to study medicine and with the death of so many young men in the war, it seems logical that a village, no matter how reluctantly, would be forced to accept a woman doctor.) She has her own burden of sorrow having lost close family members in the war.

(The recent hellishness of WWI casts long shadows on the events in this story.)

Blackwell will add her own medical and psychological expertise to the case as will an 'alienist' that Madden consults when it becomes obvious to him that the murders in this current case are not the result of a robbery gone bad, but the work of a single, fiendish individual. Then after much painstaking attention to detail, it becomes apparent that this individual has killed before but in the confused frenzy of war, his murders have been taken for separate crimes, if discovered at all. In effect, the killer has been able to use the war to cover his own murderous trail.

The mood of this book is grim (how could it not be?), and everything appears (in my mind at least) seen through 'a glass darkly'. But if you're in the mood for a brilliant historical thriller in which the 'whodunit' factor is less important than 'how-dunit' and 'why-dunit', not to mention the procedure of it all, then this is it.

There are similarities to Caleb Carr's book, THE ALIENIST (set in NYC, at an earlier time), but Rennie Airth creates his own world, quite separate and equally gripping. I understand too that there are similarities to the Charles Todd series of apres-WWI mysteries. (I hope to begin reading those at some point in time.)

The free-wheeling and often frenzied world between two world wars was a time when society was in flux, the  established norm was no longer so normal or so established and new methodology was needed to deal with the sometimes chaotic results. A good time for a man adept at disguise and re-invention and compelled to kill.

Don't miss this book.

Monday Book Review: THE IRON HEART A Franz Schmidt Mystery by Marshall Browne

Marshall Browne is an Australian writer you've probably seen me talk about before. I consider it one of my callings to spread the word about his work whenever I get the chance. He's just much too good to be overlooked. Browne, a former merchant banker, writes two terrific suspense series: the Inspector Anders books set in modern day Italy and the Franz Schmidt books set in Germany on the eve of WWII.

Forced to choose, I'd pick the Schmidt books as my favorites, but the enigmatic Inspector Anders is not far behind.

THE IRON HEART is the second book in the Schmidt series, published in 2009 and not, currently, readily available in this country for reasons that mystify. I was thrilled when I finally got my hands on a copy - thankfully sent directly to me from Australia, by the very accommodating author. I'm happy to say that the book more than meets my expectations. It is even better than I dared imagine. (Not always the case with second books in a series.)

The first book in the continuing Schmidt saga, THE EYE OF THE ABYSS was/is one of my favorite books and now I must add this second adventure in which Schmidt once again risks life, limb and everything else he holds dear, to work undercover against the insidious Nazi regime. This is as good a book as the first one and simply put, I was completely caught up in the story - kept reading till 3 in the morning one night, same thing the second and third nights. What a terrific book!

The gist of the story: Franz Schmidt is a bank auditor who has helped mysterious anti-Nazi forces (apparently controlled by the powerful General Manfred Von Streck, a member of the Nazi inner circle) in the past. Schmidt's ingenious machinations in the first book resulted in several Nazis killed - framed for embezzlement at Bankhaus Wertheim, the bank Schmidt once worked for. This time around, General von Streck places the clever auditor inside the ultimately more important Reichsbank, 'the financial heart of the Third Reich' in Berlin. It is the freezing winter of 1939.

"You're a man with extremely unusual and useful qualities, a Machiavellian mind. A man upon whom good luck smiles," Von Streck had announced to him in November. It was true, though he'd only become aware of it in those last vexed and dangerous months at Wertheims.

Not only is he to keep his eyes open (well one eye for sure, the other is a prosthesis), Schmidt is to photograph a certain Nazi financial blueprint kept at night in the bank president's safe, then pass the photos on to Von Streck. Schmidt has also to maneuver - daily - through a dangerous phalanx of suspicious Nazi party members and workers who bristle at the idea of his being brought in from the outside to take over as Chief Auditor. These include the zealous amazonian bank manager, Fraulein Freda Brandt, a passionate, resentful woman and her lover and deadly cohort, Sturmbannfeuhrer Sack of the Gestapo. It isn't long before both begin to suspect the Chief Auditor is up to something.

Schmidt also has to tread lightly around the lascivious bank President, Dr. Funk. Funk, an ugly little man with pretensions of grandeur, is a known homosexual. He is intrigued by the handsome Chief Auditor and plots an unseemly romance. Schmidt is repulsed by Funk's drunken debauchery but forced to put up with him if he [Schmidt] has any hope of undermining the Reich's financial plans.

Also working at the bank is the beautiful and aristocratic Fraulein Anna von Schnelling. The young woman (who has caught the divorced Schmidt's eye) is placed in grave danger when she forcefully foils the plans of Herr Rossbach, a vile oaf of a manager (and future boss of her department) intent on rape.

When she has no choice but to turn to Schmidt for help, he is drawn deeper into a secondary plot which can only endanger his primary goal. Deadly undercurrents swirl around him as Schmidt, despite the many distractions, continues to carry out his  assignment. The grimly impatient Von Streck may be working against the Fuehrer's plans, but he is not someone to trifle with.

In another and ultimately very moving storyline, we meet Fraulein von Schnelling's friend, the intellectual (and rather politically naive) Elizabeth von Bose who has been holding literary salons in her Berlin home, inviting society women and others to speak freely against the government. She is sure that the authorities would not act against them, at least without due process. A tragically wrong assumption on the part of von Bose and her well-meaning friends once they are infiltrated and betrayed by a young Swiss doctor.

Perhaps the most heart rending parts of the book are the scenes at Gestapo headquarters once von Bose and a woman friend are picked up by the authorities. The women are helpless against the kind of animal brutality they have never imagined existed.

This brought home to me once again, one of the possible explanations why citizens of 1930's Berlin and elsewhere in Germany did nothing while the Nazi juggernaut marched forward. It's possible there were many people who simply did not believe that humans - Germans themselves - were capable of such depravity on an organized scale. By the time they were forced to believe it, it was too late.

As the factions at work in a futile attempt to help von Bose and her friend combine and overlap with Schmidt's plans, murder and deadly intrigue become commonplace. Ultimately, in one of several hold-your-breath moments in the story, a daring escape to Switzerland (a neutral country during the war) is activated and succeeds because of an ominous and unexpected presence.

Marshall Browne expertly weaves layer upon layer and all I can say is, this is now officially one of my favorite series of all time. (I can only hope there will be a third book.) It's not just Schmidt who intrigues, there are other secondary characters all beautifully realized: Frau Singer, the elderly Jewish woman who lives across the hall from Anna, Abwehr Captain Eugene Von Beckendorf, in love with Anna, but dying of tuberculosis, he will make the ultimate sacrifice to help her and Schmidt, ex-Judge Rubinstein, a Jewish man surviving in the shadows, supplying false papers, working just a step ahead of the Gestapo. All these characters live in this incredible book.

Browne writes with aplomb and the gift of a sure story-teller. He understands the deep conflict of his main character only too well. Herr Schmidt is a reserved, even brilliant man - once just a staid banker -  trying to stay alive, caught on the slippery slope of equivocation as his duties force him more and more into murderous conspiracy.

(There is a further ominous note in the story, the revelation that Schmidt's ex-wife (he divorced her for her own protection) and his little girl are living in Dresden. This is one of the most heavily bombed German cities during the war - over a hundred thousand people were killed.)