Reading in Reykjavík

This is a triple challenge book for me: A Top Mystery, a TBR book and a What’s in a Name read. I can now strike out the “size” title in the last one. Genre: Hardboiled detective story Year of publication: 1939 Setting & time: The Los Angeles area, USA; contemporary Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by elderly General Sternwood to look into a blackmail attempt, but more may be at stake. The General’s older daughter thinks he has been hired to find her husband, who has been missing for several weeks, and the younger daughter wants to have some fun with him and will not take ‘no’ for an answer. Before long, Marlowe has uncovered some criminal goings-on, including not only blackmail, but also gambling, illegal pornography and murder. Raymond Chandler was a master storyteller, and also had a way with words and poetic and startling turns of phrase pop up from time to time, usually when Marlowe is contemplating things. Characterisations are simple but just escape being...

Year of publication: 1929 Series and no.: The Continental Op, first novel, preceeded by and based on short stories Genre: Noir thriller Type of investigator: Private detective Setting & time: Personville, a fictional town in the western USA, probably California or Nevada. Story: The nameless narrator, know to the reader only as the Continental Op, arrives in the small city of Personville where the crime situation has become so bad that people have started calling it Poisonville. His client is murdered before he can meet him, but the dead man’s father retains his services to find the killer. The Op starts investigating and uncovers all sorts of nastiness, and events finally lead to him becoming so annoyed with the place and it’s criminal elements that he decides to clean up the town. Review and rating: Like the previous two Hammett novels I have reviewed, this one is written in a spare and quick style and the narrative moves fast. The story is nasty and brutal and slightly tem...

Here’s another review I wrote shortly after I read the book (in 2007), and then forgot to post. Discovering it has reminded me that I still have the sequel left to read. Year published: 1995 Genre: Crime, thriller, comic Setting & time: New York, USA; 1990s The Story: The book tells the story through the eyes of several characters, but the protagonist is Tommy Pagano, a young sous-chef at a restaurant he doesn’t know is a front for the FBI who are using it to trap some loan-mongering crooks, one of whom is Tommy’s uncle. Other characters include the tragic figure of the drug-addicted chef, the restaurant boss who is trying to keep both the FBI and the mafia happy so he can keep running his restaurant as long as possible, and a couple of FBI men who are trying to do their jobs. Tommy’s world begins to crumble around him when he witnesses a gruesome crime but can’t report it because it would lead to his own death. The chef gets into trouble over his addiction and tries to quit, a...