Three Crime Novels

 1. Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben.  I read Deal Breaker (Dell, 1995) because I had liked two TV series on Netflix with which Coben had been involved -- The Stranger (from his novel) and Safe (which he produced) -- with their emotional and ingenious plots.  Deal Breaker is not particularly emotional but it is ingenious and sometimes funny, one of a series where sports agent Myron Bolitar becomes something of a detective, in this case when one of his stars plans to marry and his intended disappears.  Myron is helped by his partner Winsdor Horne Lockwood III, a black belt in Tae Kwan Do (Myron and Win often attend classes in the middle of their sleuthing).  The story moves slickly and quickly, with a predictable ending (something to which I do not object).

2. The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr (1933, recently republished by Penzler Publisher).  Carr was an American who was an expert on locked room mysteries and wrote twenty-four mysteries with his brilliant sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell.  On Dec. 2 last year I wrote about another Dr. Fell mystery (Carr wrote twenty-four of them) and in that, as well as The Mad Hatter Mystery, it is somewhat unclear as to whether Dr. Fell knew who the murderer was or was simply skilled at extracting confessions in the manner of Chesterton's Father Brown (Fell's appearance is supposedly based on Chesterton).  In the manner of many English mysteries of the time (Carr lived in England most of his life) there is an effective evocation of London and its inclement  weather as well as a map of the murder location and many red herrings.

3. I was impressed with Wendy Lesser's Scandinavian Noir (see my post of Oct. 16  last year) and am now re-reading Wahloo and Sjowall; The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Pantheon 1969, translated by Joan Tate), their second Martin Beck novel.  In this one Beck has to cut short his vacation to travel to Budapest, where a Swedish journalist disappeared.  While snooping around he is assaulted by friends of the journalist who were in league with him to smuggle drugs.  Beck is helped by the Hungarian police and finally solves the case by his obsession with detail, in this case the items in the journalist's suitcase, which had been left behind in a Budapest hotel.  Too much has been made about the innovative nature of the Martin Beck books -- the two Gideon Fell books I posted about show a similar grayness about good and evil -- but they are impressively written and translated and give considerable credit to Beck's comrades in the complicated hierarchy of the Swedish police.