A Canadian author new to me, Khan presents a team of community policing officers: Inspector Esa Khattak and Sgt. Rachel Getty. Khattak is investigating the death of Christopher Drayton who fell from the Scarborough Bluffs. Why is community policing involved, which normally works among ethnic and diverse minorities? It was a special request from Esa’s friend in the federal Justice ministry where they had received letters accusing Drayton of war crimes. Was his death accident, suicide, or murder? The first call Esa and Rachel make on Drayton’s neighbours is to well-known writer Nathan Clare—to Rachel’s surprise an old friend of Esa’s. Everyone they interview had great regard for Drayton, especially his fiancée, the provocative Melanie Blessant. Esa is bewitched (unconvincingly, to my mind) when interviewing Mink Norman, the creative mind behind a brand-new museum called Andalusia, to which Drayton contributed. But Drayton’s house reveals information that could have motivated his murder.
Drayton’s real identity was Dražen Krstić, formerly a Serb Army commander, the ones who coined the term “ethnic cleansing” for the planned genocide of Bosnian Muslims. Thus the true centre of the novel. Publicity could be a major embarrassment for Canadian Immigration and the Justice ministry. A great deal of research is done here on the Bosnian slaughter of the 1990s, mostly horrific, but also some touching stories of survivors. Drayton was not the only one who changed his name, in slightly improbable plot twisting. The unpleasant Melanie, her ex-husband, and their secretive daughter Hadley could also have motives for getting rid of Drayton. Rachel’s strained domestic life with two dysfunctional parents is a challenge, but she’s overjoyed when she locates her estranged brother Zach. A few unlikely elements here and there don’t spoil the start of a promising series.
One-liners
▪ He’d been the one man she’d met who she thought could resist blondes. (77)
▪ His heritage was neither Arab nor Hispanic, yet he laid claim to the intertwined identities of the civilization of Islam. (134)
▪ The woman’s need to believe in Drayton’s single-minded adoration of her had made her blind to everything else. (239)
▪ “Drayton was worth a hell of a lot more to me alive than dead.” (243)
Multi-liners
▪ Blunt as ever. Direct and to the point. It was the thing about her she knew Khattak valued most. (19)
▪ His private life was difficult to read. What was far more explicit was the reaction of every woman who came within his radius. (34)
▪ “Srebrenica wasn’t the beginning. It was the end.” (65)
▪ Book burnings. Those inveterate moments in history when knowledge and the transmission of it was the most dangerous currency of all. (79)
▪ “Pay no attention to anything she says. She lives for trouble. Eats and drinks it too, I think.” (119)
▪ Mink looked at him sharply. “Are you here about his identity or are you here because of his death?” (138)
▪ “No more than a trophy for Christopher’s arm. A somewhat artificial woman with a voracious eye for Christopher’s credit cards.” (187)
▪ “But in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbours, paramilitaries, soldiers. Those who wouldn’t participate were threatened, they were told it was a bonding ritual.” (280-1)
Museum attractions
“Eat,” she said. “You’ve been enchanted by Andalusia.”
“Or by the woman who breathed it into being.”
She brushed his words aside. “Look what I’ve brought you.” She placed a dish of fresh dates in his hand.
He knew he should rise, find another seat, place some distance between them, but Mink was as sweetly scented as her garden. It was its own magic, that and the soft words that painted for him a distant civilization, a time of grace and elegance, a grand achievement.
The Library of Cordoba.
Of course a librarian would cherish such a memory. (132)
Reunion
“ ... I needed to know if you were dead or alive. I needed answers.”
“And you thought I’d be strung out on drugs, didn’t you? You’d made something of yourself, but there was no chance that I would.”
“Jesus, Zach! You were fifteen. You may not know what happens to kids on the street but I’m under no illusions.”
“That’s right.” He scowled at her. “You’re out of uniform, I see. Does that mean you quit? Because I could never understand why the sister I looked up to more than anyone would want to follow in the footsteps of the man who beat me bloody.”
“Zach, please.” She took his hand again. (143)
Fearful teenager
She didn’t say anything else, although Khattak gave her time. It wasn’t working. Nothing he’d said had convinced her to trust him. She was much too frightened. Not of someone but for someone.
“What did your father and Drayton argue about?” he asked at last.
Hadley raised one arm in front of her body as if to ward off his question. Tears spattered her freckled skin. Throat working, she opened her mouth to speak. And then fainted dead away. (182)
Contempt for U.N.
“Your government was never going to see justice done. You preached peacekeeping at us while practicing cowardice. We remember your secret pact to evacuate your battalion from Srebrenica by stealth, leaving my people defenseless. It was your representative, Mr. MacKenzie, whose claims about ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ satisfied so many. Let the savages fight it out. Except they wouldn’t let us fight. They tied our hands and left us to die.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“The arms embargo,” he said wearily. “What else would I mean?” (227)
Susie Steiner. Remain Silent. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2020.
Susie Steiner says about this book, “I was relishing the company of DI Manon Bradshaw, the detective protagonist of my crime novels.”* And so was I, loving the third book about her crazily anxious but endearing heroine. In the midst of relishing, neither Susie nor I knew that the gifted author had a brain tumour that would be diagnosed and treated before the book was published. Strange shades of Graham Hurley’s also-wonderful Enora Andresson.
Since the previous novel in the series, Manon is approaching middle age with baby Teddie, four years old, teenager Fly, and a humdrum domestic life with partner Mark. Although her job is part-time on cold cases, she is called in on a puzzling hanging in a park (more of the police budget squeeze I see in so many Brit novels). Could be suicide, could be murder. It leads to an HMO (houses of multiple occupation) for East European migrant agricultural workers—you know, the ones who do all the underpaid, dirty, grunt jobs an Englishman wouldn’t touch. Their at-home conditions are simply appalling, being more or less prisoners supervised by cruel manager Edikas and his vicious dog. It’s his job to keep them in slavery and ensure their wages are being laundered by a crime organization. The town of Wisbech produces its own anti-immigration protesters and agitators.
Lukas (the dead man) and Matis were friends from childhood, in Klaipeda, Lithuania; their disillusionment with a promised new life in England is complete—no language, no money, no friends. Manon’s sidekick Davy thinks the hanging is a warning to other migrant workers who complain of their lot. Matis is a possible witness but he disappears. The workers say one of them called Saulius died from a beating, and his body disappears. As the story unfolds, Matis had secretly managed to get involved with sympathetic Elise, not knowing she’s the daughter of leading anti-immigrant protester Dean Singlehurst. Manon suspects Lukas was murdered, as she tries to uncover every rock, antagonizing almost everyone she meets in moments of pure hilarity. Not so funny when Mark develops cancer symptoms; suddenly she understands the warmth and magic in their relationship. Steiner’s human touches are refreshing and magical themselves. It’s a social statement as well as a tangled mystery.
You go, girl.
* “It has been easier to cope with my cancer ...” The Guardian, 13 June 2020. [And we share a world-class admiration for Christopher Hitchens.]
Manon
▪ “Never underestimate the anger of the overlooked white middleaged man, Davy Walker, and I say that as someone who lives with one.”(63)
▪ If there’s one thing she can’t stand, it’s sexual tension where she’s not remotely involved. (72)
▪ And little kids adore big kids, are amazed by them, as if they are an optical illusion, a unicorn version of themselves. The little kid inside the big kid makes contact with the big kid inside the little kid and magic happens. (81)
▪ There he is on a mattress on the far side of the room, all whopping seven feet of him, legs bent, back to the wall. The man is built like a Transit van. Giant headed. Shins like paddles. Surely he could lift Edikas off the floor with one hand. (83)
▪ And what, after all, is the alternative to being DI on the murder squad, given the rent won’t pay itself and she has failed to marry an oligarch? (267)
▪ “I haven’t managed a full interview because we need an interpreter and if I have to watch him finger type for much longer I might kill myself.” (336)
Davy
▪ When he asks each in turn what happened on the night Lukas died, there are furtive glances to one another, partial sentences, pinched lips. They know, but they’re not saying, Davy thinks. (62)
▪ Davy says, “Lukas was the depressive type. Miserable about his situation here, generally pessimistic by nature, even when he was living in Klaipeda. Doom balloon was the general consensus.”
▪ Davy is a man to avoid violence at all costs, a lover not a fighter, which isn’t true of all coppers. (234)
Matis
▪ He gave Matis his most hangdog worried look, the look that said look at the place you’ve led me to, the kind that made Matis turn away. (198)
▪ He closed his eyes, immobilised by the vodka, which has muffled him, slowed his limbs. (208)
▪ He would not choose to live in the UK, where the island mentality had made the people mean. They knew nothing of hardship, these people ‒ had never been invaded by Nazis, then Soviets. (211)
Elise
▪ Her dad tended to go for the sort of friends who followed rather than challenged, but Elise though this was less egotism on his part than insecurity. (126)
▪ She kissed Lukas then, wondering why she’d picked the wrong Lithuanian, and slipped out of the bathroom, down the stairs and onto the road, fast as a streak of light. (202)
▪ Of course it isn’t the first time he’s kicked her. Of course she’s been punched before, when he’d had a few cans of Tennent’s. (251)
Her man:
She has spent so long criticising Mark, this person she tells everything to, the person who is her lifeblood, the rug beneath her feet (and just as poorly treated), her walls, her roof, her warmth, and her seasons. She has wasted their short time together not appreciating him, and what if now he is to be taken away?
He is her fit, her equal, her better half. He is the stalwart presence that allows her to yearn for freedom; the one who loves her enough to put up with her, and who else would do that, even if she wanted them, which she never would because she only wants Mark Talbot? For ever and ever, amen. (76)
Unauthorized, uncooperated with, and a bit premature (O’Toole had almost another thirty years to live). The star made it plain he didn’t want this man to write a book about him. All of O’Toole’s quotes are, therefore, pulled from other writings – critics, journalists, and so on. I didn’t like the author’s style of chronological skipping around, granted I skimmed the first few chapters, but then came the part that yielded some excellence: the making of Lawrence of Arabia.
The film took over two years to make with a very exacting director, David Lean. O’Toole spent three months in a Jordan desert, east of Amman, before filming even began! ... living the Bedouin experience. Throughout the crew’s time in the desert, they were miserable in the heat and primitive conditions (early 1960s). It’s an unforgiving area. Naturally they did move south later, to the photogenic Wadi Rum desert ‒ my personal happy place – where the Arab army rallied for assault on Aqaba. Many other scenes were next filmed in Spain, then the whole shebang moved on to Ouarzazate, Morocco. They were not complimentary about their stay in that outpost. The vast Atlas Film Studio, which I toured in 2017, did not exist then; David Lean was among the first to recognize the area’s potential for biblical and adventure film-making.
Plus. Random things I didn’t know about O’Toole. He always wore green socks (not in the desert, I trust). In the same class with him at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts were Richard Harris, Alan Bates, and Albert Finney; friendly rivals, sometimes competing for parts. The first movie O’Toole appeared in was Disney’s Kidnapped; he got the part because he could play the bagpipes! I saw that movie! He suffered ill health, gastro-intestinal, much of his life.
Best were the comments about ‒ wait for it – learning to ride a camel. He suffered many a fall and injury. And a very sore hindquarter the first few times.
▪ When he slipped down the side of the beast at the end of the time, blood was oozing from the seat of his jeans. He was in agony. (79)
▪ “You shall be good Bedouin, stones of the desert, but this is a very delicate Irish ass.” (79)
▪ His solution, his “contribution to Arab culture” as he put it, was to get the Bedouin to use Dunlopillo rubber pads under their camel saddles. (79)
▪ By the end of the shooting of Lawrence, O’Toole had ridden five thousand miles on camelback ‒ about a thousand hours of swaying in the saddle. (80)
▪ “Mind you, Lawrence wasn’t a film. It was an experience. Two years and seven countries.” (86)
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