Books for Xmas: Thrillers

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When Minette Walters was in the country recently she said she began writing crime books for the simple reason that she wanted to write the books she liked to read. "When I go on holiday I pack the crime books in the bottom of the suitcase and the shortlisted Booker novel on the top. The Booker book remains unread."

Some picks, then, for the top of the suitcase. Included is one Booker shortlisted novel which even Walters — and the rest of us with best-left-unanalysed appetites for vicarious forays into the world and mind of the serial killer and the psychopath — might well find is the rare exception.

That book is Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (Faber & Faber, $24.95). Strictly speaking it's not a fully paid-up member of the genre. It sneaks in not just because Ishiguro's narrator, Christopher Banks, was the most celebrated detective of London society in the 1930s, but because its smokescreened world of half-truths and plays on the reliability of memory give it an air of mystery and intrigue.

The mystery at the heart of the book is what happened to Banks' parents, who disappeared in Shanghai, presumed kidnapped, when the great detective was a small boy.

He returns to discover what happened to them, to a world made both murky and familiar by recollections of his childhood there. It is a strange place to revisit, not least because there is no sense of surprise at his return —
neither Banks nor those who remember the incident appear incredulous at the idea that his parents will be found alive and well. It's a book about obsession and you emerge from it feeling as though you'd strayed into somebody else's dream (the smoke effects are from an opium pipe). Yet it's the reality of their life (which you will never know) which is far more compelling.

Marc Behm's The Eye of the Beholder (No Exit Press, $29.95) is more like wandering into a nightmare. This one's not new but it has been out of print for many years and recently reissued along with what might be described as its mirror image, Afraid to Death. The Eye is never named. He is the nemesis of popular fiction's private eye: a man who crosses the United States on the track of a woman who woos and kills, again and again. To watch, not to catch. The Eye has become the voyeur.

In the opening pages, the Eye appears as the stereotypical PI, with his miniature of Scotch, his gun, his ruined life, the photo he carries around of 15 little girls in a classroom. One of them is his daughter. He doesn't know which one. He can't identify his daughter; he can't lose sight of the woman who kills. He's met her eye: "Her scorpion's caress paralysing him with rapture, her venom warming his blood."

The stalking tables are turned in Afraid to Death. Joe Egan is on the run — from women, from gambling debt, from life. But mostly from the blond he first met when he was 11. That morning she spoke to him in a voice from "Somewhere Else." The adult Joe sees her everywhere. She could be from anywhere, or could not exist at all. As hardboiled as 10-minute eggs, as frightening as the noise in the night you never identify, Behm's books are little masterpieces of the bleak.

We like bleak. That's why we don't read romances.

Walters' latest, The Shape of Snakes (Allen and Unwin, $35), takes her a step further into the not-pretty pyschological landscape that she's so fond of exploring. With this one Walter takes on racism, labels (her protagonist is never given a first name) and madness. Can mental illness simply be a convenient form of labelling the soci-ally unacceptable?

Mad Annie is found dying in a gutter. M was there when she died and takes up a investigation into her death. It's an investigation she resumes after 20 years when she and her husband return from Australia where they've fled to escape the retribution M's actions have brought about.

Walters is a challenging thriller writer. Her characters are shape-changers (like all of us, she would argue). She's never going to give any clues about who is good and who is bad — she wants to challenge our prejudices. She does that again, but if this one doesn't quite come off it's possibly because in making M so elusive a character it's difficult to develop any real compassion for her obsession.

The Shape of Snakes is set in the claustrophobic bleak nastiness of suburbia. This year's offering from Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, Grass-
hopper (Viking, $29.95), is set above suburbia, high on the rooftops of Maida Vale where a collection of young people, dislocated from society by unhappy histories, walk above the world and watch the way other people live their lives.

It's a sort of freedom, a type of self-imposed imprisonment — and Vine/Rendell uses her vantage point to peer into the strangeness of lives behind curtains. It's a wonderfully successful, taut thriller in which the tension relies as much on the locale as the characters — who will fall, and were they pushed?

The Last Precinct (Little, Brown and Company, $29.95) is the latest Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell. It is Cornwell at her best, taking apart with her fictional scaLpel the flawed medical examiner who cuts up the dead for a living and who takes apart her own motives for living.

She's a hard woman to live with — which makes it convenient to kill off every man who has ever got near. Cornwell specialises in the politics of the workplace, which often threaten more danger to Scarpetta than the psychos (the Werewolf is back and at the front door, which should send a hairy shudder through followers of the series).

The forensic detail is, as always, as much of a challenge to those of us with tender stomachs as it is to the mere males who wander into Scarpetta's lab. Not to be read during a full moon.

Scarpetta's tough, no doubt about that.

Sometimes, though, you want a read that's as harsh on the senses as those cups of stewed coffee that every cop in every crime novel has to throw back to get themselves back on mean streets of a hungover morning.

James Lee Burke is back with Detective Dave Robicheaux in Purple Cane Road (Orion, $29.95). He knows all about waking up with a mouth as rough as grounds (he's a reformed drunk) and has a family as riddled with steamy mystery as the bayou on Purple Cane Rd. He learns that his mother was a prostitute — murdered, drowned in a mud puddle, of all pathetic ends, by cops in the employ of the mob.

He goes looking for the true story: "'Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,' the sheriff says. To which Robicheaux replies: 'He also said he never took his own advice."'

There wouldn't be a crime-novel genre if anyone had taken that advice: chasing shadows, whether they be the psycho-killer beloved of the thriller writer, casting his shadow on your bedroom blind, or the rough-hewn detective chasing the elusive concept of justice so as to make sense of the shapes in the darkness of the past, is what gives the thriller its thrill.

You never know what you might find in your Christmas stocking. Hope you get a frisson of fear in yours.