BY WAY OF EXPLANATION

Assiduous readers of my blog will have shaken their heads and thought I might be dead, remarrying, cavorting, washed out to sea from my house or. . . None of the above is true. The intermittencies they will have perceived have to do with a month spent in the archives at Yale and the Harry Ransom Center, a month in which, wherever I went or whatever I did, I froze. After my barefoot years at nine degrees north of the equator, the shoes I brought with me did not fit, etc. That is one reason.

Another is a certain Mr. Hogares, a furtive thirtyish semi-crackhead who loiters with a companion along the sea-front and, if he sees you duck into the loo for a quick one, will abstract your computer in no time at all. This little creep, I would have you know, had already stolen six other computers along my road in Cahuita. This, I am told, is standard practice among Costa Ricans: you are a foreigner, a gringo, and thus obviously rich and fair game. No matter that Mr. Hogares has been battered with baseball bats (how dare gringos attack a man in the exercise of his profession? even if that profession is thieving?) and hospitalized for two weeks, he needs his goodies.


This might seem curious to you, but the fact is that we all know him. We know where he lives, what he does for a living, his methodology. So do the police. So does our D.A., known as the Fiscal of Talamanca, a man who makes his living by releasing paedophiles, thieves, and other sundry criminals. But Costa Rica for some fifty years has been living in the ideal consitutional world dreamt up -- when this was a sleepy country and the rich were the abusers of the ¨rights of the people¨-- by the esteemed Jose Figueres. I met him long ago and a fine democrat he was too. But he was president of a backward little country that no one, and certainly the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico, cared much about.

Since Figueres, I fear, it has all been downhill, as it is with all places that are so democratic and fair that workers and criminals alike can do pretty much as they please.

The downhill slope, of course, goes quickly from equity and fine feelings, to corruption -- the one commmodity, besides natural beauty, bananas and coffee of which Costa Rica has a sufficiency. As you would expect -- God knows the United States has its share in the government and big business -- corruption is not a creation of Costa Rica´s people, who are largely honest, affable and hard-working, but filters down from On Top.


Add to that that my very own Talamanca is something like the Wild West of Costa Rica and that we have neither government nor justice here, and you will understand the intermittency caused by Mr. Hogares to my blog. Here we don´t let the police into the house, lest they case the joint; here drugs are sold from a caff on the main road in the plain sight of all, no doubt with a cut for the authorities in our county seat in Bribri; here our Sindaco gets himself elected by deliveries of sacks of rice to the indigenos who live in the mountains behind me; and here Colombian speed-boats drop their supplies a few hundred yards out from my beach. It may sound like hell, but in fact it´s a little forgotten paradise, and all I´m doing is explaining why I have not blogged as reguarly as I would like.

CRIME NOVELS AND STIEG LARSSON

In the guest house I keep some four hundred carefully selected crime novels from many countries: from Idrisson in Ireland to Tabucchi (Italo-Lusitanian), from Vladimir Volkoff (emigre Russian) to the great Nicholas Freeling (Dutch), Andrea Camilleri (Italian), Ian Rankin (a Scot) and John Le Carre (true Brit like his forebears Graham Greene and Eric Ambler), Ray Chandler (expat Brit in Hollywood), and, of course, the Pleiade edition of the priapic Georges Simenon. These are what the French call noirs, the Italians call gialli, and that we used to call plain 'mysteries' but now categorize as 'procedurals', 'psychological', 'historical', and whodunits, etc.. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? asked Edmund Wilson about Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Answer, I do. And have written quite a few myself in my I.I. Magdalen persona. It strikes me that -- in the hands of a good writer -- such novels are the last reminder of the true narrative tradition in literature.

Americans rate highly in the international market, especially in Europe,where the brutish is highly esteemed, but apart from Chandler and Elmore Leonard (who started out re-inventing the language of crime) I stick with the avatars, the dirty or convoluted (Ellery Queen, Rhinehart) writers of the 'Thirties and 'Forties. The Scandinavians (Wastberg and Co.) have long been good at the task: their cops somewhat bumbling, their criminals at odds with their smug, suicidal cultures. Until he began to take himself seriously and fell off the roster by concentrating on political corectness, Henning Mankell, now vurtually unreadable, was a fine example. The few Japanese (Matsumoto) who get translated have been remarkable: an ant-like society seems especially troubled by murderers single, if not by murder collective.

Then along came Stieg Larsson, the bolshy Swede, whose Millennium trilogy has made him the world's second best-selling writer. The trilogy is a terrific read because his heroine, Lisbeth Salander is way off all charted behavior in the genre. Seemingly indestructible, she is a sexual fantasy of the author's, whose desirous panting (bisexuality, sado/masochism, bondage usw) is in tune with every kind of lefty 'cause' imaginable. Peep into his background, and the issue is clear: he and his lifelong, unmarried partner, were unsullied sixty-eighters with extreme views, to whom everything that Sweden's highly-structured, busybody and basically conservative socuety stood for was anathema. Unfortunately, Larsson, whose phenomenal success was accompanied by his untimely death at fifty, is pretty relentless in his espousal of the radical agenda. Besides the total flatness of his style (a business-like non-language that may be in part a reflection of his translator), his enormous skill in plotting is offset by the boring predictability of his social concerns, especially in the character of 'crusading' journalist Blomqvist, a man whose company at dinner I would do much to avoid. I can also do without husbands who encourage their wives to seek sexual partners elsewhere, hot scenes of torture, and a general encouragement to view as criminals not just those who commit murder but also those who guard society against such as 'fascists'. The tendency to preach within the crime genre should be eschewed.