Shots Fired!

"An armed society is a polite society."

- Robert A. Heinlein  

I had planned Ianthe Jerrold's Dead Man's Quarry (1930) as my next read, but, once again, got sidetracked. However, I hope to read it somewhere around the weekend. So a review is coming!

In the meantime, I dipped into the twelfth entry in the Bureau Raampoort-series: Een schim in de nacht (A Shadow in the Night, 2015). The series was co-created by Simon de Waal and Appie Baantjer, but the former had to continue solo after Baantjer passed away in 2010.  

A Shadow in the Night begins when summer is finally on the horizon and evenings are slowly growing longer, which draws a veteran of the Amsterdam police, Peter van Opperdoes, from his home and into his favorite café – to enjoy coffee and apple pie. It's a quiet, peaceful moment broken by the sound of gunfire emanating from the nearby Noordermarkt.

Van Opperdoes finds a mortally wounded man, recipient of several bullets, who clings to life long enough to mutter these cryptic last words: "ik was het zelf" ("I did it myself"). The nature of the bullet wounds and the absence of a firearm on the body makes suicide unlikely, which is confirmed when a gun and shell casings are found a considerable distance away from the body. But then what did the victim mean that he did himself? Jacob thinks it was simply the incoherent ramblings of a dying man, but their inquiries soon open new avenues of investigation.

The identity of the victim is confirmed when his twin brother reports him missing, which gave Van Opperdoes and Jacob quite a fright in the beginning – as they were confronted with him just after bringing the body to the morgue. I was hoping the body would disappear from mortuary, but this is a contemporary, Dutch politieroman and not a John Dickson Carr novel from the 1930s.

Ideas of mistaken or swapped identities was entertained, but the eventual solution ran in a different direction and was stamped with De Waal's trademark signature: professional underworld figures, small-time, petty criminals and other, enterprising persons operating in the gray areas of the law, who always seem to lurk in one place of a story or other. There are several kinds of them in this story and there's professional in a short, separate story line and a second, unnecessary murder for the story – one that's solved after discovering the crime-scene was stuffed with hidden surveillance cameras that recorded the murder.

There are some petty crimes and criminals involved in the first shooting, but the explanation yielded an unexpected surprise, which was only (somewhat) foreshadowed in the characterization of the people involved. But the surprise was welcome! Unfortunately, the "dying message" was just a red herring to mystify rather than a clue to the identity of the murderer. As Jacob remarked, "it would saved us a lot of hassle if he simply had said (...) had shot him." 

Interestingly, the final parts of the book were apparently penned with a deadline looming ahead, because Van Opperdoes figures out the case while watching footage of the Baltimore riots on TV. Yes. There's something in footage that helps Van Opperdoes to grasp the explanation.

All in all, a good entry in this series of police procedurals, but the best part remains how Baantjer has been kept alive through De Waal's storytelling and Van Opperdoes' character – which is simply nostalgia for me. It was Baantjer who introduced me to the genre and I sometimes miss those heretical days when I used Agatha Christie to bridge the time between the releases of his books.

Rogue's Alley

"He who digs a hole for someone else, falls in it himself."

- Dutch proverb

Well, we're more than a week into the last month of the year and 2014 can be safely summarized as a slow, unproductive year to read and review mysteries on this side of the screen – not to mention the steadily increased backlog of new releases. It's great and all to be smack in the middle of the genre's Renaissance Era, but the pace is nearly impossible to keep up with at this point.

Oh, well, enough complaining for one paragraph and let's take down one of these new releases, before the end of the year. That'll cut one book from my backlog for 2015. Yay, progress!

Een kuil voor een ander (A Hole for Someone Else, 2014) is the eleventh entry in the Bureau Raampoort series by Simon de Waal and the late A.C. Baantjer, who co-created/wrote the series until he passed away in 2010. I have said before how Bureau Raampoort has become my placebo for Baantjer's original politieromans about Inspector DeKok, as he's known in the English translations, which were my gateway into detective stories, but this series tends to be more Simenonean than Baantjer ever was – i.e. stories about detectives rather than detective stories. Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) was a notable exception to this rule and A Hole for Someone Else can compete with it.

Winter has come to Amsterdam and Peter van Opperdoes, the old, seasoned veteran policeman of Bureau Raampoort, is enjoying what would've been his day off, observing futile attempts of car drivers at mounting a slippery bridge, but the discovery of a body puts an end to that day. A construction worker noticed a peculiar hole in a wall, inside a building that was being renovated, and inside that hole was another hole dug in the ground – containing the body of a man with strangulations marks around his throat. But the hole in the wall has more secrets to reveal: there's a hidden door giving entrance to a hidden room, stairs and the house above, which, according to rumors, have been used as a passage way for criminals. The crime scene was basically a Matryoshka doll.

The hidden cubbyhole for criminals in combination with the wintry landscape gave a charming and classical touch to the familiar elements of the series and characters. Van Opperdoes is reprimanded for having closed the open, starring eyes of the victim, out of old-school piety for the dead, before the forensic team could do their work or the scene of three Amsterdam detectives digging in the half-frozen grounds in the provinces for a second body. De Waal also acknowledged Jacob never uses his surname and Van Opperdoes still talks with the disembodied voice of his late wife, which seems to become dimmer with each passing book. The plot itself is pleasantly busy and moves along multiple lines, which includes the double identity of the first victim, an unknown man who fled from the crime scene, a big criminal from the province of Brabant, a corrupt policewoman, a shady Officer van Justitie (prosecutor) and a third body drenched in bullets. There are even a few clues, but, in the end, it still wasn't, what you'd call, a proper whodunit. However, I did appreciate how the unburied body in the wall, and how the body ended up there, brought everything else to the surface. Gotta appreciate those plot patterns.

In summation: A Hole for Someone Else is a fine, bustling police procedural in the Dutch (Amsterdam) style with all the familiar earmarks of an ongoing series that continues to draw readers back to tag along on a case with Van Opperdoes, Jacob and the cast of semi-regulars hovering in-and out of the stories.

Finally, last Wednesday, SBS6 broadcasted the first of a two-part episode of Bureau Raampoort, written by Simon de Waal (of course!), and it appears that the first (?) adaptation merged several books into a new story. The actors will probably take some time getting used to, because I imagine Van Opperdoes and Jacob as Baantjer and De Waal, but I'm looking forward to part two. Here's the promo, if anyone's interested: 

I'll probably return to the classics and writing good reviews in my next post.

Pulling a Double Shift

"To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all."

- The Usual Suspects (1995)

Een tip van de sluier (A Tip of the Veil, 2013) is the ninth in De Waal & Baantjer series about a seasoned homicide detective, Peter van Opperdoes, and his loyal colleague and friend, Jacob. Van Opperdoes was one of the old warhorses of the illustrious Bureau Warmoesstraat, but was transferred to Bureau Raampoort after his wife passed away and continued to have conversations with her ghost – which raised some concerns over his mental health.

The supernatural entity, in the guise of a disembodied voice in Van Opperdoes' head, appears to be actually that of his dead wife, because she has knowledge of things yet to come, but observes the rules of fair play by only alluding to them. Actually, the role of the voice has always hovered in the background, but has been reduced even more since De Waal continued the series on his own. Baantjer created Van Opperdoes a few years after his own wife passed away and since the characters are basically stand-ins for the authors, it was personal touch to the old police inspector and probably why the voice is now mainly there to whisper words of comfort or encouragement.

In A Tip of the Veil, a surging storm is rocking the old city of Amsterdam, but Van Opperdoes has taken refuge in his favorite café, sipping a late coffee, while the bartender informs him there has been someone looking for him. It was important enough for the man to brave the storm and return to the café. Bob Pals is the man's name and his businesses are entrenched in real-estate, which is an occupation sometimes associated with the underworld over here and Pals' problem seems to have all the earmarks of the criminal classes – there are plans in the works for his assassination. The tip came from a man calling himself "Frits," but Pals isn't willing to part with more information than Frits' phone number.

Unusually, for this series, the first three quarters of the book are concerned with a routine investigation of vague death-threats with a murder tugged away at the end of the story. However, the solution of the shooting felt disconnected from the rest of the story and a shameless rework of an episode De Waal wrote for the Baantjer TV-series in the mid-00's. The best part was therefore the routine-investigation, which was lively written with a dose of light-hearted humor and populated with likeable characters. The cast of (semi-) regular (forensic) police characters gathering and analyzing evidence in the background often gives the series a CSI-ish feeling, but often used as a good contrast of between Van Opperdoes' old-school methods and modern police forensics.

De Waal succeeded very well in seamlessly meshing Baantjer's style of story telling with his own, which makes this series as enjoyable to read as the original Baantjer series, but there’s one main difference: Simon de Waal is closer to Georges Simenon with De Waal & Baantjer than Baantjer ever was with his DeKok books – which where at least always structured as detective stories. De Waal & Baantjer are stories about detectives rather than detective stories. And, yes, I'm fully aware that I have made that observation before. More than once. But it’s the best possible description of the series.

So, all in all, as enjoyable a read as they come in this series and (sadly) better than it's follow up.

There isn't a literal translation for the book-title of the tenth novel, Een tien met een griffel (Number One With a Bullet, 2014), but the closest equivalent in any language would be a misnomer. The story began promising enough when Jacob whisked Van Opperdoes away from his favorite café to the scene of a crime. A beautiful young woman has been found strangled in the apartment of her neighbor/lover, who's found dead not much later at an abandoned site – shot through the head. It appears to be a murder/suicide until it turns out the "suicide" happened before the murder and suspects begin to appear: an obsessed man and an ex-convict. The murder here is discovered in the first chapter, but the whole book felt more routine than the investigation of its predecessor. Story telling, characters and setting where as well written and brought to life as always, but the plot was abysmally disappointing and simply failed to grab my attention. And plot is kind-of the key point with me.

Oh, well, the synopsis of the next one sounds promising and, hopefully, it'll be as good as Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012). 

By the way, is it just me or does it seem I'm rewriting the same review, over and over again, for this series?

Twofer Tuesday: The Old Fox and 21st Century Criminals

"I just place a corpse somewhere to see what happens next. I look into my own fantasy at the people who get involved and I listen to them. And I write that down. It comes naturally."

- Appie Baantjer (John Bakkenhoven's Het Amsterdam van Baantjer, 1998)  

Before I dashed off, there was somewhat of a realization that I, perhaps, should've prepped one or two posts to keep this place from falling in abeyance for a fortnight, but hey, filler posts are exactly like posting nothing at all – except you actually put an effort into it.

Unfortunately, for my return post, I did not had the time to excavate a classic from my shelves and, instead, knocked the remaining titles from the De Waal & Baantjer Bureau Raampoort series from my to-be-read pile before the latest from that line reaches its top.  

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) is numbered fifth in the series that was continued at Baantjer's request, before passing away in 2010, in which the circumstances surrounding the remains of a murdered man gives the book a fitting title. The Singelgracht (Singel Canal) is the scene of dredging activities to clean the waters from discarded bikes and other junk, when one of the men drags up a car. It contents: a body that was remarkable well preserved due to the ice-cold water of the canal and the cause of death was strangulation. Whoever the victim was, he never stood a chance when the killer launched at him from the back seat.

The veteran homicide detective in Monty-coat, Peter van Opperdoes, and his younger partner and friend, Jacob, haste to the scene of the crime to start their official investigation, but that proves to be a clash of generations. Van Opperdoes is mournfully looking on how forensic investigators, clad in white overalls, are trampling all over his crime scene. He's pining for the days when he had a scene to himself. When he could drink in the scene and find fragments of the atmosphere of the moment of the crime itself, which he actually gets when Jacob decides to chase everyone out of the inclosure – to give the old fox his moment and not without result. Van Opperdoes recognizes the victim as Albertus Koolschijn, alias "Bertje van de Dijk," a street rat and small-time criminal, who told Van Opperdoes, during their last talk, that his days of petty crimes were behind him.

Even after the car had been dragged from the canal, Van Opperdoes and Jacob are still tossed around by the cross-and under currents that emerged from this case and De Waal introduces an interesting new idea involving stolen cars – even if it lacked finesse. De Waal and M.P.O. Books have apparently discussed how fair the solution of this story really is and I have to side with Books. You can make an educated guess in the right direction, but not, fully and completely, deduce it, because there are only few clues – or, as they're called today, indicators pointing to the truth.

As usually, De Waal delivered a good and fun story about detectives, but not one that can also be considered a proper detective story. And that's pity. I really liked the ideas De Waal was throwing around here.

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bulls-Eye, 2011) actually preceded Een rat in de val, released in the spring of that year, and have no idea why I switched them around for this review. Anyway, Bulls-Eye opens when city cleaner's hand in a phone they found in the trashcan and that's the moment when it goes off. Van Opperdoes picks up to hear the distressed voice of a mother worrying over her son, Michael Zand, missing for the past three days. Michael's father, Frits Zand, is an old acquaintance of Van Opperdoes, who made his name known on the shadier part of the law.

The involvement or just the presence of professional criminal elements are a staple of De Waal's crime fiction and obviously has a lot of fun toying around with their entrepreneurial spirit (albeit an alternative one) and rivalries – and their involvement is tightly woven into the plot of this story. Before they've even begun investigating the disappearance of Michael Zand, they receive a call to go to an abandoned factory where gunfire left casings and a body in the basement. It's a gathering place for junkies and other city misfits, but the most interesting discovery is a piece of paper in the victim's pocket with Michael's phone number scrawled on it! The two investigations have come together, but it's pretty much the same story as before. De Waal tells an engrossing story that captures both the spirit and tone of Baantjer, whenever Van Opperdoes and Jacob interact with each other, but I can be really picky when it comes to plotting and clueing – although I liked this solution a little bit better than the one offered in Rat. So great reads, if you don't expect them to deliver a traditional whodunit.

I really do hope that, plot-wise, the series will look back at Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012), which none of the other entries can hold a candle to in that department. It has the story telling and a good plot to boot!

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009)

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-Eye, 2011)

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011)

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 2013)

Een tip van de sluier (A Tip of the Veil, 2013)

Een tien met een griffel (A Number One With a Bullet, 2014; forthcoming)

Café Noir

"The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world."

- Georges Simenon

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013) is the eight in a series that began when Appie Baantjer and Simon de Waal, once colleagues as (homicide) detectives of the Amsterdam police force, partnered up to append another series of police stories to their writing credentials – under the banner Baantjer & De Waal.

After Baantjer passed away in 2010, De Waal continued the series as De Waal & Baantjer, and I have to say, after Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) that fully warmed me to the characters, it's starting to feel like the good ol' days of the biannual Baantjer releases. Unfortunately, you also burn through them about as fast.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothes begins when the persistent nagging of the doorbell drags Peter van Opperdoes, a veteran police detective attached to Bureau Raampoort, from his bed to the canal belt where the body of a John Doe is floating face up in the Prinsengracht (Princes' Canal). The cause of death is drowning, but whether it was an accident or murder requires further investigation on his and Jacob's part, which leads them to a barmaid named Rafiqa. Forensics was able to retrieve her number from the victims phone and the place where she works is Café Lowietje! The same café where the bar scenes for the TV-series Baantjer were shot and the place adopted the name of the series.

But the part were Peter van Opperdoes and Jacob seated themselves on the stools of DeKok and Vledder, while Rafiqu conjures a bottle of cognac from underneath the bar, was a wonderful homage to Baantjer – even more so by using some of his own writing to construct that particular scene. I also liked that Baantjer and Piet Römer, who portrayed DeKok, were mentioned and some anecdotes were shared. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed that Van Opperdoes did not complain to Jacob about Simon de Waal bothering him with questions if he could use his name for the main character in a series of politieromans he's planning to write – similar in vein to DeKok complaining about Baantjer's fertile imagination. It will also confuse readers who picture Van Opperdoes and Jacob as Baantjer and De Waal. 

Anyhow, Jan Willem van Deventer is the name that belongs to the victim and he was student from a family that broke into peaces: the mother would not be surprised if her was son was murdered, while the father is convinced that he's to blame for his son's suicide. The girl in the café Jan Willem was interested in took his gifts, but was seeing someone else and a teacher from the university and his roommates refuse to tell the whole or a straight story – with an unfortunate suicide as a consequence. Meanwhile, Van Opperdoes and Jacob move between cafés, some for breakfast or a cup of coffee and other for work, and in one of them, they come across a polite-mannered, but cut-throat, criminal known as "De Regulaar" ("The Fixer"), who paid students for certain jobs. And here we have another café scene I very much appreciated: Van Opperdoes deducing whom the fixer is in the café and immediately plotting his capture. The guy never stood a chance.

The eventual solution of the death of the young student is a rather bleak one, because the answers they've found resolve nothing for the better for any of the people involved and the court will probably show some leniency on the guilty party. This is definitely not a cozy, but there were some clues in place that made this a (light) mystery as well as a police procedural and the ghost of Van Opperdoes' late wife (see previous reviews) even pointed out a clue of sorts that he had missed, which ended the book on a high note for me. Hey, a non-intrusive spirit entity pointing out something that her husband, The Great Detective, had missed is something I have absolutely no problem with.

De Waal has moved on with this series now that his late partner in crime can't tease him anymore with implausible plot twists, but the style and warm spirit that was so characteristic of Baantjer is what makes his memory and indelible presence in these books.

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009) [De Jordaan = neighborhood in Amsterdam]

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011) [still have not read this one]

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) [still have not read this one]

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013)

The title for later this year has not yet been announced, but I guess it probably will be something like Een geluk bij een ongeluk (A Blessing in Disguise) or Een adder onder het gras (A Snake in the Grass).

By the way, I use the English name of DeKok on this blog because this is an English-language blog. It also amused me to no end that from all the variations on the name that the translator could've decided on, he picked the one variation that makes him look silly every time he spells out his name when he's introducing himself. DeKok (with Kay-Oh-Kay) is the conventional spelling of the name DeKok or Kok. Why not settle for De Kock (with Cee-Kay), if you insist on changing the name?

Snowy Reception

"The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand."

- Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). 

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) is the seventh entry in the Bureau Raamport series, recording the daily caseload of a pair of Amsterdam homicide detectives, Peter van Opperdoes and Jacob (last name unknown), who were modeled on their creators – former homicide cop Appie Baantjer and now part-time detective Simon de Waal. Originally, the books were published under the byline Baantjer & De Waal, but after Baantjer passed away, at his request, the series was continued as De Waal & Baantjer with Baantjer's share of the royalties going to charity.

On a night, a dark and cold December night, Peter van Opperdoes wakes up to find the city wrapped in a blanket of snow and inclines to melancholic musing on things past, when the whispering voice of his late wife disturbs his reverie and encourages him to take a short walk. As I noted in my review of Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012), the ghostly, disembodied voice of Van Opperdoes' wife is a non-intrusive, supernatural entity hovering in the background and she's not allowed (from the higher up's) to intervene in human affairs. She's merely there to give spiritual support to her husband or, in this case, act as a catalyst.

Van Opperdoes strolls through the deserted, snow covered streets and the quiet, dream-like image of the city gives him a sense of unreality, as if he fell through the cracks of time, expecting any moment a hansom cab coming down the street or bump into a 19th century gendarme, but his actual discovery isn't any less strange. Between a troupe of statues, now mantled in robes of snow, someone placed a sculpted head of clay with a candle on the ground – it's flame flickering like a ghost light.

This dreamy sequence is probably my favorite part of the book and shows that De Waal can write, and I almost wished he continued this style of story telling through out the book, but morphing it back to a straight-up police procedural was probably the best decision. When Van Opperdoes and Jacob revisit the scene the next morning, when life resumed its normal tenor, it conveyed that sense of waking up – with everything snapping back to normal. Except that the head is still there! It's a recognized as a young man, named Martin, who's a local and his mother hasn't heard of him from in three months. 

Martin's father Willy, an intimate acquaintance of the police who spend most of life behind bars, went missing around the same time and thus begins a long pool expedition search pass cafés and even an obscure coffeeshop – and nearly everyone they question seems to be either criminal or appear to have close ties to them. This eventually leads them to a crime-scene that went undiscovered for months, but the dry conditions of the house and the cold weather has preserved it remarkably well and it was briefly teased as a locked room mystery.

However, I'm long since pass wanting a baffling impossible crime from De Waal. Ok. Maybe not that long. But the first chapter of A Light in the Darkness has convinced me that a double-layered story, one taking place in the time of C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch and the other in the present with Van Opperdoes and Jacob, with the two threads tying together in the end, would be even better. I even have a title that fits the series: Een gebed zonder einde (a proper, but not literal, translation would be A Never-Ending Story). It also fits into the religious themes Baantjer was so fond of working into his plots and sort-of a nod to the Baantjer TV-movie De wraak zonder einde (An Endless Wrath, 1999; co-written by De Waal). 

Somehow, somewhere, Frederic Dannay is looking over a copy of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and nods approvingly. I... I just know he is.

De Waal & Baantjer

A note for the confused: De Waal co-wrote a handful of excellent historical novels with Dick van den Heuvel about Van Ledden-Hulsebosch, a real-life counterpart of Dr. John Thorndyke, or rather, a real-life colleague of Dr. Joseph Bell – Conan Doyle's teacher whose methods of observation were adopted by Sherlock Holmes! I always wondered, if that awful, untranslatable pun they had planned for a book title (if you're curious, the title was Moord(w)apen) killed the series prematurely. Their publisher had good reason to believe they had lost it after their spoof of The Da Vinci Code (2003), in which Albert Einstein helped C.J. clear up a dark conspiracy enwrapping Amsterdam (De Rembrandtcode, 2006). Note to self: reread that series! Anyway, lets wrap things up here as well...

A Light in the Darkness was better than I anticipated and the story ended up not being just another charming, urban police procedural that spends more time looking at buildings (or other trivial matters) than at the clues. It's still a police procedural that puts emphasis on investigative police methods and characterization, but the plot was well put together and stands comparison with the works of Bill Pronzini and William L. DeAndrea.

I think Baantjer would've been rather proud, if he knew he co-wrote this book. Two years after his death. The critics can defile him, decease can kill him and his remains can be buried, but even the most devout excorcist could not keep his "spirit" from the bestseller lists!

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009) [De Jordaan = neighborhood in Amsterdam]

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011) [have not read this one]

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) [have not read this one]

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013; forthcoming)

"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact"

"Sometimes the most illogical answer turns out to be the correct one. Reality is often stranger than anything we can imagine ourselves, but I'm not the first one who has said that. It probably was Sherlock Holmes, who always had something clever to say."

- Peter van Opperdoes (Een mes in de rug, 2012)

The book I alluded to in my previous post, read on a sultry and lazy afternoon in the cool shades beneath the trees, was Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012), published under the names De Waal & Baantjer, but the series has been a solo-project of Simon de Waal ever since Appie Baantjer passed away in late August, 2010. It's the sixth installment of a series that began after Baantjer retired the successful DeKok-series that ran for nearly five decades, sold millions of copies and spawned a television series that kept millions of viewers glued to their televisions. A decision as unpopular as Conan Doyle's resolution to wash himself from Sherlock Holmes in the churning waters of Reichenbach Falls, but it was also an understandable one coming from a writer in his eighties, penning two or more books a year, who had just lost his wife – and I thought that with the publication of Dood in gebed (Death in Prayer, 2008) we had reached the end of an era.  

But the writing bug reared its ugly head and the itch began, and before long, he was working on a new series with his ex-police colleague and fellow crime-writer Simon de Waal as a writing buddy. The main characters are the old-school veteran Peter van Opperdoes and his younger partner Jacob, who are basically thinly disguised versions of themselves. You can find traces of them all over the characters. Peter van Opperdoes has also lost his wife, but in the books he still talks with her and the first part makes it clear that he's not imagining things, however, she's only there to speak words of encouragement to her husband and not to whisper the name of the murderer into his ear. It's very unusual to have such a non-intrusive, supernatural entity hovering in the background of a straight-up police procedural. Anyway, Simon de Waal worked as a rookie-cop with Baantjer and this joint-project must have seemed like things coming full circle for them. Writing the first few books must have been fun as Baantjer loved to leave impossible plot-twists for De Waal to sort out. But she didn't have a sister indeed. Good luck with that, Simon! De Waal described Baantjer as someone with the mindset of a charming young man and acted as such, which makes me think of Baantjer as Archie Goodwin in his eighties.

So I settled down with A Knife in the Back (yes, yes) and expected nothing more than a charming, uncomplicated roman policier because the first three books were kind of disappointing – with a last-minute introduction of a culprit and a lack of fair play. They were as fun to read as the DeKok novels, but, plot-wise, insufficient to satisfy this spoiled brat. But A Knife in the Back was a marked improvement on its predecessors.

The problems for Van Opperdoes and Jacob begin when they have to go to a hotel where a guest has failed to emerge from his room, but the foul smell of murder does not stink up the place despite the presence of a body and the medical examiner seems to agree. Cause of death: heart failure. However, the manager made sure that the detectives did not leave the building without a problem and notified them that the body and the man who had rented the room were not one and the same person. With suspicion on his mind, Van Opperdoes goes over the body again and finds evidence suggesting murder – albeit an accidental one. The old detective showed that an old fox may lose his hair but not his cunning and prevented a murder from being filed away as a natural death. The rest of the plot unfolds through follow-ups on witness testimonies, credit card information and everything else that comes to the surface over the course of a police investigation, but in the end this was more a story about detectives than a proper detective story. Not a bad one, but still not a genuine detective story. Still, that should take nothing away from the book for the average reader because it’s not that kind of story and this will only bother individuals hooked on GAD. 

Baantjer & De Waal signing their second book

De Waal is a fictioneer who dabbles in variety of styles (police procedurals, thrillers and historical mysteries), but has yet to write a classically styled mystery (the historical ones echoed Doyle and his contemporaries) filled with locked rooms, clues and baffling crimes! I know it's an unreasonable expectation, but it would be awesome if one of our top-tier crime writers would pen an old-fashioned whodunit. Because we have to reduce the monoculture of modern thrillers dominating the shelves of our bookstores before it kills millions of people to keep the genre fresh, inventive and more importantly it would make me happy.

Bibliography:

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009) [De Jordaan = neighborhood in Amsterdam]

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011)

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011)

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

The Historical C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch series:

Moord in Tuschinski (Murder in Tuschinski, 2002)

De wraak van de keizer (The Emperor's Revenge, 2003)

Spelen met vuur (Playing with Fire, 2004)

De Rembrandt code (The Rembrandt Code, 2006)

The Boks series:

Boks en de lege kamer (Boks and the Empty Room, 2005)

Boks en het verkeerde lijk (Boks and the Wrong Corpse, 2006)

Boks en de spoorloze getuige (Boks and the Vanished Witness; never published)

Thrillers:

Cop vs. Killer (2005)

Pentito (2007)

De vijf families: Duivelspact (The Five Families: Devil’s Pact, 2011)

Wie een kuil graft... (Whoever Digs a Pit, 2011) [a twiller = twitter novel]

The next post will be a return to our beloved Golden Age.