“But down these mean streets a man must go whe is not himself nian, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” — Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art Of Murder. John Goodman This Week Editor johng@nsnews.com - & Two Murders in My Double Life — Josef Skvorecky, Key Porter Books, 192 pp., $19.95 paper. Josef Skverecky makes a distinction berween two types of crime in his latest work of fiction suggesting that North Americans have never experienced “rota: crime.” The murder stats arc high but the soui-destroying 2-¢s of cultural anniltila- tion, familiar ro much of the rest of the world, are absent here. The Czech expatriate contrasre sauurder and literary genres in his native and adupted countries switching between the goings on at Edenvale College and the suffocating surrealism of Prague , under communism, To Skvorecky, a retired Toronto academic, literary genres are tied to identity. His approach gives him room to play with the formulas found in American crime fiction — naming the victim Raymond Hammett tips off readers to the author’s M.O. In the foreword Skvorecky advises us ta read his work as a “serious novel,” and not a detective story, but readers will be drawn in either way. He practises total literature. The Man Who Tried te Save tke World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny — Scott Arderson, Doubleday, 304 pp., 8 pages of b&w pho- tographs, $37.95.. & The Dragon Syndicates: - The Globai Phenomenon of the Triads— Martin Booth, -. Doubleday, 350 pp., 16 pages of b&cw pho- tographs, $34.95. Total crime is an apt term forthe worlds Scort Anderson and Martin Booth describe in their respective _ studies. ; .. Hong Kong resident Booth is an-expert on the history of British colonialism in China. His novel The * Industry of Souls was short- listed for rhe 1998 Booker Prize and other works have --included the highly-regarded ~ Opium:.A History, as well as a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. « Booth’s latest The Dragon Syndicates places Chinese triads in their historical context with “an emphasis on their spread through the Asian diaspora. The author's knowledge of opium and British involvement in China are put to good use tracing the rise of triads through the “79th century. ‘ Although he situates the first disturbance by an outlaw society as occurring in Taiwan in 1787 it took another half century before the Triads were established as a massive alternative subculture.” . : : Triad sociedes encouraged th: disintegration of Guangdong during the Opium War (1839-42) and in the following decades Hong Kong became a safe haven for their opera- .. tions, The Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901) showed the potential of the secret socicties to dis- ~-srupt the’social order. . <« Today triad criminality exists on a massive scale. Criminologists estimate that the 100,000 gang members operating in China in 1986 have now. grown to more than 1.5 million. .' War reporter Scott Anderson tells the story of the “master of disaster” Fred Cuny in The “Man Whe.Tried To Save The World. A Texan, teller of tall tales, womanizer, renegade adven- ~ “turer, relief worker — no one is exactly sure what Cuny was all about. Anderson went to _ Chechnya to find out what went wrong on his final escapade. The last half of the book deals with Chechnya after laying the groundwork with our hero’s - humanitarian exploits in the Gulf War and Bosnia. Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork thinks ‘ Cuny enccuraged the CIA identity as a smokescreen but was too smart to ever actually work for them.. The-Washington Pust’s John Pomfret agrees, offering a joke as explanation: “You know how. you spot the CIA guys in Sarajevo? They're the ones posing as photographers with agency-issued Kodak digital cameras. None of the real photographers here have digital cam- tras, so that’s the level of idiocy you're talking about with the CIA.” The consensus is that ~. Cuny was beyond CIA, he knew what he was doing. . _ J © Most Bosnians accepted as “fact” that the American was connected with the highest levels of goverament. Except that he cared. Cuny is credited with single-handedly pushing through -4 Water project that kept Sarajevo supplied during the latter stages of the Serb siege in 1994- 95. Prior. to this, hundreds of Sarajevans had been shot by snipers trying to draw water from ‘outdoor wells. _Cuny’s luck ran out in Chechnya — the “scariest place” on carth. The iast sighting of him | ‘ London Optic Be ee ee = was No ocher discounts apply. Ends 09105199. Ask for cotaiis. “Fred soon began to suspect there were other issues at work behind the abstructionism, and that one of them was greed. The trucks then supplying city residents with water were given a daily allowance of extremely precious gasoline, and some of that gasoline was being diverted to the black marker and selling for up to $100 a gallon. If Fred’s project came on line, there would be less need for trucks and fewer opportunities for the water authorities to work the black market. An even more callous explanation was put forward by several UN offi- cials: that the Bosnian government wanted the killing of civilians at the water wells to continue because the images helped maintain international sympathy r Sarajevo. If people could now get water in the relative . safety of their apartment buildings, Bosnia would lose a potent propan- da toal.” oo ". — from The Man Who Tried to Save the World. nae Photo Stanley Greene/Agence Wu was on a mountain road in the Russian rogue republic heading towards a rebel fortress. © . Anderson's retelling of Cuny’s endgame is a thriller worthy of Graham Greene or John Le ‘Carre. LA. Requiem ~— Robert Crais, Doubleday, 382 pp., $29.95. fee te : Wl Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir —John Heimann, Cironicle, 256 pp., 150» duotone photographs, $28.95 paper. oo ay Los Angeles might be outside Skvorecky’s definition of total crime but you wouldn’t kno’ that from writers Robert Crais and John Heimann. The mean streets of southern Californi make up a universe of their own. re Pos Heimann documents actual L.A. crime scenes, from the ’20s through the 750s, thar.infl enced writers working in the film aoir genre. The well-researched study presents :‘newspape photographs from various archives and special private collections that are reminiscent of... Weegee’s New York City material. None of the photographers are on his level but the and dirty” funk of tabloid jourialism communicates the sleazy dark side of the city’s n Heimann’s stories of corruption rank right wp there with Kenneth Anger’s classic of tinse? town shame Hollywood Babylon. Movic fans interested in the source material for film noir wil! want to check it out. . : Cg ae SF aes It’s obvious that novelist Robert Crais is very familiar with the genre and. movies in g al. He opens L.A. Requiem with a prelude that can roll before the credits if his book is made. into a movie. The cighth book in his scries about private detectives Elvis Cole and ‘Joe. Pike i rooted firmly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald... - wal Long-suffering partners Cole and Pike settle in for another-round of cat and mous¢ in City of Angels. The story is a rich character, study with enough twists to Keep you guessin Crais knows how to work off contrasts to get the right kind of noir shading. ‘The openir paragraph of L.A. Reguiem reads “That Sunday, che sun floated bright and hot over th Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to. the heat.” . ; anne True noir never allows its characters space to escape from anything let alone the tempera’ ture. Crais knows this and somcone, somewhere will have to pay for another sunny day:on, the mean streets of paradise. : Se OS AAR i Save up to 50% Off All Frames’! Check your mail jor our Scratch cards - or pick one ub at our stores. - Sunglasses are 25-50% off ! compiete pai purchase required. 145 East 13th Street, 981-0400 Park Reyal South, 925-3470 | Vist our website at veww.london-hole.com