Yasmina Khadra's DOUBLE BLANK (tr by Aubrey Botsford)

February from the French now takes me back to Algeria, back to crime fiction, back to Yasmina Khadra and his incredible detective-cum-novelist (not unlike Khadra himself), Inspector Brahmin Llob.

The murder that gets the plot going in this second Inspector Llob novel, Double Blank, the sequel to the amazing Morituri, is an arresting and perfect encapsulation of the relationship between the elite criminals of Algeria and the police who have to at least pretend are trying to keep those criminals in check. Not even a full day before he told Llob that "Our country needs neither prophets nor a president. It needs an exorcist," and implied that Llob should be that exorcist, former cop, diplomat and author Ben Ouda is found beheaded in his luxurious home. Ouda's headless corpse stands near a painting that belongs to the nation but has hung in his private residence for who-knows-how-long. His head has been stuffed in the bidet in the bathroom -- concealing a bomb meant to blow up whoever shows up to investigate the murder. 

Oh boy.

This time around, the good inspector is accompanied not only by his accustomed sidekick, the shell-shocked officer Lino, but by a shooting range instructor who has decided to return to fieldwork after realizing that too many of his former students have turned up dead. This new character, Ewegh Seddig, is a Touareg so massive that everybody calls him a dinosaur upon first meeting him (and I can only imagine him as played by Dave Bautista). They only get to do that once, however; if they do it again, they find out that his reflexes belie his size and his reflex is always to lash out with a face-re-arranging punch. If you're thinking that Ewegh is my new favorite character, gold star to you.

A second body, that of a well-known professor, is barely cold before Llob, Lino and Ewegh have a list of suspects to track down; there were eyewitnesses, and the murderers made zero effort to conceal their identities. Their incredible beards proclaim them as vicious fundamentalists; their lack of concealment proclaims as surely as did the head-bomb-in-the-bidet that they really and truly DGAF if the cops come after them, unless it is in that very special "come at me, bro" way in which a certain type of male seeks to solve any and all problems. Not too different from how Ewegh handles insults, I suppose? But I never claimed to be a morally consistent reader. And there's a bit of a difference between attempting to blow some functionaries into Jahannam and punching a smart-ass in the nose. Swing away, Ewegh.

Interestingly, this is the first instance that I can recall in which the translator of a sequel is not the same as the translator of the first book. David Herman did the honors for Morituri, where from here on out it's Aubrey Botsford translating Khadra's work from the French. With this in mind I kept an eye out for differences in prose style, etc, but never noticed any except for one thing that I don't really know is a translation issue or just a surprising turn of phrase in the original. It comes fairly early in Double Blank, when Llob, Lino and Ewegh are interviewing the owner of the getaway car and he looks disdainfully upon them and tells them "I'm so allergic to pigs that even the sight of bacon makes me throw up." Which just sent me off on a tangent that looks like it's going to take me a while to sort out but, isn't calling a cop a "pig" an even worse insult in an Islamic country than in more omnivorous parts of the world? Or is that slang just universal now? So far I'm turning up a doughnut hole on this but I'm probably going to keep digging.

While on the subject of translation, there is one annoying tendency I don't quite recall in the prior volume, and that's some weird ambiguities in compound sentences that left me having to read them several times to sort out who was doing what. For example, I had to ponder a moment over "I ask my colleague to let me take the wheel and then get lost." At first I thought the narrator, Llob, had simply had his companion, in this case Lino, move over to let Llob drive, and then Llob took some wrong turns or something, but no; later context revealed that in fact Llob was kicking Lino out of the car, and furthermore telling Lino to go away or "get lost." As I said, there are several bits like this, and I don't know if they are Khadra's fault or Botsford's.

Regardless, as rendered by both translators, Yasmina Khadra is one quotable motherfolklore, each paragraph more searingly awesome than the last. Like, here's one of his many passages describing the psychic atmosphere of the city of Algiers and its casbah:

Here in this tangled web, resignation rises ceaseless and unconvinced, like a noxious dough. People don't expect anything anymore. With their feet in purgatory and their heads in limbo, their prayers are transformed into curses. The graffiti on the walls has the feel of epitaphs. Cobblestones raise bruises on the surface of the disgraced road. Doorways inject their shadows deep into men's minds. 

But lest you think this an entirely bleak read, I must hasten to assure you that he can be damned funny, too, in that deadpan way of all good gumshoes.

Meanwhile, the part about the crimes. Oh, the crimes. Because it's not just a string of brutal murders getting longer and more brutal all the time; Ben "Body #1" Ouda had recently lost a whole lot of money and was plotting some kind of baroque revenge against all the hotshot tycoons that watched from the sidelines as he did so.  Ouda's revenge was to be in the form of, what else, this is an Inspector Llob story, a book he was threatening to publish. Surely it was to be full of compromising information.

And a mysterious diskette was missing from his fancy safe.

The plot that is eventually uncovered is gigantic and audacious and certainly could never happen here, in the good old US of A, or now, in the 21st century. 

Except, oh, wait, it is. Or at least it's trying to. And, of course, has tried to before. Google the Business Plot sometime. Except, well, don't use Goog anymore. It'll waste your time. Just go straight to Wikipedia, or better, a good public library. 

Meanwhile, I find I am still in shock at how good this book was. And only 127 pages long. What are you doing? Go find you an Inspector Llob novel and let Yasmina Khadra scramble your brains without using a whisk. You'll be glad you did. Mostly.

Where will February from the French take me next? Watch this space, true believers. It will be somewhere they speak French, I'm pretty sure...