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...

Yasmina Khadra's MORITURI (Tr by David Herman)

When Ghoul Malek ordered me to come and see him at 13 rue des Pyramides, I nearly drowned in my glass. An influential member of the old, ruling oligarchy, Malek had been particularly feared in the days of the single party. When he appeared on TV, it was enough to make people want to barricade themselves behind their curtains. Among his prerogatives were: the summary execution of 'undesirables,' changing the laws, making women abort and aborting social projects: in short, he had the power of day and night.

The classic noir detective character is either an ex-police officer, a hard-bitten veteran of one of the World Wars, usually World War II, or both, who Saw Some Shit on the mean streets or overseas and has lost what faith in humanity he had, which is why the narrative voice and prose style we associate with the genre are so distinctively harsh, brilliantly described without mincing words, vividly imagined, tough.

But there's a type of dude out there who could go toe-to-toe with any American Noir Guy and probably not even chip a fingernail, and that's the Disappointed Revolutionary, which is who we get when we transfer the classic noir plot to a place like late 1990s Algeria, barely ten years since that country's proto-Arab Spring, the October 1988 riots.

We don't know for certain whether Brahim Llob, the hero of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri , took part in those riots or on what side he would have if he did (he turned out to be an older man than I'd been reading him as at first, so likely he was already a police officer? But that doesn't indicate his actual sympathies, just what he was required/paid to do), but he is a disappointed revolutionary at least inasfar as he has seen that the uprising accomplished very little for all that it unseated a one-party oligrarchy somewhat. Our man circa 1997 is both a police superintendant and a moderately famous novelist, but that doesn't translate to him getting... really any respect at all, from anyone, even his supposed fans. 

Take how he gets the assignment that drags him through most of the plot of this short little novel: summoned to the home of the guy described above, one of those important kinds of men who combine the power of a government official with that of a crime lord without officially being either, he is rather contemptuously handed a photograph of the Missing Girl, told she's been missing  for a few weeks from the house she hardly ever even leaves, and given absoutely nothing else by way of clues how to even begin finding her. If Llob is a good detective, the photo will be enough, he is told, and really, he should be grateful that the important man even bothered to tell Llob the girl's name, which is Sabrine.

Llob starts looking for her in all the old familiar places and then some new ones. The scale of cynicism, corruption and moral decay that he encounters on a daily basis is on a whole 'nother level than what we get in good old American noir, stuff that would make even Phillip Marlowe blanch to behold:

The Cinq Etoiles is a brand new hotel. All bay windows with stained glass. With its eleven floors overhanging the hill and the city it resembles a futuristic mausoleum. They say that at the start a hospital was envisaged, but that by the time they reached the sixth storey the good intentions ran out of breath. Characters in high places got into the act. Before the ninth story the documents changed hands and content radically, to the extent that at the dedication, instead of the national anthem, the guests were treated to an evening of popular Algerian rai music.* The result: the poor continue to die in unbelievably filthy pigsty-like dispensaries... Bah! what good does it do me to bring her back, me, a roast chicken cop, a big mouth in a pinhead for whom the only fitting status is that of a cardboard target.

I mean, shit, man! But of course, Llob so cynical that at one point we learn that his standard for disrespect for authority is a Deputy of the Assembly.** And really, almost every paragraph of the novel is like this; for once my severe physical limitations when reading paperback books (the only way this translation is available, apparently) were actually a bit of a benefit, because they forced me to take this book in slowly and really savor its brutality, both in terms of the circumstances under which Llob works (his office gets carbombed! And the bombing isn't even investigated; that's just part of the Life of a Cop in Algeria!), what he thinks about them internally, and what he says to pretty much anyone who isn't his wife -- who is barely a character but at least he behaves decently toward her, so, while it might occasionally feel like we're straying near it, we're not in Albert Cossery territory here. Phew!

The book is incredibly tightly plotted as Llob and his partner Lino investigate opulent but shady nightclubs, humble shops and the homes of the elite, seemingly getting nowhere in the quest to find the missing girl until, of course they stumble across a very active terrorist network, one that fears cops about as much as you or I would fear the mail carrier, and then suddenly the plot noose tightens as much as possible; the last 20% or so of the book is one of the tensest  games of cat and mouse I've ever read. 

Inspector Llob is a popular character, though***, and I knew going into this that he's in three other novels, so he's in Doctor Who jeopardy, but hey, occasionally the Doctor's companions get hurt or killed, as do endearing bystanders, so I was still reading between the fingers stretched across my eyes, as it were.

This has probably ruined me for American crime fiction, though. If a gang of demented fundamentalists aren't hunting you while you try to find a bad guy's missing daughter, are you even detectiving? On the other hand, I do read the news...

*You know me; a book mentions music and I have to go check it out if I don't already know it. I went looking for some rai music from the late 90s (contemporaneous with this novel) and fell in love with this rather famous example by Rachid Taha:

**The People's Assembly is the lower house of Algeria's Parliament, so when he speaks of himself striding into his boss's office "As denuded of respect for the Republic as a Deputy of the Assembly" that's like saying "As denuded of respect for the USA as a Congressman." HOWL.

***So popular that, in addition to getting three sequels (all of which I have acquired thanks to good old ABEBooks; the English translations aren't available as ebooks, so I'm stuck with trade paperbacks, the most painful physically for me to read, but Morituri was so good that I'm going to find a way to endure), there's also a feature film. Nobody is streaming it with an English translation, but if you've read the book and studied any romance language, you can probably follow this YouTube presentation of the film with French subtitles. I didn't find it too difficult to follow, watching it right after I finished the book, anyway!