The Bridge of Sighs, Blood of the Innocent

I read Olen Steinhauer's Confession a while back, which was his second book about a fictional Soviet buffer state.  It was very good, gripping in its depiction of a totalitarian state.  The Bridge of Sighs is the first book, set a few years earlier.  Steinhauer apparently wants to give us a view of the state over a few decades, and the first one starts not that long after WWII, while the Russians are still cementing their control.  Already the Stalinist system is in place, with files on everybody, but there isn't the paranoid feeling of the later novel.

I'm not sure if the difference is really supposed to be there, though.  The second novel shows Steinhauer as a much better novelist than this first one, much more in control of his material.  This novel starts with Emil Brod, the protagonist, at his first day on the job; his colleagues are suspicious of him, because they suspect he's a spy from the state.  Fortunately for Emil, it's resolved relatively quickly, but not so fortunately for us readers.  It's a pretty clear case of the author setting the stage to have Emil being sent to investigate an extremely dangerous case by himself; his superior doesn't trust him, so he assigns Emil to the case hoping he'll fail, even though Emil is too junior to be handed such a case under normal circumstances.

It all feels very arbitrary, and the arbitrariness continues.  The main love interest never really gels, except that Emil needs someone to care about who can be held hostage.  The resolution doesn't quite make sense either, although I enjoyed its irony.

It's not that The Bridge of Sighs is a bad novel; it's just not as good as the later novel.  If Steinhauer gets better, then I should be in for a treat in the next few books.

E. O. Wilson (I think) called the mystery genre a travelogue.  He was being disparaging, and I disagree with the general thrust of his argument, but there's a germ of truth there.  In addition to Steinhauer's exploration of life in a Soviet buffer state, I read Leighton  Gage's Blood of the Wicked, set in Brazil.  Gage uses the conventions of the mystery novel to show up the vast divide between rich and poor in Brazil, as well as the corruption left over from the days of military rule.  Unfortunately, one convention he doesn't use is that the detective should be an important factor in the plot.  Instead, he creates an interesting detective in Mario Silva, establishes that said detective will bend the rules if necessary, and then drops him into a situation where his hands are completely tied and he does nothing.  By the end of the novel, it's clear that events would have played out exactly the same even if Mario had never showed up on the scene.

It occurs to me that I had the same issue with The Shape of Water, which is one reason I write this blog -- it lets me keep track of my thoughts so that I can revisit them.  I'm more willing to give Camilleri a second chance, though, because his secondary characters really jumped out at me.  Gage's characters are really there just to dramatize his concern about the wealth divide in Brazil; they never gelled as actual characters for me.