Death in Paris: a short review of Karim Miské's "Arab Jazz"

[dotinthesky]

Arab Jazz by Karim Miské

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Karim Miské's debut novel is timely and has all the ingredients for a great crime novel. It's set in contemporary Paris, involves radicalised muslim youth and acts of terror, and it touches on drug dealing, mental illness and police corruption. Sadly, this is a disappointing read.

The novel starts out well enough, with a depressed and isolated young man, Ahmed, discovering the murdered body of his upstairs neighbour, a young woman who had once been a Jehovah Witness. The crime scene is set up in order to implicate Ahmed but the two police officers assigned to the case immediately sense he's innocent. Soon, the police officers realise the crime points at local young men with extremist views.

This promising set up is unfortunately torn apart by a sudden influx of all sorts of characters living in the neighbourhood -- from the victim's girlfriends to a dodgy barber -- who take away the focus of the story and any suspense surrounding the investigation. The narrative, intriguing to start with, gets bloated by all these characters - most who are just there as misplaced red herrings.

Another problem with the novel is that Miské uses the third person omniscient point of view, giving us a look into the minds of all characters, including the murderer, and unfortunately diffuses all tension in the story. By the end, you couldn't care less who killed who, who survived, who went on a date with you. There are no surprises. You are left with the feeling that with a little more effort Miské could have turned this into a cracking read.

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Comments

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

ugh, mysteries of any kind should not be written in the 3rd...

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

Interesting you mention that... it's something I never thought of! But, looking back at Agatha Christie's mysteries for example, she did seem to always use the 1st person (usually someone who was close to the detective - eg. Poirot - but never allowing the reader to go directly inside the mind of the detective.)

I'm listening at the moment to the audio version of "Silence of the Lambs" and something interesting is also done there: we get third person, including a look into the killer's mind, but we never get inside Hannibal Lecter's mind! I feel that's how the novel's suspense is built - he's the biggest threat but we are led to believe at first that it's the other one.

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

exactly, and that sort of bait and switch is actually quite effective. i feel like my writing class in high school covered how mysteries only work if you do it from the first person, but that it didn't have to be the perspective of the detective; you just couldn't go broad in scope with perspective, or you ultimately lose the element of mystery/suspense from the work.

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

I agree. Too broad a stroke in mysteries/suspense leaves little to the imagination. Fear is built on what we don't know!