Lavie Tidhar

When we meet Joe he is your usual downbeat private eye just about making ends meet in Vientiane, Laos. He is hired by a mysterious woman to find the author of a bunch of pulp novels depicting acts of terrorism by Osama Bin Laden. Although written to stylise the titular character as a revolutionary vigilante. Following the one clue he has available Joe, with his freshly acquired credit card which seems to have no limit, sets of to Paris to check on the address he has for the publisher which turns out to be a PO Box. As he sets out for the airport he gets shot at so he knows it’s just going to be one of those cases.

I enjoyed the story and style of this book as well as liking how well it was written but there was something missing for me here. Guessing what Joe was fairly early into the story ate into the underlying depth and with all the characters resembling stereotypical noirish tropes left little but the style to get to grips with. Very readable but also quite easy to put down.… (más)

Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is the second 2023 book I have encountered that sets its plot in the postwar West Coast science fiction community of L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, and Robert Heinlein. Exadelic by Jon Evans uses an AI with suspicious motives to move characters to an alternate 1946 where the party at the Parsons estate is going full blast.
Tidhar employs a more complicated device. A mathematician is married to a physicist who becomes obsessed with a legendary book by Eugene Charles Hartley, a stand-in for Hubbard with a bit of Philip K. Dick for spice. When her husband goes missing, the mathematician hires a reclusive rare book dealer to investigate. In the book, we find that a double of the mathematician is a major character. (Add creepy sound effect here.) Along the way, we are given Hartley’s backstory with some amusing jibes about Heinlein’s fascination with nudism.
Now that all the Golden-Age pulpsters are dead, they seem to be fair game for the mythmakers. Tidhar offers a stylish example.… (más)

I was expecting a fairly normal detective story but what I got is a history of the state of Israel which ends up showing us that although a state of a particular religious group, it is no better or worse than any other state. In fact, its development is remarkably similar to most western countries; the good and the bad are inextricably linked.

The book starts off with a car bombing and a detective, who is high, attempting to solve the crime. It was meant for Reubenstein but missed him and killed two children walking to school. It is at this time that we meet Chief Inspector Cohen, a man who sees it as his job to contain crime rather than solve it and who is linked to the major crime families and groups. But what he also does is quote from the bible regularly - a disturbing mix of violence, drugs and religion. At one point, he is described as a man for the state, who loves his country and who is a reflection of it.

After this event we jump back to the 70s to meet the young Cohen to oversee his journey from being a young policeman to the man who manipulates and schemes in later life and who is always in the background pulling the strings.

The book is structured around real historical events. We get the land grabs, the invasion of Lebanon, the assassination of Rabin but with drugs and gun running and people always looking for an opportunity to make money. The Russians become involved and as the music festivals of the 90s take off so does Ecstasy. The book is almost a history of drugs in Israel as well as the making of a state.

This is an exceptional noir novel with its morally compromised protagonists, the corrosive effects of money and the darkness of the themes. Maror is the bitter herb that reminds Jews of the pain of the exodus but now it also reminds us of the creation of a state that is no different to anywhere else. Remarkable.… (más)