Crime queen's latest is 'utterly creepy' reading

22 January 2013 - 02:32 By Andrew Donaldson
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Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

'The Caller', by Karin Fossum (Vintage) R140

Fossum's psychological thrillers have earned her the title of queen of Norwegian crime; her Inspector Sejer series - this is the eighth - are terrific reminders of what makes the Scandinavians so good at this stuff.

She has an obsessive's understanding of the criminal mind and of the human cost of criminal activity. This one is particularly chilling. A young couple find their sleeping baby drenched in blood - only it's not their daughter's and the infant is otherwise unharmed. Then a note arrives, reading, "Hell begins now". Utterly creepy, yet compelling late-night activity.

THE ISSUE

What is puzzling about the Lance Armstrong saga is that it took so long for the facts to come out. David Walsh, the London Sunday Times journalist whose book, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, is now in bookstores everywhere, first suspected the cyclist's performances were too good to be true when he won his first Tour de France way back in 1999.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's engaging La Tour: A History of the Tour de France, published in 2003, also dealt with Armstrong's doping suspicions at some length.

Indeed, Wheatcroft makes the case that doping and illegal performance-enhancing drugs have been associated with the race from the very early days.

Interestingly, the tour was started in 1903 by a newspaper proprietor, Henri Desgrange, as a promotional gimmick to boost sales of L'Auto, a newspaper of "ideas and action" printed on trademark yellow paper - hence the tradition of the yellow jersey worn by race leaders. It is fitting then, that although stripped of his titles, the disgraced Armstrong's yellow jerseys are still a circulation booster.

CRASH COURSE

Theatre critic Henry Hitchings first caught my attention with his curious Who's Afraid of Jane Austen? How To Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

In it, he recommends various shortcuts to pretend knowledge and, importantly, how to avoid the genuinely erudite.

His new book, Sorry! The English and Their Manners is, alas, not a "how-to ..." but a history of courtesy, etiquette, privacy, kissing, hypocrisy, name-calling, table manners and the rituals of bereavement.

Stuffy as the book may seem, there are times, according to the Guardian, when Hitchings comes across as "a seething, mad-eyed malcontent" railing away at the "sacred cows and filthy pigs of contemporary culture". Certainly, he is the first person I've come across to describe a person using a cellphone as "Trendster McF$%kpig [blurting] once again into his tiny electronic conch."

THE BOTTOM LINE

"It was a voice that would seem to his future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been born in French." - The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, by Joyce Johnston (Viking)

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