Crime and place for everything

LIKE Agatha Christie's Poirot, and her village snoop Miss Marple, Singh has an instinct for solving crimes.

Illustration by Tom Jellett

LIKE Agatha Christie's Poirot, and her village snoop Miss Marple, Singh has an instinct for solving crimes.

YOUR Departure Lounge columnist has banged on before about her passion for travel narratives and fiction that have a resounding sense of place and context, be it historic or contemporary.

This year's reading has uncovered a haul of sterling examples, many of which have been reviewed in our popular A Little Flight Reading column in the past 12 months. While reprising the best of those reviews, Lounge has added other favourites to transport you to wonderful shores, foreign and far, mild and wild.

Trinidad: The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey (Pocket Books, $32.95): Most travellers see no more than verdant landscapes, crumbling colonial buildings and colourful villages in Trinidad. In this engaging novel, poignantly balanced between love and hate, Monique Roffey, born in Port of Spain, the capital, and educated in Britain, exposes decades of anger and terror during and following the dismantling of white rule.

The white woman on the green bicycle is French-born Sabine Harwood, whose English husband George loves Port of Spain, its exotic otherness, its rum-soaked expatriate lifestyle and, increasingly, its coffee-skinned women. But the free-spirited Sabine is isolated and angry; even her two children, Sebastian and Pascale, speak the creole patois and are closer to the housemaid, Venus, than their mother. Sabine is mad at George and despairing of the charismatic Eric Williams, the newly independent nation's first prime minister. Lost in loneliness, she writes Williams letters of discontent that she never posts.

Sweeping from 1956 to 2006, Roffey divides the book between the perspectives of George and Sabine to form a ripe and uncompromising saga. The novel was deservedly shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction.

Laos: The Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill (Quercus, $29.95): The 73-year-old national coroner of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos is back in this latest title in the Dr Siri Paiboun series. He is the country's only medical examiner and the ruling Communist Party top dogs refuse to allow him to retire; he is bored and resentful, as is a misogynistic chap known as Phan, who is busy marrying poor country girls (all he requires is "beauty, virginity and a long, squeezable neck"), strangling them on their wedding night and binding their bodies to trees.

This is clearly not a happy thing and the good comrades of the Vientiane constabulary are moving too slowly. Time for Dr Siri to swing into action, galvanise his cronies, and put his investigative powers and near-supernatural skills to effective use in tracking down the murderer.

The Old Dart: Icons of England edited by Bill Bryson (Random House, $19.95): Bill Bryson has collected a wealth of short essays on what makes England so, well, English, from country stiles and cider farms to village cricket and the damnable climate. The list of contributors is long, from popular plantsman Alan Titchmarsh and musician Bryan Ferry to the peripatetic Michael Palin and television presenter Jonathan Dimbleby. It's a surprise to find actor and director Kevin Spacey among the lineup; obviously his tenure with the Old Vic has given him honorary pommy status and herein he extols the pleasures of a boating holiday. It's all very Ratty and Mole, with a nice dash of the eccentric.

Many of the essays are whimsical (I enjoyed reading about musician Eric Clapton's boyhood in Surrey, also the county of my youth) and Bryson, himself an honorary Englishman, must have had huge fun putting together such a jolly good assembly.

Singapore: Inspector Singh Investigates the Singapore School of Villainy by Shamini Flint (Piatkus, $22.99): Inspector Singh is everything Hercule Poirot is not. He's dishevelled, overweight and sweaty, his clothing frequently spotted with the curry stains of Mrs Singh's excellent cooking. But like Agatha Christie's Poirot, and her village snoop Miss Marple, Singh has an instinct for solving crimes that would otherwise foil the local constabulary. In this third outing in a continuing series, the detective is at home in Singapore and has been assigned a corporate murder case, which is a rare event for this low-crime tropical enclave.

Shamini Flint moves things along at a cracking pace and the dapper Belgian detective with the superior "little grey cells" would have been intrigued, I feel sure, to meet one of his 21st-century rivals.

France: The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle (Quercus, $29.95): Here we have an old-fashioned soft-crime gallivant from the chap who shot to fame in the late 1980s with his lifestyle transplant tale A Year in Provence. He's made a good living writing about this lovely patch of France and, unsurprisingly, he has chosen familiar backdrops (the Bordeaux winelands, Marseilles) to set the scene in this light and racy novel. I read it in one sitting and kept thinking of the crew from the television series Hustle and how they would have pulled off an international wine heist; perhaps Mayle is also a fan of the show and of grand deceptions such as the 1950s Alfred Hitchcock classic To Catch a Thief with the fabulously debonair Cary Grant. The ending of The Vintage Caper trickles away and the circular nature of events is too neat; nonetheless this is fine holiday fare, preferably with a glass of French red to hand.

Morocco: The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah (Bantam Books, $24.95): Only a writer with the humour and insight of Tahir Shah could turn a year of renovating horrors into a such an affirming tale of joy and hope.

With his wife and two young children, Shah leaves the safety of their "meagre" flat in England for the relatively wild territory of Casablanca and for Dar Khalifa, a ruined palace with cobwebs that "hung across doorways like lace curtains" and resident jinns, "an army of invisible spirits".

There's a cast of dodgy tradesmen, an architect with grand notions and gangsterish neighbours. Bureaucracy is evident at every turn of the paperwork jungle but it is no spoiler to reveal the house does not win; in fact, Shah now lets out rooms to travellers. A magical read about self-discovery, digging in and taking root.

Paris: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Gallic, $24.95): We use that word concierge so freely in travel circles, from hotel help desks to rental-car agency assistants. But the true Parisian apartment-building concierge has a far less public profile: resident caretaker and cleaner, manager of deliveries and keeper of secrets, such women (for they are frequently female, often with a rather less forceful husband as co-concierge) are formidable.

The widowed Renee is concierge to a grand building, 7 rue de Grenelle, on the Left Bank and lives in a cluttered ground-floor lodge where she observes the comings and goings of the (mostly) aloof residents of its eight apartments. But Renee is not the drab middle-aged drone she appears; she is an autodidact, a reader of highbrow literature, a lover of Japanese art films and philosophy. Her carefully constructed disguise crumbles when Mr Ozu, an astute businessman, moves in and quickly realises why the Tolstoy-loving Renee's cat is called Leo. He breaks all bourgeois conventions by befriending this "permanent traitor" to the concierge archetype.

A parallel plot involves Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old resident of the building who believes the world is so meaningless that she plans to commit suicide when she turns 13. Mr Ozu enters Paloma's life, too, and the three characters become gently connected. The ending is as unexpected as the craftily invisible Renee herself.

Best of the rest: For English village life at its most eccentric: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (Allen & Unwin, $32.99). For petty crimes and long lunches in southwest France: Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker (Thorndike Press; $13.40 at bookdepository.co.uk, including postage). For snippets of life in a London apartment building called Corduroy Mansions: The Dog Who Came in From the Cold by Alexander McCall Smith (Polygon; $24.97 on special at fishpond.com.au). For shady crimes on a sunny Greek island: The Lady of Sorrows by Anne Zouroudi (Bloomsbury; $17.95 on special at www.fishpond.com.au).