Ahmed lives alone in an apartment in Paris’s multicultural 19th arrondissement. Signed off work with depression, he spends his days jogging, daydreaming and devouring crime novels. His only source of contact is Monsieur Paul, owner of the second-hand bookshop below, and Laura, his neighbour, above.
One day, as he is languishing on his balcony, he is roused from his thoughts by a drop of blood on his face. He ventures upstairs and finds Laura’s hideously mutilated body both leaking blood and slathered in pig’s blood, along with a pork joint stabbed with a butcher’s knife and three decapitated orchids.
So begins Karim Miské's debut novel Arab Jazz, a twisting, conniving, page-turning murder mystery that has won several literary prizes in France and is now neatly translated into English by Sam Gordon. Miské's grisly opening scene is textbook whodunit, one that would have made Agatha Christie proud. In a deft move, he updates the Queen of Crime by ratcheting up the psychological component. Is key witness Ahmed the killer? Seeds of suspicion are sown: Ahmed has a bloodstained djellaba to dispose of before the police search his flat; he confesses to his psychoanalyst that he regularly pictures himself killing women; and he has a key to Laura's flat.
And then there is his vast collection of detective novels. If anyone can commit the perfect crime, it is surely Ahmed. He explains the meaning of the title of James Ellroy's White Jazz – "a twisted plan hatched by white guys" – and with that the reader admires the manipulation of Arab Jazz and wonders if it refers to an equally warped ploy of Ahmed's to bump off the woman who loves him and stay one step ahead of the police.
Like Ahmed, Miské knows how these dramas unfold, and so around the halfway point of the book we find ourselves confronted with umpteen potential suspects. We get a disbanded hip-hop group, a Jewish barber, a Salafist preacher, bent coppers and Laura’s three best friends, one of whom has disappeared. As if this wasn’t enough, Miské casts his net wider, out of Paris and into New York, in a flashback that concerns Jehovah’s Witnesses and a new mind-bending drug called Godzwill soon to be unleashed on the streets of Europe.
Attempting to make sense of these tangled networks and shady alliances is the crime-fighting detective duo of Jean and Rachel, who easily provide the best company in the novel. Jean is a lapsed Catholic from Brittany who nevertheless “spends his life permanently ricocheting between unfulfilled impulses and pangs of guilt”. Rachel is a secular Jew whose Aunt Ruth has instilled in her “the visceral horror of the forbidden”. Instead of a good cop, bad cop set-up, Miské gives us laconic Jean and interrogative Rachel – “more of a present-absent thing”. And instead of succumbing to her colleague’s advances, Rachel ends up falling for her prime suspect, Ahmed.
Miské was born in Abidjan to a Mauritanian father and a French mother. His characters either share a similar mixed ethnic background – Ahmed, we are told, was born in France to Moroccan parents – or they are defined by their religion, one practised or cast off. Miské alternately renders his melting-pot enclave a vibrant safe haven and a perilous no-go ghetto. Indeed, several scenes are not for the faint-hearted, from the shock opener to the violent showdown. Equally candid is Miské’s display of bodily fluids and functions: hyperreal visuals for some readers, unsavoury excess for others.
Miské also impresses on us a series of headings – “POWER”, “DEATH”, “FACING THE KILLER” – which are presumably intended as portentous but unfortunately sound melodramatic. In addition, here and there the narrative is blighted by clunky formulations (“This murder must be tamed, nourished, pondered, infiltrated”) and unconvincing dialogue (“A thread so fine it’s practically invisible, the smallest breath enough to disturb it. The thread that will guide our investigation”).
Luckily, these irregularities constitute patches not pages. Soon we are back on the trail of religious extremists and hit men and absorbed in Ahmed’s elaborate cat-and-mouse game. This is a hectic, multi-stranded policier, but also one in which the players are at their most interesting when lost in thought and not on the move. Whether prompted by lust, fear, nostalgia, music or marijuana, Miské’s characters drift off and zone out and their trances make for appealing diversions.
Ahmed is a beguiling creation, but the real stars of the show are the two detectives. It would be a crime if Miské didn’t bring them back for another case.
The book is available on Amazon.
Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.
