The Bogus Buddha
(JAMES MELVILLE)
The Bogus Buddha is one of a series of novels about
Tetsuo Otani, police superintendent of Hyogo prefecture, Japan.
Light-hearted and urbane, they fall into the polite mystery tradition rather
than the hard-boiled one. Though his writing fits comfortably within genre
conventions, Melville uses the Japanese setting (and elements derived from the
Chinese Judge Dee stories) to create something new. He is now among my favorite
crime novelists.
Melville''s plots are skillfully paced and thematically
engaging, involving the unusual and out of the ordinary without becoming
fantastic or implausible. (In The Bogus Buddha two separate strands
end in murder: tensions between academics at a summer school on Japanese
culture and an underworld struggle between gangsters.) But the real attraction
lies in the characters and their relationships. One-off characters sometimes
have leading parts, but it is Otani''s family and assistants who take on a life
all of their own, often threatening to steal the story. Ninja Noguchi, a
slightly seedy figure with contacts throughout the underworld, and ladies'' man
Kimura, responsible for anything to do with foreigners, are particularly
memorable, as is Otani''s wife Hanae. But we keep returning to Otani himself,
who centers everything
Resumos Relacionados
- Silver Pigs
- The Silver Pigs
- The Murder Room
- A Spoke In The Wheel
- Gone For Good
|
|
