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Like Jazz, After Midnight, Fév 3 2000
Ordinarily, I'm not much of a mystery fan, but I found the Resnick series to be quite a departure from what I had expected. These novels are actually in the police procedural genre (the McBain books, for instance, are its American equivalent) and center on a group of investigators in the English city of Nottingham. There are ten books in all, with the concluding volume in the series being the 1999 release, "Last Rites".The central figure is Charlie Resnick, a middle-aged man of Polish descent, overweight, divorced, the guardian of four cats, a jazz lover, unlucky in love. In many ways, he's a stolid, workaday figure, not especially gifted with brilliance or exceptional deductive reasoning. But that's one of the points of this series: the characters are very human. Some succeed (justly or otherwise); some fail. Friends will come and go; love affairs will start and awkwardly end. People die. Those who seem sympathetic when viewed from one angle are shown to be all too frail when seen from another. Resnick's squad isn't burning with zeal to pursue justice or punish crime. They're just doing a job. They're not angels, and indeed, some of them are rather despicable. Those that do try to aspire to something better receive no special reward; they're as likely to be caught in the random unfairness of life as any other. And the villains are not criminal masterminds or psychopathic serial killers. For the most part, they're small-minded and lazy people, or those looking for the main chance, or just plain screw-ups. None of them are Moriartys or Hannibal Lecters. Nonetheless, some of them prove to be chilling all the same; they're your neighbors, your friends, people who have lost their way and become trapped in a cycle of violence. But they have the same fears and desires as anyone else. The novels are not especially plot-driven. They're rather character studies, small arcs showing the lives and thoughts and fates of Resnick and his associates. And equal attention is paid to those on the other side of the law, or to the victims, or even to those on the periphery. The stories are built up out of small moments, minor interludes, quiet scenes. The jazz that Resnick loves so well informs the series; there is rarely a large, grandiose thundering climax, or a pulsing, driven beat; rather, there are starts and stops, variations on a theme, improvisations, minor notes. Some characters in the series will grow wiser. Some won't. One will be killed in a sudden brawl totally peripheral to the main plot, and his killer will much later suffer a similar fate. Criminals will escape the scene of the crime only to be killed in car crashes. Miserable fates will continue to be doled out to the same families over and over again, yet they seem powerless to escape. In many ways, it seems Resnick is fighting a losing battle, putting away a few minor league criminals while the city deteriorates around him and evil flourishes. Yet if one thread runs through these books, it is the power of love, how it can lead to wonder and terror, endings and beginnings, inspiration and despair. The desire for the characters to connect with something beyond themselves is what drives them onwards, a desperate and terrible yearning. And sometimes, these desires fulfilled, they find themselves no better off, and cast aside what they have just attained. Often lyrical, full of scenes of keen insight and of small portraits drawn in a few swift brushstrokes, these books are deceptively simple on the surface, hiding deeper themes within. While some of the books are a little weaker than others, as a whole the series lays out a story arc that is well worth reading.
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