Malniveau Prison - Ariel S. WInter

Malniveau Prison, the first in a trilogy of books that come under the title of The Twenty-Year Death, is a curious book. It's not one of the hard-boiled noir classics that Hard Case Crime do a wonderful service in reviving, but one of their more modern publications supposedly in the classic style. While some of the newer models can definitely still evoke the greats - and Ariel S Winter has received praise in some quarters for his writing - it doesn't really cut it for me, lacking any of the real literary or underlying social commentary that can often be found even in pulp fiction, lacking even any real character of its own.

Even as a crime thriller, I found Malniveau Prison curiously unengaging in its style and in its plot. Even though it involves a relative small cast of characters, it's all over the place, not really sure of where it wants to take you. It starts out on one direction, leaves matters curiously uninvestigated and then moves on to relate other bizarre events and disappearances, with the number of deaths connected to the prison near Verargent escalating rapidly with no obvious connection between them and no one really all that concerned about investigating them.

It starts out with Chief Inspector Pelleter travelling to Malniveau Prison to speak to a notorious murderer locked up there. Mahossier, who abused children held captive in cages in a basement, forcing them into fights to the death, has summoned Pelleter there. He has information he wants to share and has helped the Inspector out before. All Mahossier has to tell him this time however is that someone is killing prisoners in Malniveau. That might not exactly be news, as on his arrival during the heavy rains in Verargent, the town baker has discovered the body of a dead man that has blocked the gutter and flooded his basement. The man has been stabbed, but changed into fresh clothes. He turns out to be an inmate of Malniveau, Marcel Meranger.

The investigation leads Pelleter to Meranger's daughter who - not coincidentally one must presume - is living nearby. Clotilde-ma-fleur Meranger, is married to a hot headed American writer called Shem Rosenkrantz, who flies into a rage when she disappears soon after being interviewed by Pelleter. Then five coffins with bodies inside are found in a field being ploughed, and then two children go missing. Then another prisoner is stabbed. Things like this just seem to happen with no rhyme or reason, no real connection established, the reactions of the police curiously unperturbed by this sudden upturn in serious crime. No one seems to have any idea what is going on.

Pelleter - and Ariel S. Winter - at least keeps a firm grasp on developments, frequently making notes to summarise where we are, but it all just seems to lack any sense of urgency, proportion, motivation, purpose or drive. As far as characterisation and the writing in general goes, it's all very basic with very little depth, the writing doing little more than relating plot and dialogue. Obviously events are connected and are brought together, but little of it seems to make any real sense, and there's not enough sylistically or in terms of character to encourage any further reading of this series.

Reading notes: Malniveau Prison by Ariel S. Winter is published by Hard Case Crime. I read an eBook edition.