Russell James has been named “the Godfather of Noir” by Ian Rankin. Russell writes crime novels - about criminals and victims, not the cozy procedural or whodunnit. He is the editor of Great British Fictional Detectives.
Bitter Lemon are issuing the Inspector Hunkeler series out of sequence, so this isn’t a follow-up to The Basel Killings but takes us through a case earlier in his career.
It’s a good one, as it happens, despite being a variation on the ordinary-man-stumbles-across-a-gangster’s-haul plot. The ordinary man here is a Turkish sewage worker who finds diamonds stuck in a blocked pipe. How did they get there? We already know: a drug mule, running from the police, flushed them away, and these diamonds could be worth a million Euros. Quite a loss. So, the gang bosses are not going to wash their hands of it. Even if the diamonds have been in the sewer.
They are soon on the Sewage worker’s tail. He, of course, thinks the diamonds will transform his life and he can return enriched to Turkey. Meanwhile, Inspector Hunkeler, fat, angry and unfit, wants both the diamonds and the gang. The Turk and his ageing mistress make a run for it. But the odds are against them – and we know, this being a crime story, that the couple will not get clean away. And we ought to know that, right at the end, there’ll be a twist.
Editor’s Note: Translated by Mike Mitchell
