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Bayer: The New King of Classic Crime Fiction
San Francisco Examiner
By Tom Dowling
Examiner Book Editor
A few months back you might have read my lamentation over the melancholy news that the reigning king of crime fiction, one Elmore Leonard by name, had misplaced his clothes altogether in his latest best-seller, Bandits. Nakedness is a condition readers have learned to tolerate, if not to wallow in, in the work of Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins. But an Elmore Leonard in his birthday suit is not a pretty sight for those crime fiction fans among us who prefer the genre stripped down strictly in stylistic ways.
The king, in short, was dead, and while it was easy to raise the traditional dynastic cry of "Long live the king," actually finding a successor to hail was no simple matter.
Well, lo!
Here we have someone I've never heard of before named William Bayer. His book, Pattern Crimes, sounds like a learned article from a criminology journal, and worse yet, the flap copy introduces him as a man who collaborates with his wife as a food writer, of all things - Leonard in his prime would have baked the woman, her recipes and all her Tupperware in the oven at 450 degrees before sitting down to write.
But Bayer has got the real stuff and the clothes to dress it in, too: a pounding narrative line; the capacity to use recent history artfully and persuasively; real people you can identify with; dialogue that snaps with authority even as it advances the exposition; a riveting sense of locale; and above all a plot that gradually widens and expands to engorge the complicated action.
Pattern Crimes is an impressive piece of work, bone-hard in its internal structure, sartorial in the elegance of its outward appearance. If any of his four previous novels - or, for that matter, if any successors - rise to this book's standard, Bayer is the anointed new king of the crime fiction heap. At a minimum he has written one unputdownable book and certainly the best one-shot political crime thriller since Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.
The story here is set in Israel - Bayer is an American who has spent some time hanging out with Israeli cops and it captures the chain-smoking tension and odd combination of inordinate melancholy and pride that underlie life in the Jewish state as well as any native-born author I've ever read.
David Bar-Lev, the head of a five-detective Crime Patterns unit within the Special Investigative Unit of the Jerusalem police force, finds himself assigned to the first serial murder case ever to hit Israel. A Moroccan-Jewish streetwalker, an male Arab prostitute, a tourist American nun and an Israeli truck driver are all brutally murdered, their naked bodies dropped on the roadside, each defaced with sadistic cut-marks obviously meant as some grisly signature.
The pattern is to say the least baffling, all the more so since the book begins with a brief chapter set a year earlier and concerning a mysterious Russian emigre sculptor named Sasha and his defected cellist mistress in Big Sur. Before long the cellist turns up as Bar-Lev's live-in lover. Obviously, the concealed pattern is of large international consequence. But perhaps the most admirable aspect of - Pattern Crimes lies in the orderly police procedural unfolding of its ever widening circle of intrigue and corruption.
We are inside Bar-Lev's skin every step of the way as the investigation spreads to renegade Israeli assassination squads; rogue elements of the Israeli counterpart to our FBI, the Shin-Bet, militant religious fundamentalists of the Jewish and Christian persuasions; and, of course, the Russian sculptor among many others.
The headlong pace, the slowly integrating dimensions of the conspiracy, and the breathtaking neatness of the solution all reside within the scrupulously delimited domain of Bar-Lev's mind. We see the same pieces of the kaleidoscope that he sees, twist it into a new pattern as he twists it, and come to root for him as passionately as the members of his own investigative unit.
The phrase for this kind of intense involvement is artistry, and the key to pulling it off is the cold-blooded avoidance of as much as a single false note, either of scene construction, character drawing, dialogue or plot. Bayer delivers He wears not just the clothes, but the laurel that once belonged to Elmore Leonard.
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Murder in the Holy City
The Washington Post
By Seymour Krim
You're in very good hands here, especially if you don't look too deeply into the rather outrageous plot machinery. Let me first fire off a question: When was the last time you met a policeman whose father was a psychoanalyst? It's certainly easier to swallow the other way around- "Meet my son, the shrink"-but the important thing to understand about William Bayer is that he likes to stand the predictable on its head for the sheer perversity of it.
His policeman's name, by the way, is David Bar-Lev, often referred to as "the best detective in Israel." And in that last word you have the key to what makes this such a blast of a read-Israel, with all of its tensions and dissensions, getting the American treatment as far as pace, violence, sex and the rest of the menu goes. Bayer's exploitation of Jerusalem may have been inspired by what Martin Cruz Smith did with Moscow in Gorky Park, but the truth of the matter is that you'll learn some hard lessons about today's Israel, quite apart from the approved spectator sport of watching murder games.
In no other piece of recent writing, including David K. Shipler's Arab and Jew, have I felt the same shock of recognition. This is not the idealized Israel of the TV ads and the tourist brochures. Nor does the writing seize on the negative and exult. It's just a vividly candid mini-mural when we're used to getting airbrush and retouch jobs. Bayer has the courage to get past the familiar Israeli cliches and stereotypes-the clenched fist, the tanned bodies-and he has done it through the middlebrow medium of a thriller. He's foxy.
I can't go into close detail about the significance of the seven unsolved (until practically the last page) murders without giving the game away. But in all honesty the intricate way that Bayer sets up, and then wraps up, this gory puzzle is less important than his truly enviable gift for making people and places materialize. The first testifies to his ingenuity, in which credibility is sometimes sacrificed for razzle-dazzle, but the second is what makes scenes and "moments" in the novel replay themselves while you're waiting for the subway. (I'm a New Yorker, obviously.)
Anyway, down to business: Captain David Bar-Lev is head of the Pattern Crimes unit of the Jerusalem police, which is exactly what the name implies. He and his loyal band of snoopers (all marvelously delineated, one from the other) take on repeat crimes until the source is figured out and the case is broken. But they've never run up against anything like Israel's first serial murder sequence, in which such heterogeneous types as an American nun and an Arab transvestite are mutilated in exactly the same way.
As you can imagine, Bar-Lev has his hands full, complicated by a new girlfriend who has emigrated from the Soviet Union to try to become a star musician in the West and an ex-wife who routinely insults him. There is an electricity to Bayer's writing-rich design, crackling fabric-that sets it apart from the usual competent thriller. This deceiver is a bona fide novelist, you first think to yourself, but it is really the combination of the two, formula writer and writer- writer (not unlike Dashiell Hammett) that puts Mr. B. in a special niche.
Like Hammett-and I have no intention of stretching the analogy beyond this-he also is fascinated by corruption among the people who are supposed to enforce the law, a frightening thing when the bad guys are officially greenlighted as good guys and possess all the shameless arrogance that their position assures. In this particular instance, it is the Shin Bet, Israel's equivalent to the FBI, which comes under scrutiny and leads to a showdown between Bar-Lev's local investigators and the government elite. Once again I feel my hands are tied as far as details go. Only the most cold-hearted of critics would spoil the pursuit for you-but let it be hinted here that Bayer finds nothing sacred at earth level. We are the beneficiaries of this jaunty iconoclasm.
One final word. Bayer has all his characters speak a juicy American English, with a disingenuous justification every 50 pages or so that a certain speech or document is being "translated." It's all very confusing. The simple fact is that Hebrew is the national language of Israel-the language of the cobbler, the laundry-man, most of the radio, the television, the newspapers and the Knesset (parliament). English is as hard to learn and speak for the older majority as Hebrew is for us, in case you've ever wondered about the strange accents encountered on the 7 o'clock news.
It is a tribute to Bayer's fiendish spellbinding that we don't question any of this until the last page has been gulped down. L'chaim!
Seymour Krim was Fulbright writer in residence at the University of Haifa, Israel, in 1985-86.
--Article apeared Sunday May, 17, 1987--
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