Customer Reviews

Double Blank: An Inspector Llob Mystery (Toby Crime)

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I bought this book because of its Algerian setting and was predisposed to like it. Unfortunately, I didn't connect with the writing at all. It might have been a weak translation, but somehow the dark, depressive atmosphere established from the novel's get-go was too much to overcome for me. The storyline is not particularly strong and none of the characters were engaging. Perhaps Khadira's other books are better, but I wouldn't be inclined to find out.

For its brevity, this is crime fiction on a grand scale. Inspector, rather, Superintendent Llob of the Algiers police finds himself on the trail of a diabolical scheme played out against the political turmoil of the country whose independence from France he once fought for. Told with all the grittiness of hard-boiled detective fiction, this tale takes readers from one end of the social spectrum to the other - the grinding poverty of the crime-infested slums to the grandiose life styles of the filthy rich.

The plot is engaging enough and its predictability is continually undercut by a fast-forward narrative style that propels the reader from scene to scene, often omitting the plot developments building up to them. More entertaining is Khadra's mastery of the genre itself - the feuding investigative agencies of the police, the ageing rogue cop as hero, the trading of insults among professional colleagues and their suspects, the gruesome crime scenes, the seductive temptress and ruthless villains, the caricatures of humanity ranging from dwarves to giants, the cynical narrator whose observing eye falls on everything that is beyond redemption. The pace is breathless, while finding room enough for social comment and digs at Islamist operatives. Grim but darkly humorous.

This is a short detective story by the Algerian army officer who disguised his identity by writing under a woman's name, Yasmina Khadra. Khadra produced three of these Superintendant Llob stories in the late 90s: they take place in modern Algiers, and are noir fiction with a real bite, because the villains are often terrorists armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

In this entry in the series, Llob is confronted with the murders of several people. First, an old acquaintance who doesn't remember him is killed, then a financier, and soon after one of his informants. As the story progresses, Llob must confront political corruption, violence, and a confusing array of villains, each more annoying and disgusting than the last. Fortunately, the sidekick who was killed in Morituri has been replaced by a giant of an ex-soldier who seems to punch everyone and take on the world singlehandedly when needed.

I enjoyed this book, and would only repeat my one negative comment from before: they should have grouped all three of the Superintendant Llob books together. Together they'd be about 400 pages, less than a Dan Brown novel, and much more appealing together than separate.

Drugs, lies, murders, and hunt for the culprit at the root-a typical crime story everyone has been watching for decades. This time Yasmina Khadra sets the scene in Algeria with his (or her, if you would) political thriller Double Blank (Toby Press, Connecticut, 2005). We now know Khadra is the nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer whose books breach the underpinnings of violence in Algeria. It is easy to see where a modern political thriller like Double Blank ends up-at the doorstep of a crooked businessman cum politician. And Khadra gets us way up there.

Double Blank tells of police superintendent, Mr. Llob, who is set to track the hand behind a series of murders involving puppets in the drug market and the red-light district. Things get to a little higher level as clues point to a conspiracy theory living in a diskette. There is little new in the 140 pages of killings and investigation except its Algerian setting. You are watching Law and Order with some added action and subtracted coherence of plot.

Khadra's book is a prey to many weaknesses. It is supposed to be a novel but the mode of narration is typical of a short story. The voice of the narrator in present has unnaturalness hard to put up with, especially in a story with events that certainly have taken place in the past. There is little true action in the story and the most blatant murders happen in two sentences. Lack of description leaves a very poor mental picture of the scenes. Characters too are extremely ill-defined and character development seems a thing alien to the author's concern.

The most fatal slump of Double Blank is, perhaps, the quirky employment of humor throughout the telling of events. Superintendent Llob's voice sounds detached from its inner care for peace by constantly gushing out twisted quips, many of which are too idiosyncratic to be appreciated. Clumsy experimenting it language and slack exaggeration for the sake of humor nullifies the effect of Khadra's tale. In general, Double Blank falls too very short of a novel. It sounds like a story you try to get involved in as a reader and always find yourself far behind where you started.

Khadra's first Inspector Llob mystery (Morituri) was a wonderfully unexpected pulp fiction take on a large Arab city. This second in the trilogy is also set in Algiers in the mid-90s at the height of the Civil War. Like that book, it owes more than a little in style to Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, as the intrepid Inspector delves into a dark a corrupt world of powerful men and their vices. Inspector Llob is a classic seeker of justice, armed with battery of wisecracks and caustic insults -- backed up by a pair of distinctive policemen, pony-tailed Lino and hulking Seddig. The story concerns the beheading of a longtime intellectual who wrote a popular book critiquing the FLN regime, but just recently returned to Algeria. The obvious culprits would be a known cell of Islamic guerillas, but Llob isn't so sure. Just a few days before the murder, the victim had met with Llob and told him that he had explosive information that he was going to turn into a book that would rock the country.

As Llob mobilizes his resources and races around the underworld trying to piece together what happened, the bodies start to pile up. Soon he's looking in high places, barging in on the rich and famous in order to find answers. True to Algeria's tragic Civil War, it's a bloody, messy affair, with severed necks, booby-trapped corpses, and dark dark humor (one notorious beheader's nickname is "The Hairdresser"). The writing is so pulpy and staccato that it's hard for the reader to really engage with the material, it's simply too stylized. Moreover, the entire subject matter is so steeped in such corruption and brutality that many Western readers will likely have a hard time getting a handle on it. One kind of wishes Khadra had slowed the pace down a little and toned down some of the stylistic tics to make it a little more realistic, which would have made it that much more powerful.