Lie in the Dark by
Dan Fesperman
hbk out July 99
Published by No Exit Press
at £16.99
Here's something different - a crime novel set in Sarajevo at the height of the Yugoslav conflict. Vlado Petric, the hero of Baltimore journalist Dan Fesperman's novel, is a homicide detective; an extremely overworked one given the war, you'd think. In fact, until the corpse of another investigator turns up in a street raked by sniper fire, he's been pretty underworked. And there you have the first problem with this sombre and slow-moving book - how do you make an individual murder interesting in times of genocide? Although Fesperman struggles manfully with the task, he doesn't really succeed. Which is a pity, because much of the novel is interesting, poetic and genuinely original (despite the inevitable reference to Gorky Park on the back cover).
Petric is a Marlowesque protagonist; uneasy with women, keen on drink and permanently up the noses of his superiors. But he's no macho slob - his wife and daughter were evacuated to Germany at the beginning of the fighting and he's tortured by the enforced separation. There's also a large cast of war-scarred locals, bent policemen and women driven to prostitution, all of whom give human dimensions to the devastated urban landscape of Sarajevo.
The setting is what gives Lie in the Dark its power. From the gravediggers in the football pitch Petric watches at the outset, to the blown-out buildings, the zoned city and the trench-lined mountains, the reader is brought close to the full horror of the conflict. Although the urban imagery clearly builds upon the mean streets of classic noir fiction, it does so in a highly innovative way. The detective is very much part of his surroundings, at one point even crawling down a sewer lain with mines.
But in the end, the setting and the hero's gritty nature aren't enough to move Lie in the Dark out of the "nice try" class. The fatal flaw is the author's failure to keep decide what kind of book he's writing. As a crime novel, the plot just isn't strong enough to keep the reader's attention, and as a non-genre novel it suffers from a lack of depth in characterisation. That's a pity on both counts, because original slants are always welcome and Fesperman's Sarajevo almost has a lot going for it.
Lie in the Dark by
Dan Fesperman