Wolves of Memory

With Harper and Iles mysteries, James throws you into the deep end of the pool as a kid and tells you to "swim." Adrift in this dialogue ladened yarn, you are plopped right in the middle of a whirling maelstrom in an unnamed Midlands city. Harper, a detective and a family man, and, Des Iles, his dangerous, maleviolent superior, indoctrinate a snitch, his foxy wife and two kids into the British version of the witness protection program. It is all typical Jamesian stagecraft with unduly repetitious conversations, remembrances of past betrayals by the psychotic Iles, mental machinations on being "a grass," retaining one's new identity and a fast paced surprise at the end. Bill James is an acquired taste but an enjoyable one at that.

This time, Harpur & Iles have been given the task of helping to relocate and protect a police informant and his family. This informant helped to send down several major criminals--even if he really was trying to do the right thing by them and got screwed over by his police contact--and now he and his wife and young children have to be made to take on a whole new identity. Of course, while the parents understand the necessity of this, the children have a bit more trouble with it. And even the parents keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, there'd be a way to explain to their old associates that it wasn't intentional, and things would be okay, and could go back to the way they were. Bill James fascinates me as an author. He does several things I'm not accustomed to seeing and makes them work so beautifully it's amazing to behold. Very few things actually seem to happen in his books, and yet it doesn't matter. Most of the story takes place in people's heads. Even action-filled events are told as recollections, something that in most authors' hands would rob them of their power and energy. And yet what really drives James's books are the internal workings of the characters, who are so fascinating that you don't mind and even vastly prefer spending whole chapters inside their oh-so-bizarre heads. Perhaps the only thing that slightly bugged me in Wolves of Memory as opposed to Girls is that in the latter book, James allowed Harpur & Iles's strange relationship to speak for itself. In this one Harpur often ruminated on it. At first he seemed to do this a bit much, perhaps over-explaining things that seem, if anything, more interesting if left unexplained. But as the book went on this became streamlined into something that worked quite well. As was the case for Girls, Wolves of Memory works on a number of levels. It's incredibly funny and entertaining, yet beneath all that it explores a number of issues. Class, social level, law and criminals, family relationships... it's all there somewhere. And just when you think James's skills are purely on the level of characters, he pulls off a surprising yet wholly natural ending that twists things quite beautifully. I always find myself wanting to quote from his books when I review them, because there are single lines I come across in them that are truly amazing. But one of the things that's very different about his work is that these lines are so beautiful not in a one-off manner, but because of several intricate pages of setup and back-and-forth dialogue--so to take them out of that context doesn't work.

Nobody much likes informants. Other criminals hate them--indeed, their only perscription is death. While the police rely on informants for a huge share of their convictions, even they don't really like them. Still, when a young criminal decides to protect himself by informing on the car robbery he's involved in, and manages to put a long-sought criminal behind bars, he and his family are given new identities and whisked away to the not-so-tender mercies of Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur. With a police psychologist to help them overcome their identity issues, Harpur and Iles are to provide safety and any other needed help. Transforming from respected thief Ian Ballion to salesman Robert Templeton doesn't sound difficult. But Ian/Robert finds it horribly painful. He never meant for his informing to result in arrests--he'd merely intended to break up a robbery plan that was clearly doomed without having to actually go back on his agreement to participate in it. He continually rehearses possible approaches to the mob boss whose son is now in jail as a result of Ian/Robert's testimony. He knows the mob is not forgiving of informants, but he still fantasizes about being welcomed back into their arms, his mistakes forgiven, even appreciated. ACC Iles and DCS Harpur recognize that the Ian memories will cause problems--will, in fact, be the critical issue in the transformation of Ian/Robert's identity. Yet their own ability to work together and to be effective in this case is hampered by Iles's continued anger at Harpur for a long-ago affair between Harpur and Iles's wife, and by Iles's attraction to Ian/Robert's wife (now Jane). Author Bill James continues his exploration into the lives and police-work of Harpur, Iles, and their associates. James's writing, especially his dialogue, is fascinating. Neither Harpur nor Iles ever seems to respond to the other's comments, but always to the subtext, to the thoughts behind them, as if they could read one another's thoughts, no matter how unsavory they were. Indeed, the lack of secrets, whether on the part of the police or on the part of the criminals, is a recurring theme in the Harpur & Iles series. Despite, or perhaps because of Iles's near-insanity, his police methods do (usually, and by some definitions) work. Yet Ian/Robert's misguided belief that he can somehow escape his status as an informant, be welcomed back into the criminal brotherhood is so destructive there seens no way out of it. Because of Iles's near-insanity, Harpur can't even explain the dangerous steps he's taken that might further unravel Iles's carefully laid out plans WOLVES OF MEMORY is probably not the best place for new readers in the Harpur & Iles series to start. Too much of the story is tied up in the established relationship between these two men. For fans of the series (like me), however, WOLVES is a powerful addition, letting us look into the souls of two damaged m

(4.5 stars) The London police world of Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles and Deputy Constable Colin Harpur is in constant turmoil, and not just because of the job. Des Iles is a borderline psychotic, a man who twists the law, ignores it, or imposes his own law and punishment without batting an eyelash. Harpur, the single father of two adolescent children, is both his assistant and his curse, since Harpur once had an affair with Iles's wife, and Iles, a man described as "one of the world's routine cruelties," has never let him or anyone else forget it. Harpur and Iles have been assigned to provide protection and new identities for Ian Ballion, his wife, and two children, after a planned robbery of cash-in-transit from Africa to England goes awry. Ballion, scheduled to participate in the robbery, had "grassed," wanting the police to intercept the cash before the robbers reached it, thereby avoiding violence. The police, however, reneged, grabbing not only the cash but also the potential robbers, arresting all but Ballion. The ringleader for this job, the son of London's biggest crime lord, has received a long jail sentence, and the lives of Ballion and his family are threatened. Believing that the Ballions can become "unstuck from yesterday" by creating new memories, which will push old memories out of their heads, a police psychologist conducts classes in which they practice their new name (Templedon) and learn to become wholly new people. In the meantime, Ian Ballion longs to return to his "family" in the criminal underworld, finding it preferable to being a police "grass," his wife hates Iles's leering advances, and his children arouse suspicion by constantly repeating their new names and prepared stories. Protecting the family becomes increasingly problematical as the family resists their new identities. This often hilarious novel is told through wry, tongue-in-cheek repartee, conversations, and internal monologues as the various characters go about their daily lives. Their constantly skewed observations, inability to see ironies, and practice of one-upsmanship lead to confrontations in which the characters are frequently talking and acting at cross-purposes, while the reader chuckles in amusement. The sympathetic characterization of the children adds depth to the well-developed issues of identity and memory, and the author's casual inclusion of references to poet Walter de la Mare, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Conrad, Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes, and the Bible create a literary overlay to the humor. Short on action and long on wacky characters and off-the-wall talk, this novel will appeal to lovers of black humor, irony, and absurdity. n Mary Whipple

If you are already familiar with the Iles-Harpur mysteries, the quirky Bill James' characters will already be old friends. For this neophyte, however, these eccentrics, Assistant Constable Desmond Iles and Deputy Constable Colin Harpur were quite a shock, their quick repartee setting the tone for a very unusual approach to the police procedural. Harpur is the most accessible, a widowed father of two adolescent daughters who is dedicated to his work in the department. Desmond Iles is a bird of quite another feather, groomed to the nines for every occasion, waxing lyrical about his responsibility in settling a family into a new identity one moment and raving about his colleagues' betrayal the next. Iles thinks of himself as Dr. Frankenstein: "the good, young, idealistic man of science who yearned to produce new life by his own methods." The family in question, newly christened the Templedon's, is still in the transitional phase from old to new lives. Robert Templedon, in his former incarnation, was a successful professional thief who found himself in an untenable situation: a perfectly planned heist guaranteed to fail. He warns the police, who make certain promises they fail to keep. Wanting peace and security for his family, Robert is still drawn to the rush of the criminal life, plagued by the "wolves of memory", although a psychologist has been assigned to "hunt down and slaughter those wolves in Templedon, Jane and the children, or they would pack-run and fang-destroy the present fine future." One foot in the past and the other in a new direction, Templedon worries that he is in the middle of Iles' ongoing drama, questioning the authorities' priorities. He quickly learns that criminals have no monopoly on chaos. In a wicked mix of pithy dialog and smooth-talking criminals, Iles and Harpur enact their private contretemps, their relationship fraught with barbed insults, salty asides and unctuous compliments, just managing to avoid the destruction of all the finely laid plans. The supporting characters, Templedon's wife and children, Harpur's daughters and an assortment of crooks contribute the complications that accompany Iles' master plan of creating the perfect "new" family in a rollercoaster of improbable events and near-misses. Bizarre, menacing and a fascinating read. Luan Gaines/ 2006.