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Author uses real name on No. 5 in Red series

"The Beast in the Red Forest" by Paul Watkins writing as Sam Eastland
"The Beast in the Red Forest" by Paul Watkins writing as Sam Eastland

There are any number of reasons a writer might decide to write under a pseudonym, and some of them are innocent. Just over a year ago I wrote about Holy Orders, a faux genre mystery written by distinguished English author John Banville under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Banville is one of those writers who genuinely dislike most of their own writing. He has told interviewers he is at times embarrassed by his fiction -- that he often hates it. (I do not doubt Banville is telling the truth; sometimes I think there is an inverse correlation between how much a person may love his own work and the quality of that work.) Perhaps writing as Black removes him from the painful immediacy of the inadequacy of his words. Maybe it's just easier to write in character.

Paul Watkins says he enjoyed the anonymity of writing as Sam Eastland, and that he was bemused when his spy novelist alter-ego began to outsell -- by a wide margin -- the literary novels he wrote under his name. For a certain kind of writer, that might seem the perfect situation. But now, with The Beast in the Red Forest (Opus, $22.95), Watkins' real name appears on the cover along with Eastland's.

Watkins, hailed as a publishing world wunderkind in the '80s, says he wrote his first novel -- the Booker Prize-nominated Night Over Day Over Night -- when he was 16 years old (Knopf published it when he was 23). He has written 10 other books under his real name, including a memoir about his days as an American teen being educated in English public schools. His last novel under his name, The Ice Soldier, came out nine years ago.

That was about the time that he created Eastland -- as a British subject who, like Watkins, lives in the U.K. and the U.S. (but whose grandfather "was a London police detective who served in Scotland Yard's famous 'Ghost Squad' during the 1940s" ) -- and started writing a series of novels about Inspector Pekkala, who was once personal detective to Czar Nicholas II.

After the fall of the Romanovs, Pekkala escaped execution and was sent to a Siberian gulag. But then he was recalled by Stalin to investigate the murder of the royal family, becoming in the process a reluctant but trustworthy servant. Pekkala's investigative powers and his Rasputin-like ability to survive eventually made him Stalin's favorite policeman.

The Beast in the Red Forest begins in 1944 with the disappearance and presumed death of Pekkala -- a soldier reports having found his charred body -- on the Western Front. But Stalin isn't convinced his pet detective has perished, so he assigns Pekkala's friend and assistant (his Watson, as it were) Major Kirov to search for his boss. Kirov travels to the forest of West Russia and encounters partisans who are squabbling among themselves as much as skirmishing with invading Nazis.

Like Watkins, Eastland is meticulous with period details. His depiction of William Vasko, a New Jersey steelworker who emigrated to Russia to look for work at the height of the Great Depression, is a wonderful touch. Of course, there were men like Vasko -- the world was desperate in 1936. It was preparing to tear itself apart.

Similarly, while The Beast in the Red Forest is a real genre piece (like Holy Orders) and not a meta-goof on a genre piece (like Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice), Eastland never reduces his characters to stereotypes or cartoons. Even Stalin emerges as a complex and conflicted character, and he's all the more dangerous for it.

I'm not huge on modern detective fiction (although I admit to scarfing down the occasional Lee Child Jack Reacher book) but there's something charming about Eastland's (relatively) relaxed storytelling. To call the book a guilty pleasure is to minimize its substantial virtues. This is terrifically paced, but it also seems rooted in a very specific place and time. At times, it is as psychologically nuanced as it is easy to read. (There's something here that reminds me of James Ellroy, albeit without the manners.)

Maybe it's too late in the summer to nominate The Beast in the Red Forest as a great beach read, but it is likely to make some readers new to the series (like me) want to check the others out. There are four others, but only three are in print in the United States at this time. (For marketing reasons, The Beast in the Red Forest, which was the fifth Inspector Pekkala book published in the U.K., is coming out in the U.S. before the fourth book, The Red Moth, which will be released in this country in 2015. And Eastland reportedly has already finished another Pekkala novel, which will probably arrive in 2016.

As for Paul Watkins, we have no information.

...

A contender for the most irritating novel of the year, Paul (author of The Alchemist) Coelho's Adultery (Knopf, $24.95) is a remarkably accurate and utterly exasperating evocation of a certain smug and clueless upper middle class voice. Linda, Coelho's protagonist, is a bored and eternally self-regarding woman in her 30s who is married to a wealthy Swiss financier.

Her husband adores her, she adores her two (apparently invisible) children and she is, she doesn't mind saying, a "highly respected" journalist who knows many people in power and quite possibly has many leather-bound books in her mahogany, shelf-lined study. She is -- or at least she sees herself as -- the sort of woman who arouses "desire in men and envy in other women."

Remarkably, there's very little comedy (or tragedy) in this voyeuristic account of how she has an affair with an old high school boyfriend who's now an important elected official. What we have here is a shallow and stupid, if masterfully controlled, work of smut. If The Beast in the Red Forest is a little like when a great director goes slumming (like Orson Welles making Touch of Evil), this is like Steven Spielberg bringing all his resources and production values to bear on a sad little porno flick.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Style on 08/31/2014

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