Black days
Dan Katz reads “The Buenos Aires Quintet” by Manuel Vazquez Montalban and “Little Scarlet” by Walter Mosley I seem to have been reading crime and noir endlessly, book after book, for years. That’s what it feels like — and God have I read some crap. Villains from south London, investigators from Manchester, cops from Leeds. Even a half-wit from Nottingham (whose author — conspicuously unable to write well — adopts an old trick to give his character a certain melancholy and bleak depth: the man listens to jazz! Apparently liking jazz conveys all the above without the need to write words which...