Let's go dull and good and typical for crime.
Caleb stands in front of the mirror in the hotel, examines the wound on his forehead, pulls a few splinters of glass out of his skin and bleeds all over the sink.
Blame for the injury is his girlfriend, who only knew how to help herself in an argument by using a whiskey glass as a projectile.
Then follows a look back at the couple's history together, and again a cut, this time on her foot, plays an important role.
Next, Caleb drags himself to a pub for a quiet drink of whiskey.
So the reader learns: In Jonathan Moore's thriller "Poison Artist" even lovers meet with relentless hardness, the action takes place in the realm of human, all too human skirmishes, and everything seems to vibrate with everything else: frustration,
Kai Spanke
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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That is still correct at the moment when the plot intensifies: the corpses of well-to-do men are found again and again in the Bay of San Francisco, and their crucial common ground is the ordeal.
Caleb, a toxicologist and pain researcher by trade, investigates for his buddy Henry, who works as a coroner, that the dead were not only completely drunk, but also pumped full of the muscle relaxant vecuronium and the neurotoxin thujone.
"I've analyzed everything his endocrine system has been pumping out in the last three hours of his life," says Caleb, "it's totally out of control.
Before his death, he endured the maximum amount of pain a human being can endure.
For three hours at least.
Total, unbearable suffering.”
What's odd is that one of the victims was last seen at the bar where Caleb was having a drink with his girlfriend after the escalation.
Stranger still, his institute is fighting for grants so he can finish research on how to measure pain.
The strangest thing, however, is this femme fatale, who suddenly appears, from then on at the most inopportune occasions, nestles up and into events, smells of a “dark perfume”, prefers to drink absinthe, goes by the name of Emmeline, gives the impression “as if she stepped out of a silent movie" - and drives Caleb insane.
To help slow readers understand that the story veers toward noir every time it enters the scene, the author uses the word "shadow" nearly fifty times throughout the novel.
Emmeline is the powerhouse of the second story line, which constantly counters the realistically told and overall successful passages.
The phantasmagorical episodes with her also mark a reversal of the flow of time.
She drives an Invicta, has a backwards clock in her bower, and has Caleb, who usually works with state-of-the-art technology, prepare a meal in old copper pots: grilled oysters, with Prosecco, then pan-sautéed scallops with wild mushrooms, then truffle risotto and chilled raspberries with dark chocolate for dessert.
While it's well known that any crime plot risks digesting itself when cuisine is used as an indicator of levels of cultural sophistication, Moore even lets us watch carrots and celery snipping.
The big gorge and the reference “Noir” are problematic because they give the form of the thriller a surface polish over long stretches without connecting with the content.
Emmeline is not a finely modeled figure, but a decal: pale skin, dark hair, satin dress, whispered talk.
Jonathan Moore, who is also a lawyer, worked as an English teacher and whitewater rafting guide and owned Taiwan's first Mexican restaurant, tries to evoke an enthralling mood by sprinkling clichés and rain clouds into the text.
However, the longer the reading lasts, the clearer it becomes that the story groans quite a bit under the often involuntarily funny images it evokes.
Had Moore put aside his fondness for the "Black Series",
Jonathan Moore: "Poison Artist". Thriller.
Translated from the English by Stefan Lux. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 352 pp., br., €16.95.