The world of the Mafia is on the whole more interesting than that of, say, football because it has a livelier vernacular, is more imaginative in its nicknames and has better refrains: "You want to know the truth?" beats "At the end of the day" any time. Jim Cirni's The Big Squeeze (Soho Crime, £7.99), set down the grubby end of the mob, comes out of Damon Runyan sounding like Harvey Keitel in quadraphonic.
After 20 years of slog, "Dip" Dippolito wants to settle down with his Jewish girlfriend; not as easy as it sounds. Cirni does grainy dialogue, fast, funny and full of good standoffs, and has a handle on everyday improbabilities. Also, he doesn't get cute, sticking to a style with a great sense of illuminated cliché - "He was a fat mess in a chair but still as tough as they come" - and displaying a craft in which everything is nailed down. Hard to believe, but the author blurb lists his other job as accountant. He must write a great letter.
In Other People's Rules (HarperCollins, £9.99), Julia Hamilton penetrates that disaster zone known as the upper classes and gives them the withering treatment. Observation rather than narrative drives her story of social hypocrisy, with Hamilton alert to smugness - and its corollary, eating disorders - and "the white noise of the upper class, a perpetual drone of loaded detail". Toffs behaving badly is a safe bet; here a Thatcherite aristo fulfils the brief with his taste for teenage girls - including his daughter - generally lording it and getting away with murder. Although it is unlikely that a Catholic earl would also be grand master of the local Masonic lodge.
Hard to say why Christopher Reich was drawn to set his story in Germany, 1945 - perhaps it was his name. The Runner (Headline, £17.99) promises more than it delivers; the US occupation of Germany in the weeks after the war was far more surreal than Reich allows. His manhunt - ex-cop after nasty Nazi who murdered his brother, a priest - aspires to efficiency rather than achieving it. It is let down by Reich's penchant for over-revved verbs: examples from successive paragraphs include barrelled, careering, shooting, flooding, dashing, threw, coughed, sputtered, grasped, thrust, slammed.
Perhaps it went wrong for Thomas " Silence of the Lambs " Harris when a clever Oxbridge professor declared that he was writing in the Gothic tradition, at which point the etiolated literary set thought it had better pay attention. Come Hannibal (Arrow, £6.99), they duly praised. The funniest reading in this paperback edition are the puffs handed out by the review boys, clapping their hands while running to catch up.
To them the book's appeal was its snobbishness, always an Achilles heel. Fine wines, bon vivant, a taste for the exquisite, a prep-school nastiness - reversion to Ian Fleming without the élan - they fall for it every time. The perverse act of rehabilitation offered by Harris's "monster turns hero" line was either breathtaking or silly, depending on whether you bought the story. If you didn't, then compared to the lean sense of purpose Harris showed in Red Dragon, Hannibal seems grotesquely inflated, full of florid camp, notable chiefly for the willed preposterousness of its ending and interesting only for its bizarre destruction of a lucrative franchise. On reflection, best read as a rogue episode of Frasier minus the humour.
Buy The Big Squeeze at BOL
Buy Other People's Rules at BOL
Buy The Runner at BOL
Buy Hannibal at BOL
