Morituri (Toby Crime)

Both the story and the style owe more than a little to Raymond Chandler, as the disenchanted hero is tasked with tracking down the missing daughter of a powerful mover and shaker. The muscular prose tracks Llob and his sidekick as they trawl through the dregs of the city and the corrupt upper echeleons in their attempt to stay alive and find the missing girl. The story is full of twists and turns, as they deal with pimps, pushers, and perverts in order to find the truth. All against a backdrop where certain neighborhoods are off-limits to police, every rich person is slimy, and any package could be a bomb. It's a quick read, and over the top in kind of a pulpy way, but well worth it if you're interested in having your stereotypes of the Arab world shattered. This is apparently being made into a filmohere's hoping the other Llob books appear in English soon.

Note: The excerpt posted on Amazon is not the final translation, and is much more fractured than what is in the book.


Morituri   March 6, 2004
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

The English language version of Morituri, as translated by David Herman, IN THE EDITION I
HAVE is profoundly
frustrating. The language it is rendered in bears only a casual
resemblance to English.

However, when I compared it with the excerpt which appears on the Amazon.com screen, I
was surprised to discover that it differed in many details from the text in my book, though
outwardly it appears to be the same edition. Many of the linguistic absurdities had been
removed. I had never encountered this phenomenon before, where identical editions of a
book would contain such different texts, one appearing to be a "raw", unedited
version of the translation.


New Take on Old Themes   May 8, 2006
David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

Many years ago I read Philip Kerr's novel March Violets, in which the protagonist is a private eye in Hitler's Berlin just before the war. The book is quite entertaining, and it has an interesting premise: the author takes a well-worn genre, and uses the setting of Hitler's Germany to make things interesting. When the police pick up the main character and take him downtown to beat him up, it's really serious: they're the original Gestapo, and so things have more of an edge.

Morituri is the same thing, except in a different setting. Superindendent Llob isn't a private eye, but the characters and atmosphere are heavily and recognisably influenced by Hammett, Chandler, and perhaps Ross MacDonald. Even though he's a police officer fighting crime, he's still essentially a loner fighting for justice or at least some semblance of the truth. The difference here is that Llob fights crime in modern-day Algiers, where there are regular carbombings and kidnappings by terrorists, and the whole country lives in fear of who will be targetted next.

This leads to some interesting, tense scenes in this short, gritty novel. The whole thing is written in a desparate, hurried tone that's almost exhausting. Characters wander in and out of the plot hurriedly, and the action takes several twists and turns that you either don't expect, or if you expect the turn, you don't know which way it's going to go.

My one criticism is in the presentation of this edition of the book. Morituri is only 138 pages long, with a large font, generous chapter breaks (sometimes you skip a whole page getting to the next chapter)and a glossary. The story is really a novella, that sort of thing that's too long to be called a short story but really too short to be a stand alone novel. Since he's written three of these, and they apparently work as a trilogy, it's a wonder they didn't package all 3 of them together. If they had, the result wouldn't be as long as a Dan Brown novel.

Outside that, this is an interesting story of the modern Arab world, the people who populate it, and the things they have to deal with. I enjoyed it a great deal.