Once upon a Time: An Inspector Green Mystery (Inspector Green Mysteries)

Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: Barbara Fradkin holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Ottawa. She is an accomplished short story writer, having published in several anthologies and magazines. She has been nominated for the 2001 Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for best short story twice and has won the Storyteller's Great Canadian Short Story Contest. She is an active member of the Canadian crime writing community. She lives in Ottawa with her children and pets. Her first Inspector Michael Green mystery is entitled Do or Die.

In this second Inspector Green tale, an old man is found dead in a parking lot. Only Inspector Green is suspicious, because the body contains an unexplained gash to the head. Little does Green know that his subsequent investigation will take him fifty years back in time to the Nazi concentration camps in which his Jewish ancestors were imprisoned, tortured, and died. Why would World War II come back to haunt in an Ottawa homicide?

"'But if he were a survivor, I don't understand why the continued anti-Semitism. Almost paranoia. He was very upset when his son married a Jewish girl. The girl said he seemed afraid. Wouldn't a non-Jewish camp survivor feel some affinity towards the Jews?' Haley shook his head. 'You got me there. I'm not a psychologist. But it always seems to me the shrinks can explain anything. Maybe it reminds him of those days in the camp, you know? Of his humiliation.'"

Barbara Fradkin weaves a sobering tale about many atrocities committed during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Using the murder of a mysterious man whose family was uncertain of his past, but who suffered from his cruelty and alcoholism, Inspector Green, himself a Jewish man, follows a trail that uncovers much pain, but also enlightenment. Michael Green is a dear man who the readers can't help but fall in love with. His dedication to his family is at odds with his duty as a policeman, and the resulting chaos creates some comedic tension. A great read.

Shelley Glodowski
Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: The Persistence of Memory
Review: In the second entry in her Ottawa mystery series, psychologist Barbara Fradkin uses the theme of time to weave a provocative story with roots in the Second World War. Chafing at the increased bureuacracy of his job, maverick Inspector Green can't resist raising questions about the death of an old man found in a parking lot. Already in ill health, had he fallen and hit his head before succumbing to hypothermia as the coroner surmised? Meeting the grieving family only increases Green's suspicions. Why do they avoid specifics about his past? Did expediency or guile lead this unlikable Polish man to claim the name of Walker after recovering in Britain from serious war wounds? If his memories had vanished, why did he hide a German soldier's ID card in his country farmhouse?
Fradkin is a solid writer whose many skills continue to unfold with each book. Her sense of place is precise, whether combing the streets of the Canadian capital, or describing a European hamlet ravaged by the Holocaust. Secondary characters are rich and varied, including the wife of the dead man, Green's long-suffering but patient wife newly ensconced in their plastic cube house in uninspiring suburbia, his earnestly plodding colleague Sullivan, and most of all, his elderly Jewish father, shuffling between card games at the synagogue and reading the obituaries. Sid Green is drawn with loving details: "The senior citizens' building was a bulky low-rise conveniently placed between a bakery and a drugstore. Sid had moved there under protest eight years earlier...but his heart still lay with the little brick tenement where his son had grown up." Anyone with a geriatric relative would smile sadly at the proud helplessness of Sid's request not to be let out of the car near a puddle.
Directing the plot with a careful eye to police procedure, Fradkin also displays thorough research skills with which she doles out tempting clues. Her knowledge of the ramifications of Polish internment camps, the pecking order between prisoners from all faiths and backgrounds, and the modern resources such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center shows that she has done her homework with aplomb.
"Once upon a time." A grim fairy tale indeed. The bold stylistic device of telling the war story through snippets of poetry introducing each chapter intrigues as it enlarges, building suspense. The poems stand on their own as a running chapbook: "But in our lair below the barn, in hunger, cold, and darkness,/ we wait our turn./ We share our warmth, snuggled together deep in the straw./ A whimpered cry, the coo of a baby at the breast." Dialogue is finely tuned, whether depicting the stumbling cadences of an immigrant or the measured tones of an annoyed Montreal doctor.
A final structural parallel is Inspector Green's search for identity as he learns at last about his father's tragic family losses in the ghettos. The theme of guilt and innocence, crime and retribution whether for slaughter of a entire people or an individual, resonates through each chapter and ushers a satisfying close.