Review: Inspector Sam Tay Smokes and Calls On His Mother's Ghost in The Umbrella Man
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 9, 2013
Inspector Samuel Tay of the Singapore Police, the central figure in two of Jake Needham's Asia-centered mysteries, should have to give back a healthy part of his paycheck every week: he seems to spend most of his time on the clock avoiding physical confrontations, dodging assignments from his superiors and lounging around his little garden smoking Marlboros.At least, that is the impression that one gets from this, Needham's second Tay mystery. I haven't read the first Tay novel,  "The Ambassador's Wife," or any of his Jack Shepherd thrillers so far, and I will be interested to see if "The Umbrella Man" is an anomaly or Needham's norm.Basically, the story is this: terrorists bomb Singapore's biggest hotels, taking out a multi-block section of the island nation's main commercial district in a 9-11 style attack. To his outrage and disgust, Tay, whose modest inherited wealth gives him the freedom to be a royal pain in the ass to his superiors, is shunted aside from the main investigation of the bombing by Singapore's internal security police. Instead, he and his handful of troops are put in charge of the mysterious death of a foreigner.With the assistance of a shadowy American spook who apparently was introduced in "The Ambassador's Wife," Tay uncovers the link between the bombings and the dead foreigner. But he works out the connection with glacial slowness, factoring in time-outs during which he is physically threatened by another U.S. covert operator, knocked out twice at inopportune moments, and given the runaround by the secret police.And smokes Marlboros. Enough of them to fill every bed in an oncology ward.The tectonic pace of the book is annoying to begin with, but it is also suffers a plot driven by one of the most miraculous coincidences in the history of crime fiction, a coincidence so problematic that it is impossible to even mention an aspect of it without completely turning this review into a spoiler. What's more, we never actually learn who is behind the bombing or why they did it.Even more annoying is the fact that on at least two occasions, Tay's mother confers with him and kindly points him toward critical clues. Unfortunately, his mother has been dead at least two years, so these conferences are essentially hallucinations. Having supernatural agents help an investigator would be fine if this book was advertised as a supernatural thriller, but it isn't. "The Umbrella Man" is presented as a straightforward mystery story and the sudden appearance of a ghost who plays a lead role in the solution smacks of an author who wrote himself into a corner and was desperate to find a way out.With all the weaknesses, the story still would have been worth reading if it had given us a more vivid look at Singapore, a country that few Americans know anything about except that it gives long prison sentences for minor crimes and relies heavily on caning as an instrument of judicial corporal punishment. Unfortunately, other than one or two geographical references, we learn next to nothing about the country besides the fact that Inspector Tay believes its people, a ployglot collection of Malaysians, Chinese, Indians, Southeast Asians and others, are obsessively deferential to authority and driven by a single-minded pursuit of wealth.If a change of pace from the normal mystery is what you are looking for, Jake Needham's "The Umbrella Man" may satisfy you. But it didn't satisfy me. Perhaps one or more of his other novels will, and if it does, I will definitely let you know about it.