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Stan Lauryssens: Synopsis/Summary
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“Stan Lauryssens. A new name in crime fiction.
He’s Belgian, like Hercule Poirot himself.”—ATV
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DEADER THAN DEAD (Doder dan dood)
… is the harrowing story of a spectacular heist. While their accomplices set the city on fire—to keep the police on alert—two gangsters disguised as telephone operators enter the Central Bank of Belgium…
(blurb) Slowly, it started snowing. Over the barrel of his rifle, the sharpshooter looked at his victims on the other side of the street. A yellow bi-plane flew around the fairytale-castle that was the Central Bank building. So much money stacked in the safe, it was a real pain to the eye. Money stinks, they say. Money is the mud of the earth. Rubbish twice. Tower bells in the cathedral banged simultaneously and dazzling fireworks illuminated the night sky. Bam-bam-bam. Bullets pierced the cold winter air and party-goers stumbled through the snow, dripping blood, holding their bowels like spaghetti in their hands. Waves rippled around the pier and in the River Scheldt, a dead body washed ashore. Midnight. One single funeral bell tolled over the city. It was wickedly beautiful.
A fragment:
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On the triangular Central Bank courtyard, two Playmobil-size men started unloading blue and green parcels from a security van. They loaded the parcels on Europallets. He didn’t need a drawing to see what they were handling: cash money, wrapped in blue plastic. German marks, French and Swiss francs, guilders, dollars, Sterling, roubles, Japanese yen and Belgian francs were horded into an underground safe that was as heavily guarded as Fort Knox. What a treasure-trove.
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The hold-up of a lifetime, he thought.
This is the hold-up of a lifetime and I’ll be the mastermind.
‘Im-pos-si-ble,’ the Governor said. ‘Do I make myself clear, Inspector?
This is not a shoebox we’re in, this is the Central Bank. A national institution. I’m telling you, a hold-up is im-pos-si-ble.’
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“Stan Lauryssens carries you away with his simple plan for the perfect hold-up.”
HET NIEUWSBLAD, 12 March 2005
Dear Stan,
Last night, I started reading Doder dan dood, your latest thriller. Read in a daze until 2 A.M. Slept for a few hours and when I woke up, I started reading again. Finished your book at 6 A.M. Splendid, Stan. Your best crime fiction to date. This is going to be a smashing hit.
Filip Marsboom, journalist/reviewer
A short introduction to three of the main characters in each and every Stan Lauryssens thriller—the city, the criminal mind and the Inspector heading the city’s murder squad:
1. The city:
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The yellow bi-plane swerved to the left and looped over the slaughterhouse, a fierce wind singing between the rods that steadied the wings, whirling along the body and flapping the canvas. The poetry of the winter landscape down below was breathtakingly beautiful, falling snow dramatically highlighting city towers,
churches and the golden spire of Antwerp cathedral, the silvery ribbon of the Scheldt River slowly meandering all the way to the seaside. In Lillo marina, small white yachts lazily drifted the cold, still water. White bulbous clouds of steam bubbled from Doel nuclear power station opposite the marina. The river oozed a mercury-colored steam and bright petrochemical torches sparkled like upright matches in the far distance.
A pale winter sun was glued against the flat grey sky.
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It was wickedly beautiful.
The co-pilot couldn’t care less. For twenty years, he had seen the sun rise behind prison bars and after all this time, he saw her set behind the glittering curve of the earth. What does all this beauty buy me? he thought. Not a thing. Nature is what it is and I, well, I don’t give a damn. Nature, my ass. His eyes were watering, he wasn’t used anymore to the brightness of daylight. He smiled and looked down at the tapestry of snow down below, on ground level, like bales of candy floss twelve hundred feet below the rocking plane.
‘Full throttle!’ he shouted to the pilot.
‘You in a hurry?’
‘It’s getting dark!’
‘Doesn’t matter. Trust me.’
‘I don’t trust anyone.’
‘No-one?’
‘No. Trust is not a word in my dictionary.’
‘Don’t you thrust your father or your mother?’
I don’t have a father and a mother, he thought. All of a sudden, haze and mist erased all colour. Empty streets. White, cold and empty. Domed churches protruded from the ground plan like tumored lumps. The sky darkened. Streets fumed like hot toast. The whaling of a police siren far away. ÍÍÍ-ÁÁÁ, ÍÍÍ-ÁÁÁ, with the sound of braying donkeys. It seemed as if the inner city was already asleep while its stench was still wide awake. High up in the sky, the co-pilot almost choked on the foul sodden smell of mould and exhaust fumes. On the motorways, in every possible direction, traffic was bust up. EINDHOVEN, to the left. Nobody could go left. ROTTERDAM, to the right. Nobody went right. BRUSSELS FRANCE GERMANY. Dreary rooftops in the suburbs.
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The 1946 Renault 4-cylinder engine snored like an old sewing machine. Under the hull of the plane, seven white swans lazily drifted over black, oily docks.
‘Watch when the rain comes,’ the pilot shouted.
‘What happens?’
‘The dock water mysteriously takes on a red hue.’
‘Red? Why red?’
‘The color of blood. For years, offal from the slaughterhouse has been dumped into the docks.’
‘I see.’
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Like lightning, the tiny bi-plane rose to eighteen hundred, nineteen hundred, two thousand feet, until it was hanging almost vertically in the thin cold air. The engine coughed and spluttered, gasping for breath. The pilot pulled the control stick full force between his knees and gave it a hard push while his feet frantically working the altitude rod. The propeller bit into the air and the bi-plane raised its nose and spun around and around and suddenly the co-pilot was hanging upside down in the lovely blue sky, loo—oo—ooOOoo—oo—oop, like a ride on a rollercoaster, the world tumbled and flipped and the plane went up and down, again and again, rolling over and over.
The pilot couldn’t stop laughing—
HERE WE GO LOOP DE LOO—OOP
HERE WE GO LOOP DE LIE
Just as way back in the sixties, on all jukeboxes.
—while his co-pilot went pale as a ghost.
No end in sight to that terrible rollercoaster ride high up in the sky.
“… I should have robbed that bank myself.” Stan Lauryssens, as quoted in METRO.
2. The criminal mind:
Give and take, such is life. I’ve given and I’ve taken, he thought. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king. No doubt about that. From now on, I’ll take the law in my own hands. No mercy. No tears, for God’s sake. He smiled and listened to the radio, fiddling the dial. And you want to travel with her… Leonard Cohen. A tired voice, hoarse, longing and desperate. In between the old houses, behind a curtain of whirling snow, the imposing sandstone façade of the Central Bank glittered in the night sky. A bonbonnière, he thought, a cookie jar, and the best cookies will be mine. A blanket of snow muffled all street sounds. Bruxman poured himself a drink. He smiled and held up the amber liquid against the whirling snow and quietly said: ‘A toast to crime!’ He emptied his glass in one gulp. The next song was the classic to kill all classics. Nat King Cole singing Darling, Je vous Aime Beaucoup. How awful life is, and how bloody beautiful. No tears, Bruxman thought, no tears. Another whisky, double this time. He dropped a zinc tablet in his glass, to stop the diarrhoea that would be an inevitable side-effect, and perhaps to dull the crushing pain he knew would be coming. Another double and another and another until he could see the bottom of the bottle. He broke in a cold sweat. Don’t think. Act. Quickly Bruxman gulped down a handful of painkillers and tranquilizers. Don’t think. ACT. As in a fog, his watery eyes looked at the reflection of his own tired face in the almost empty bottle.
He tried swallowing. His throat was bone-dry.
No, he thought, I am not a brave man, I’m not, not at all.
‘You sure?’ he asked himself.
‘Yes.’
‘Positive?’
‘Yes.’
He squeezed the flacon and rubbed a generous amount of Ambre Solaire tanning oil on his fingertips. Sighed. Leaned against the kitchen cabinet and turned the hot plates on. He stared at the plates until they were red hot and in one gulp he downed the rest of the bottle. His head bubbled. He knew. He knew he was flipping.
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Every human being has got ridges, loops and arches on the tip of his fingers. They have tiny pores that continually ooze sweat, diluted urine, grease and other body fluids. A sweat-imprint left by the pattern of ridges, loops and arches is called a ‘fingerprint’ in police jargon. As the pattern of each imprint is absolutely unique, it is sufficient proof to identify the person who left the fingerprint. Unfortunately, the ridges and loops and arches are not superficial. They are wedged under the epidermis and there is only one way to remove them definitely. The epidermis has to be burned away until carbonized.
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Bruxman gnashed his teeth. His nostrils flared. His gasped for breath. He spread his fingers wide and pressed them on the hot plate and counted the seconds, two hands at a time, two, three, four, and only half a second before his fingers would irretrievably be burned to the bone and lost forever, he withdrew them and dipped his fingertips in Ambre Solaire again and once more he pressed all ten fingers on the red hot plate. His eyes started popping out of their sockets. Sweat poured from his face. Black skin curled from his raw fingertips, with the stench of barbecued flesh, and a deafening pain jerked from his hands to his wrists through his shoulder blades and flashed with a banging pain into his head and his heart. Head bumping, heart pounding. Suddenly his knees softened and buckled and he shit his pants, he couldn’t help it, he fainted, and face forward, Bruxman fell on the hard cold kitchen floor.
“What a bravura performance!”—de VOLKSKRANT
Hello Stan,
What a fan I am---in your books, you can smell the stench, taste the blood, everything is told in such detail. As a reader, I becomes a character in the story. What a good read it is! Like real life—beautiful and raw and brutal--as every good thriller should be… Looking forward to your next book.
Greetings, Eric Syvertsen
3. The Inspector:
The pleasant smell of potpourri wafted the living room. Dried flowers and lemon curd. There was coffee—no milk, no sugar—with a dash of Bailey’s. As always, Marie-Thérèse had seen to it that freshly baked croissants were in the oven when the Inspector came home. He almost couldn’t wait, wanted to bite them straightaway. Bite the croissants, or Marie-Thérèse? Both, actually. He fondled the dusty sleeves of his fine collection of LP’s. Louis Armstrong. The Everly Brothers. Wake up, Little Su-usie. Dave Brubeck. Miles Davis. Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud with a startlingly pretty Jeanne Moreau in shades of grey. These old classics, how he loved them. Their labels made him daydream. Brunswick, Capitol, Decca, Edison, Parlophone and His Master’s Voice, of course. Why was it that he so dearly loved the past? Duke Ellington imitating singing birds. Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Chet Baker. Hot pancakes topped with strawberries and chantilly on lazy Sunday afternoons while the family listened to the gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt and his Hot Club de France. He couldn’t help it, the Inspector was homesick for all things that couldn’t be found because they don’t exist anymore, such as black chocolate with an egg yolk and brandy filling or brightly colored CIN*ZA*NO and DU*DUBO*
DUBONNET neon signs on a dark and rainy street corner. He loved things past because the past was different, not because it had been any better. It hadn’t been. Back issues of Les Cahiers du Cinéma featuring Jean Seberg on the cover, he hoarded them is if they were a life buoy. In reality he hadn’t even looked at them once in over thirty years. Or old Jean-Luc GODart and Gérard DeparDIEU movie posters, GOD and DIEU in bright typeface, shining red on black.
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The Inspector tightened his white cotton gloves and gracefully placed a Chubby Checker LP on the turntable of his antique gramophone. It looked antique anyway, but it wasn’t, it was a clever imitation he had bought a couple of years back, on a flea market. The turntable was covered in burgundy velvet. The needle hit the grooves and music cracked from the boxes, scratches and all, mono instead of stereo, since the Inspector didn’t care for a digitally mastered sound. To his ears, Chubby Checker and Elvis and Pat Boone had to sound the way they sounded all those years ago, coming from a Wurlitzer or Rock-Ola jukebox.
COME ON BABY
LET’S DO THE TWIST
TAKE ME BY MY LITTLE HAND
AND GO LIKE THIS
A lengthy saxophone, dark and jazzy.
Marie-Thérèse pushed chairs aside and they grabbed each other and started dancing right in the middle of the living room.
‘Twist your legs!’ the Inspector shouted.
EE—OH TWIST—BABY BABY—TWIST
OOOH—YEAH, JUST LIKE THIS
COME ON, LITTLE MISS
AND DO THE TWIST
‘Hop hop hop!’
How they let their hair down.
‘To rock-n-roll, you have to be in good shape,’ Marie-Thérèse said.
‘You’re telling me?’ the Inspector laughed.
‘You should have seen me when I was eighteen.’
‘Oh my—that’s a long time ago!’
‘Those years are long gone, I know.’
‘You’re still a beauty. You are my film star. My own private Anita Ekberg.’
‘Look at me now,’ Marie-Thérèse said and there was a sad edge to her voice. ‘Look at me, standing here.’
‘You’re not standing, Pussycat, you’re swinging!’
‘DO-THE-TWIST!’
Marie-Thérèse shouted and she shook her hips in super slow-motion and the Inspector in his white cotton gloves grabbed her shoulders and they wiggled on the ball of their feet, as if extinguishing a cigarette, and waved about their arms and legs and clap-clap-clapped their hands.
My Pussycat is as beautiful as a flower, the Inspector thought.
I’ll put her in a vase and water her every day.
He turned the volume up. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could hear 1959 or 1960s street noises, tramlines and vintage cars, rain gurgling from the roof, do the hoop hoop hoela-hoop, a Studebaker sporting pink fins, like a shark, and the bleep-bleep bleep-bleep of Spoetnik orbiting Planet Earth.
The needle scratched the vinyl and was stuck again and again.
COME ON AND TWIST
YEAH BABY, TWIST
OOOH—YEAH, JUST LIKE THIS
‘Do you remember?’ That was the Inspector.
‘Of course!’
‘Good old times.’
Marie-Thérèse rolled her eyes.
Look at us, she thought.
‘We’re so foolish,’ the Inspector said, shaking his head.
DO THE TWIST
YEAH—ROCK ON NOW
YEAH—TWIST ON NOW—TWIST
They were exhausted.
‘I’d give my life for a chicken-and-curry,’ the Inspector said.
Marie-Thérèse gasped for breath. ‘I’m on a diet!’
‘Chinese food won’t fatten my Pussycat,’ the Inspector said. ‘Did you ever see a fat Chinaman? All Chinese women are close to anorexia.’ He chuckled. ‘The more Chinese food you eat, the more you loose weight. Isn’t that amazing, Miss Weight Watcher?’
The telephone started ringing.
‘Let it ring,’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘Nobody home.’
The Inspector lifted the arm of the old gramophone and in a melancholy silence, the old vinyl record twisted and turned around, silently and endlessly, around and around.
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“Deader than Dead explodes in a breathtaking finale. Of all crime writers active today, Stan Lauryssens has the most street credibility, simply because he was in jail himself.”—P-Magazine
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