Eyfoh zeh?

Israel has gone through many demographic changes in recent decades, becoming a much more international country. It was a stirring experience to hear an Ethiopian speak Hebrew in Tel Aviv this evening, though I'd have enjoyed the moment more if the words had not been "Eyfoh zeh? (Where is it?)" and the speaker not a taxi driver to whom I'd just given my destination.

Earlier, a fellow bus passenger had helped me out by asking the driver at a rest stop where the bathrooms were, the first time I'd heard a Nepalese person speak Hebrew. And my hotel clerk was a gregarious Finn. So much for stereotypes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

He walked, I rode

(Confused ass on the road to Jerusalem)

Rented a bicycle, rode along the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias, and fell off just once, in the mud at a Roman archaeological site that will be something to see if Israel ever makes it accessible.

And, in another experience that reminded me of Matt Rees' crime novels,  my driver to Hebron and Bethlehem, asked why rich Arab governments don't pour money into the Palestinian territories the way Jewish benefactors do into Israel, said: "They did. It all wound up in Swiss (bank accounts)."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Territorial imperatives

(Mosaic floor, Church of the
Nativity, Bethlehem)

Hebron is an occasional flash point of tension between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, and the city's streets are rubble-strewn relics of strife and of shops closed by a straitened economy. Parts of Hebron are probably frightening places to be caught at night.

My driver for the day, an Israeli Arab, said he can't leave his car alone in Hebron for fear that it will be stoned. Yet the only fear I felt all day came when we pulled into a gas station outside Bethlehem, to find the attendant lounging against the pumps smoking a cigarette.  I nervously asked the driver if we ought to pray for the Creator of us all to get us out of there alive.

So, why Hebron? Because it is arguably the world's most important historical site. The Book of Genesis says Abraham bought land here as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, and was later himself buried there, in the Cave of the Patriarchs, to be joined by Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah. This was by tradition the first acquisition of land by Jews in Israel and is thus the seminal site for the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

Herod put up a fine building over the tombs, to which Salah ad-din (Saladin) added minarets in the twelfth century. The biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are buried in the caves, memorialized in cenotaphs in the building above, where worshipers pray to Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah in the building's Jewish section and to Isaac and Rebecca in the Muslim section. (Like much else here, the building is divided.)

A bunch of men prayed before Sarah's tomb, one young man pulling at his payot (forelocks) in religious ecstasy. A woman chanted alone before Leah's memorial, bowing and swaying, showing no sign she was distracted by the conversation and occasional clatter of metal from workers maintaining the adjacent synagogue. (Here's a bit about the physical vocabulary of Jewish prayer; read it as a counterpart to the Arabic gestures from Tuesday's post.)

So, what did the day have to do with crime fiction? I'll tell you tomorrow. Blessed be God, who created long lines, Bethlehem drivers, and cliffhangers to teach us patience!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

History repeats itself in Israel

(It wouldn't be the first time)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bless your hands!

(Magnificent, Solly)

Matt Rees, who has written four crime novels featuring a Palestinian teacher named Omar Yussef, once explained why he translated certain  greetings rather than giving transliterated versions of the original Arabic:

"I translated them, rather than just putting the original Arabic phrase in italics, because I wanted readers to get the poetry of everyday speech. ... When someone gives them a cup of coffee, they tell them `May Allah bless your hands.' Isn't that beautiful?"

Struck by that everyday poetry, I decided to try it myself this morning, and I wished the waiter who served me breakfast يسلم يدك ("Yislamu eedayk."). From the smile and the profusion of words that followed, I suspected I had said the right thing, but who knows? The man could have had a sense of humor and been calling me a dog and the son of unworthy parents.

But he also placed his right palm on his chest, which was the clincher, because

"Placing the palm of the right hand on the chest immediately after shaking hands with another man shows respect or thanks. A very slight bow of the head may also be added."

and

"Placing the palm of the right hand on the chest, bowing the head a little and closing one’s eyes connotes `Thank You' (in the name of Allah)."

This was the greatest and most gratifying effusion of good feeling I had received since I wished the locals "Eid Mubarak" in Tunisia.  So who says crime fiction can't be educational? Thanks, Matt.

(Learn about Arabic gestures including the ones described here at a Web site that bears the evocative name www.bellydanceuk.co.uk.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Western

I felt right at home  in my first visit to Jerusalem in many years because the shuttle driver from Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport was impatient, as his kind proverbially are, but with a penchant for explaining things to the drivers at whom he raged (though no more than one could possibly have heard him). I didn't understand all his cursing, but the end of one string of invective sounded like simcha, the Hebrew word for happiness.

Spent my first evening wandering around the Old City, and I didn't get lost, at least not in any way worthy of the name.  The Old City is divided into Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, so I saw:  Orthodox priests who, with just a splash of color in their garb, could have been Piero della Francesca's King Solomon; Chassidic Jews with hats cooler than those you'd see on any American hipster, and young Israeli Arabs who were more than happy to offer spur-of-the-moment advice, including one about 12 years old, who said, "It's closed" when I tried to wander down a side street to see the Al-Aqsa Mosque. "Only for Muslims."

Read some more Elmore Leonard on the plane over, including one story that began with a long, stolid, grimly straightforward description of a buffalo hunt that ended thus (the description, not the hunt):

"Wait until he rode into Leverette with a wagon full of hides, he thought. He’d watch close, pretending he didn’t care, and he’d see if anybody laughed at him then."

The man to how to create tension.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Elmore Leonard's Westerns

Before I head east, a post about the West.

I don't know where Elmore Leonard fits in the history of the Western, other than that he wrote some good ones, Hombre and "3:10 to Yuma," to name two. But to this neophyte reader in the genre, Leonard's early stories make an instructive comparison with American crime fiction of the same time: the early 1950s. (That's right, the early 1950s. Leonard, whose latest novel, Raylan, has recently hit the shelves, was a published author at least as early as 1951.)

Here's the conclusion to one story:

"The Southwest was full of Hydes. And as long as there were Hydes, there were Billy Guays. Big talkers with big guns who ended up lying dead, after a while, in a Mimbre rancheria. Angsman would go back to Fort Bowie. Even if it got slow sometimes, there’d always be plenty to do."

The matter-of-fact resignation reminds me of hard-boiled crime writing from a few decades earlier. It's as if hard-boiled writing decamped for the West around 1951, leaving American crime fiction to the twisted mental worlds of Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

Leonard's Western stories are almost breathtakingly free of political correctness, unsparing in their discussions both of the counterproductive brutality of American policy toward the Apaches of the Southwest and of the blood-curdling violence and internecine feuds of some of those Apaches. Leonard is careful, too, to delineate different habits and war customs of various Apache bands, thus honoring their humanity more fully than do blanket views of Indians as bloodthirsty savages or creative and ecologically sensitive innocents.

Leonard gets great mileage of the tension between experienced Western scouts and hot-shot young military officers from back East, mining the theme both for dramatic conflict:

"It was his patrol and he was supposed to have the answers. That’s why he had a commission. But the face bore a puzzled expression. It was young, and lobster-red, and told openly that he was new to frontier station, though he had learned all the answers at the Point. You hesitate when it’s your command, your responsibility. When a dirty old man in an undershirt is studying you to see what you’ve got, waiting to pick you apart. And if he finds the wrong thing, the buzzards do the rest of the picking."

and for humor:

"`I’m only saying what if,' Travisin agreed, with a faint smile. `Could be one way or the other. I just want to impress you that we’re not chasing Harvard sophomores across the Boston Common.'''

And, Leonard being Leonard, he could work a good line out of a routine bit of description:

"A hundred things raced through his mind, and every one of them was a question."

or

"Six enlisted troopers prayed to six interpretations of God that the young lieutenant wasn’t a glory seeker … at least not on this patrol."

OK, that's it for now. More on Leonard later, and the next time I mention Western in a post, it will be next to Wall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The post I wrote

Another verbal habit of some writers:

"I fired two shots that sprouted into big red blossoms across the white cotton shirt he wore."

— "Carrera's Woman" by Ed McBain
writing as Richard Marsten, Masters of Noir: Volume One

Why not "his white cotton shirt"?  What does "he wore" add? What could the victim have been doing with his shirt except wearing it? If yesterday's writing quirk was common in American pulp stories of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, I associate this one with writers of the '40s and '50s, often when describing the attire of an attractive woman. But "the dress she wore" (rather than "her dress") always takes me out of the story, if just for a moment.

Why would Marsten/McBain/Hunter/Lombino use "the white cotton shirt he wore" rather than "his white cotton shirt"? Does one convey something the other does not? Was he merely using the words that came naturally at the time (1953)? If the fashion in words changed in favor of brevity, when? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Stuffed crowdedly with adverbs

Adverbs are out of favor in crime fiction these days, but American pulp writing in the middle of the last century was full of them — stuffedly full.

In Norbert Davis' stories, characters shave, kick, flip, search, punch, stab, fade, and flip through hotel registration cards "expertly." A  street car clangs its way emptily down the street. Raoul Whitfield, too, used adverbs more than is fashionable today and, if my memory serves me well, Raymond Chandler and perhaps even Dashiell Hammett would have a light blinking redly from time to time.

When did adverbs slip out of fashion? And why?

***

Was good grammar ever looked down on in tough-guy crime writing? The first-person narrator of a Mickey Spillane story originally published in Manhunt in 1953 tells us that "But having learned my lesson the hard way, he never got the chance to impose upon me again."

***

Finally, here's a bit from one of Elmore Leonard's stories published in 1951 (yes, the man has been writing for that long) that may be more pertinent today than ever:

"When he was through, he shook his head and silently cursed the stupidity of men trying to control a powder-keg situation two thousand miles from the likely explosion. ... Sometimes things get a bit hot; otherwise you just sit around and watch the desert."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Scanning Scandinavian crime

Declan Burke asks a provocative question about why Scandinavian Crime Always Pays: Whither the mavericks?

His thesis, to which commenters, including your humble blog host, provide but minor correctives, is that there's a certain sameness to the Nordic crime fiction translated into English, as good as some of that crime fiction may be.

You can find the rest over at his place, but to expand on one of Declan's rhetorical questions, where are the Scandinavian Eoin McNamees, Ronan Bennetts, Eoin Colfers, Adrian McKintys, and Kevin McCarthys?

The hook for Declan's post was the publication of Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Forshaw was kind enough to provide some advance material from the book last year when I moderated a panel full of Scandinavian crime writers at Bouchercon.   And here's a post based on some notes Forshaw sent along some months ago about the book.

*

Declan's post may be a message from above, as it comes just when I had picked up his interestingly neo-Chandlerian novel Eightball Boogie for a second reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

"?"

I like to post excerpts that convey the tone and flavor of my recent reading, only this time I'll add a new wrinkle: I'll give the selections without identifying the work or the author, and let you have fun reading, guessing, or throwing your hands up in exasperation at the whole silly enterprise. Here goes (Warning: This post contains adult content):

• “Louis found Chip in the kitchen making himself a Bloody Mary and asked him, `Who’s Ezra Pound?’
  
  “Chip said, `Ezra Pound,’ stirring his drink and then pausing. `He was a heavyweight. Beat Joe Louis for the crown and lost it to Marciano. Or was it Jersey Joe Walcott?’”

• “`Teachers always said reading poetry should be fun.’
  
  “`It can be—unless you’re reading Ezra Pound.’”

• “They paid no attention to me and I repaid the compliment. Then how could I know they were paying no attention to me, and how could I repay the compliment, since they were paying no attention to me? I don’t know. I knew it and I did it, that’s all I know.”

• “Louis said the Shia fixed their hostages rice and shit, but no doubt would have given them TV dinners if they had any.”

• “To apply the letter of the law to a creature like me is not an easy matter. It can be done, but reason is against it. It is better to leave things to the police.”

• “`An officer of the law tells an undesirable like yourself to get out of town. It’s done all the time.’”

• “He had told Joyce last night he couldn’t think of anything he didn’t like to eat, though in the Chinese food line he’d only had chop suey and the other one.”

• “Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself."

• “`How do you come so much—and so fast? Even for a woman—'
  
  “`I learned from the nuns. … They told me I’d go to hell for fucking—`impurity’—so I figured if I was already hellbound I’d enjoy every bit of the ride.’”

• "Cunnilingus in the office is frowned upon certainly, but he hasn’t heard of it as cause for automatic dismissal.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

MCM

Welcome to Detectives Beyond Borders' 1,900th post. I celebrate the occasion with an homage to beauty. First up are two bits from Roger Smith's new novella, Ishmael Toffee, the title character freshly out of Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison and surveying his new surroundings:

"When he leaves the shack in the morning the sea of rusted iron that is Tin Town sprawls out into so much space that it robs him of his breath and he almost runs back inside."

 and

"Distant Table Mountain and its cloth of cloud rises up clear and sharp over the endless shanties and box houses of the Cape Flats ..."

The Cape Flats, "apartheid's dumping ground," must be one of the most hellish places on Earth ("Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steam-punk Victorian hell hole," I wrote after reading Wake Up Dead.) Yet the image of a sea of rusted iron sprawling "out into so much space" has a certain desolate beauty. One secret to good noir is keeping the beauty and the dread in perfect tension so the reader is attracted and repelled at the same time. Smith does it.

***

Vicki Hendricks' beauty is of a different kind: hot, steamy, sexy,  and doomed, what the movie Body Heat wishes it could have been on its best day. Everyone's headed downhill in Hendricks Edgar-shortlisted Cruel Poetry, but on their way, Hendricks gives them some lines as funny as Allan Guthrie's:

"He can’t imagine that a woman living at the Moons could write anything, but who knew? Maybe a female Charles Bukowski—frightening thought. He hopes she never asks him to look at her work."

and

"Despite the cold air conditioning of the office, he’s beginning to overheat. He scoots his chair closer to the desk to skim the last essay. He’d shuffled it to the end of the stack, in case he might die and never have to grade it."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I polish off Elmore Leonard

I've always hated one kind of self-consciousness in crime stories: the kind that has characters and narrators saying, "It was a foggy day, just like a detective story" or "If this were television, he would have solved the mystery in time for the commercial. But this wasn't television; this was real life." This does nothing but take me right out of the story.

Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap offers the following:

“`I always wonder what that would be like, two guys facing each other with guns. 

“`Like in the movies,’ Louis said.”

*

“But the man didn’t drop like in the movies when getting hit over the head knocks the person out…”

*

“He had never seen it done in the movies this close.”

*

“Louis raised the Browning, cupped his left hand beneath the grip the way they did in the movies and fired.”

*

“Louis said, `We like in the movies, huh? The two hombres facing each other out in the street.’”

and more. And it would be a shame if readers didn't get the point after Leonard labored so hard to make sure that they do.

The contrast with Riding the Rap's predecessor is instructive. Pronto, published three years earlier, in 1992, evokes the feeling of Westerns without, however, hitting the reader over the head. Leonard trusted the reader to make the connection, and I was so thrilled to have done so that I went out and bought a book of Leonard's Western stories.  After the first reference in Riding the Rap, on the other hand, I wanted him to shut up already, and the references just kept on coming.

I've never written a novel and I can't imagine what it's like to do so, but I'd guess that spinning out a narrative hundreds of pages long requires an author to come up with a few ideas, then develop them. In Riding the Rap, Leonard doesn't develop his ideas, he flogs them. That some of the ideas are good mitigated my frustration only slightly.

One more example: Riding the Rap brings the protagonist, U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, into contact with a young woman who claims to be a psychic. Leonard has the wonderful idea of having Givens begin to talk like a psychic himself in his exchanges with the woman. Once I got the excellent joke, I wondered what Leonard would do with it. But he does nothing except repeat it periodically throughout the rest of the novel.

What kinds of self-reference, in-jokes, and undeveloped ideas drive you nuts in crime novels?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A mystery full of question marks

A leading Leonardite among this blog's readers suggested yesterday that Elmore Leonard had shot his literary bolt by the time he wrote Pronto (1993) and Riding the Rap (1995).

I've read too little from Leonard's 60-year career to judge which have been his stronger and which his weaker periods, but Riding the Rap certainly seems a weaker book than Pronto.  Each features as its protagonist Raylan Givens, a courtly U.S. marshal from Kentucky thrown up against some serious criminals in Florida and Italy. The situation is ripe for social comedy, but Riding the Rap violates one of the keys to Leonard's low-key humor: Its characters sometimes seem to know they're being funny, which is a lot less funny than when they play it straight and leave the laughs to the reader.

Hints of romantic tension seem thrown in merely because Leonard felt the need to inject drama. Especially irritating to this copy editor/reader, Leonard tacks on question marks to declarative statements. Presumably this is meant to suggest the rising intonation some speakers use. Leonard makes the interesting choice of giving this stereotypically female tic to male characters as well as female ones, but the tic is still no less annoying in print than it is in real life.

Compounding the superfluous question marks, the book several times omits question marks where they are called for. This may be mischief on Leonard's part, or it may be sloppy copy editing, but whatever the reason, it's a bloody distracting pain. Y'know? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Elmore Leonard's first-person in disguise

An interviewer once noted Elmore Leonard's tendency to get inside his characters' heads without, however, resorting to first-person narration:

"So, when you say it’s character-driven," the interviewer [Martin Amis] asked, "do you mean you’re thinking, `How would this character see this scene?' Because you’re usually third-person. You don’t directly speak through your characters, but there is a kind of third-person that is a first-person in disguise."

Leonard replied that: "it takes on somewhat of a first-person sound, but not really. Because I like third-person. I don’t want to be stuck with one character’s viewpoint, because there are too many viewpoints."

Here's an example from Riding the Rap (1995), the second book to feature U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens:

"He was a rangy kid with the build of a college athlete, bigger than this marshal in his blue suit and cowboy boots—the marshal calm though, not appearing to be the least apprehensive. He said the West Palm strike team was shorthanded at the moment, the reason he was alone, but believed he would manage."

That's a decent bit of description — until it becomes something more in the highlighted portion. Leonard beautifully conjures the flavor of how Raylan Givens would speak and think but without dialogue. That has to be what Martin Amis meant by first-person in disguise. It also achieves the high comic goal of not just saying funny things (that is, cracking a joke), but saying things funny.

That, I think, is a big part what of what readers mean when they talk about Leonard's humor. His books may not about in slapstick, laugh-out-loud moments, but they sure do say lots of things funny. [Disclosure: I'd read just three Leonard novels and one short story before Riding the Rap: Be Cool, The Hot Kid, Pronto (the first Raylan Givens novel), and "3:10 to Yuma," so I don't know how pertinent this post is to his work as a whole. Comment from Leonardians is welcome.]

*** 

Leonard's influence is international. Among writers discussed here at Detectives Beyond Borders, the work of Ireland's Declan Burke, Canada's John McFetridge, and New Jersey's Charlie Stella bears an unmistakable and oft-noted Leonard stamp.

Who else has Elmore Leonard influenced? (Here's a post from the paleolithic age of Detectives Beyond Borders that asked "Who is the most influential crime writer ever?")

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Toddler died after crawling into Irish ghost estate

I don't write much about true crime, but this headline caught my eye at work Tuesday night:

 CHILD’S DEATH DRAWS ATTENTION TO IRELAND’S ‘GHOST’ TRACTS

The story concerns 2-year-old Liam Keogh, who crawled through a gap in a mesh fence at an unfinished "ghost" estate in Athlone, was found face down in a puddle near an open drain, and died, apparently of drowning. (The boy died last week; American newspapers are now reporting on reaction to the event. See some scary photos of the ghost estate in the Irish Independent.)

The ghost estates are housing developments started during Ireland's Celtic Tiger economic boom, then left unfinished when the money went away. Wikipedia, citing reports in the Guardian and in the BBC, says there are at least 600 ghost estates and 300,000 empty homes in Ireland. Here's what the Independent said about the estate where Liam was found:
 I'm haunted by, er, some haunting scenes set at vacant properties, I think in Alan Glynn's Bloodland, and saddened by this latest grim crime-fiction metaphor come to life.

"Described by estate agents as an exclusive development, Glenatore - which is close to Lough Ree - was granted planning permission for 66 terraced homes and apartments in 2005.

"Just five properties were occupied and 13 were vacant, according to the 2011 national house survey. Others were never started or were at various stages of construction when building work stopped."

I'm haunted by, er, some haunting scenes set at vacant properties, I think in Alan Glynn's Bloodland, and saddened by this latest grim crime-fiction metaphor come to life.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

#Blogger sucks

In addition to its new verification-word security feature, which is confusing, harder to read, and does not work, Blogger now apparently no longer allows commenters to be notified of further comments on a post. This, of course, will inhibit discussion by making it more difficult to follow and contribute to.

Is this the worst customer service since PayPal? Why is Blogger doing this?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Outlaw Album

The Ozarks, and poor white folks, are just as foreign to most crime-fiction readers as Botswana, Cape Town, Shanghai, and Stockholm, so Daniel Woodrell belongs here.

The Outlaw Album is an apt title because its dozen selections are more vignettes than stories, like snap shots in a photo album. (If you forget what a photo album is, look for a picture of one in your "Pictures" folder or on one of the popular search engines.)

The most heartbreaking sentence in the collection so far? This, from "Florianne," about a man whose daughter has disappeared years before:

"At the opening of each deer season I hope this time she’ll be found."

Look what Woodrell does with that sentence. He lets us know that the setting is rural and its people are hunters. He lets us know that the man has been looking for his daughter a long time, and that the futile hope has become as natural and as recurring as the seasons. It's like Beckett's "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on," but without the middle step.

(I write about Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy — which I read before Barack Obama let the world know that he had read it — here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Children of Men

Baroness James of Holland Park is probably best known for her novels about Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray and for the television series based on the former, but I chose her dystopian novel The Children of Men to begin my acquaintance with James.

I'd seen the 2006 movie based on the novel, and I begin the book curious about why the movie changed the cause of the impending end of human reproduction. (It's mass male infertility in the book, female infertility in the movie -- a commercially wise decision, perhaps, given that men are said not to read books anymore. Who wants to pick up a book and get blamed for the impending extinction of humanity?)

The novel's strength in its opening chapters is the matter-of-fact first-person narration by a historian named Theodore Faron, who begins a diary of his middle age with the news that the last known human being to have been born on Earth has died. Oddly enough, the world has managed to continue on its way for two decades after the end of human fertility, and Faron's diary is as personal and idiosyncratic as diaries are supposed to be, yet full of chilling details. I'll leave you with my two favorite, then go back to my reading:

"History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species." 

and

"It was in that year, 2008, that the suicides increased. Not mainly among the old, but among my generation, the middle-aged, the generation who would have to bear the brunt of an ageing and decaying society’s humiliating but insistent needs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Amateurish prose

I'm between books, browsing, reading a few pages, picking them up, putting them down, and I'm also busy with non-blog matters. So you'll have to bear with a few random observations for a day or two.

Among the book pick-ups is a Japanese crime novel that I put down quickly because of slack prose in the English translation, e.g., "The guy fell back and lay sprawled on the ground, motionless, like the letter X." At the very least, the letter was unnecessary. Readers don't need to be told X is a letter. And lay is the wrong verb for an action scene.

I know neither Japanese not any other works by the author, so I can't guess at the reason for lapses. But I'm reminded again that a translator is not just a translator but also a writer, with all the demands that entails. If the original lags, the translator should have made it better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

JJ DeCeglie's downward spiral from Down Under

I don't know if Australia's JJ DeCeglie has been anywhere near Oklahoma, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or any of the other psychic nowheres of American noir, but he sure can channel their spirit well.

Drawing Dead is about a P.I. in Western Australia, a busted gambler and self-proclaimed asshole who goes drunkenly, lustfully, and violently to his own destruction, narrating his demise with amused detachment.  Jim Thompson might have produced something similar if he'd infused his stories with a bit more humor and his protagonists with a bit more violent action-hero flair.

Thompson is a presence in Drawing Dead, an object of the book's dedication and the source of its epigraph. Charles Willeford makes the scene both as dedicatee and as one of the authors the protagonist, Jack, thinks about reading on his doomed wanderings. John Fante makes that list, as do Louis-Ferdinand Céline and — no surprise — Charles Bukowski. And that, friends, ought to give you an idea of the ride you're in for in DeCeglie's book.

***

What makes some of our darker noir writers cite their literary idols so explicitly? Maybe it's just literary preciousness. But maybe writing about characters who embrace doom is so psychologically perilous that authors need to reach out for predecessors who lived close to the edge but still managed to hold themselves together long enough to write a few books.

DeCeglie pays looser homage to the hard-boiled but non-noir tradition. Though Drawing Dead is more a doomed road novel than a P.I. story, Jack is, nominally, a hard-luck private investigator. And the case that quickly degenates into his downward journey is — naturally — a wandering-daughter job.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Canada is funny; Ireland is cheap

Here's one of my favorite bits of humor from Tumblin' Dice:

“Gayle looked at him, slumped in the big leather chair, drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning, watching himself on tv, the old days, and she was thinking pretty soon they’d have to take him out with a forklift, bury him in a piano box.

“She said, `We can’t have guys running around shooting people all over the place.'

“Danny said, no, sure, that’s right, `But once in a while it’s good.'”

Here's author John McFetridge on "The Hono(u)r Killing in Tumblin Dice."

***

is now $2.99 or £1.95 for Kindle! And, never mind this post's title; Absolute Zero Cool is funny, too. And hard-hitting. Mind-expanding, as well, and totally legal. Here, the novel's author, Declan Burke, holds forth on e-book pricing on the Irish Times website.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Tumblin' Dice rocks, rolls, and rules

A blurb for John McFetridge's new novel, Tumblin' Dice, invokes This is Spinal Tap and Elmore Leonard, but I'd add Return of the Secaucus 7 to the list of cultural referents.  Tumblin' Dice is even more about growing into middle age and facing change than it is about fast talking, violence, and life on the road, though it's about all those things, too.

And the change is nuanced;  there's no clear line between characters who accept and characters who reject it. Even the most decisive is plagued by occasional introspection, doubt, and reminiscence. Others act decisively (for good or ill) just when a reader is likely to write them off as hopelessly nostalgic or irredeemably stupid. That nuance makes this an unexpectedly moving book, as close a simulation of what I imagine real life is as I can remember in a crime novel.

Let's meet some of the characters:

• There are The High, a 1980s rock band that reunites and hits the oldies-and-casino circuit, with larceny on its mind.
• There are the Philadelphia mobsters.
• There are the Saints of Hell, familiar to readers of McFetridge's previous books, bikers gone upscale and professionally stratified. The Saints challenge the Philadelphia mobsters for control of an Ontario casino, where The High are booked for a show (opening for Cheap Trick).
• There are the cops from Toronto and elsewhere who try to contain the violence and who cope with a blood-chilling and culturally timely case of their own.

Each of those groups has its own drama and subplots, in addition to its role in the climax at the casino. That's a lot of characters and action for a medium-size crime novel, a lot of story lines interacting in any number of ways, expected and unexpected, kind of like life. But it's funny, it's moving, it works, and the worst thing I can say about McFetridge is that he appears to like Rush.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Meet Kevin McCarthy

The world's best crime fiction comes from Ireland, and one of the country's best new crime and historical-fiction writers has started a blog.

The author is Kevin McCarthy, his first novel was Peeler, (which no U.S. publisher has seen fit to pick up in a print edition; it is available as an e-book), and the blog is A Criminal History?  Here's a bit of what I wrote about Peeler in 2010:

“When Clive James turned into Francis Fukuyama three years ago and as much as declared the end of crime fiction (`In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.'), I dissented.

“For one thing, the where can constitute its own what, a setting so different from the reader's own that it offers fictional possibilities even Clive James never dreamed of.

“I've just now opened Kevin McCarthy's novel Peeler, and its plot, its dueling epigraphs, and the note of uncertainty in its second sentence offer the promise of an exciting and maybe even morally serious work. And it's all because of where the story takes place: in Ireland, during the country's war of independence, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the IRA each investigating, unknown to the other, a young woman's killing.”

The book fulfilled its promise, and it performed one of those acts of alchemy that always leave me in awe: It conveyed not just the facts of the novel's historical setting (the founding years of the Free State of Ireland), but also the feeling: the rural and urban poverty in West Cork, the moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler. (McCarthy talks about the history behind the novel and the Royal Irish Constabulary at Crime Always Pays.)

It's up there with Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels and Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year as the best historical (crime) I've read since this blog first saw the light of day.

Take it away, Kevin.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nights of Awe

The protagonist of Harri Nykänen's Nights of Awe is named Ariel Kafka, and he's one of two Jewish police officers in Helsinki.

Now, Finland's entire Jewish population is no bigger than a couple of good-sized Long Island bar-mitzvahs, so it's no shock that Jews would be somewhat exotic figures there. Nykänen has Kafka react with head-shaking amusement to well-meaning questions about Jews, and the deadpan humor is of a piece with what Nykänen did so well in Raid and the Blackest Sheep.

Kafka's Jewish identity figures also in the crimes that drive this story, a series of killings of Arabs that eventually involves drugs, trains, cars, Israeli diplomats, the Mossad intelligence service, and friends and others from Kafka's own past. To say too much more would risk spoilers, except that things, as in all good mysteries, are not what they seem, even when you think you've figured out what's what and who's who.

The novel's title refers to the Jewish high holidays, the Days of Awe, when observant Jews repent of their sins. Nykänen presumably intends moral weight, but a character named Kafka needs no help from the calendar to get introspective. The story could have been set any time in the year.

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The book was smoothly translated into English by Kristian London, an American who lives in Helsinki. The fluency of the translation is especially noticeable in the novel's first half, which consists largely of routine police detail and dialogue, where the prose, and not the action, must hold readers' attention.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012