We have lots of winners ...

... but only two get books. So many eye-opening and thought-provoking replies poured in for Friday's competition about fallen cities that I'll award two copies rather than one of Annamaria Alfieri's City of Silver.

Alfieri sets her tale of murder and metal in Potosí, little known today (though a UNESCO World Heritage Site), but in the seventeenth century an immensely wealthy city whose silver mines were the economic engine that drove the vast Spanish empire.

I asked readers for examples of other cities whose positions in the world had fallen and promised a copy of Alfieri's novel for the best nomination.

Suggestions flooded in, and I wound up with eyes opened toward parts of the world I had not considered much before, as well as a list of new travel destinations.

In the end, I chose José Ignacio Escribano for his twin suggestions of Manaus, in north Brazil, and Córdoba, Spain, once the capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba, of which it has been said that

"in the latter half of the tenth century Córdoba, with up to 500,000 inhabitants, was then the most populated city in Europe and, perhaps, in the world."

and

Jerry House for Lowell, Massachusetts, once the largest industrial complex in the United States. Honorable mention to Barbara Fister for suggesting Timbuktu, once a religious, intellectual and economic center, and today a byword for way-to-hell-and gone. Honorable mention to the lot of you, really, for the exciting reminders that history is all over the map: North and West Africa, South America, Central Asia, the United States ...

Congratulations to José and Jerry. If they'll send postal addresses to me at detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net, I'll put their books in the mail. Thanks again to all who contributed to this most enjoyable thread.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fresh spies

The pace of geopolitical change must make thriller writers tear their hair out. The Soviet Union is gone, and terrorism, as wise commentators point out, is not a country. What does the fight against it mean, and what is a fictional spy to do in this multipolar world?

Lots, according to Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, in whose world the collapse of the Other Side has given birth to a range of Other Sides: Chinese industrialists, Russian mafias, Islamic insurgents among them.

This fractured geopolitical scorecard is just one of the things that make The Tourist seem new, at least to this infrequent reader of thrillers. Here are a few more:

1) Frequent mention of characters' ages, many of those characters in their twenties or early thirties. This has an internal purpose, but I suspect it's also Steinhauer's way of reminding the reader that the international thriller is alive, well and still a young man's and woman's game two decades after the U.S.S.R.'s collapse.

2) An occasional wryly mocking attitude:

"Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghanistan, he would spend his time on terrorism's more surgical arms."

3) An amusing poke at one of the dumbest songs of the last thirty years:

"`Why `the Tiger'?'

"`Precisely! However, the truth is a disappointment. I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, first used it. Maybe a journalist, I don't know. I guess that, after the Jackal, they needed an animal name.' He shrugged—again it looked painful. `I suppose I should be pleased they didn't choose a vulture—or a hedgehog. And no—before you think to ask, let me assure you I wasn't named after the Survivor song.'"

Do political and spy thrillers have a shorter shelf life thanks to events such as the end of the Soviet Union and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? What does it take to keep such a story fresh? What are your favorite classic spy stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Stuck in Mitteleuropa with you

The TBR pile is situated between wars these days, or between Europes, or as close as one can get to between centuries.

First came Rebecca Cantrell's A Trace of Smoke, set in 1931 Berlin. Now are J. Sydney Jones' Requiem in Vienna, which opens with Gustav Mahler conducting a rehearsal of Vienna's Court Opera in 1899; David Downing's Stettin Station, set in Berlin in November 1941; and Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, which shows that wars (and spy novels) don't end when walls come down.

As I read these books, I'll think about a Europe as exotic and unfamiliar as any African or Asian clime. I'll think about what draws authors to those agitated times and places where eras, civilizations, cultures and religions clash.

These stories all happen where East meets West. What are your favorite borderlands for crime fiction?

While you're thinking, here's the first sentence of Steinhauer's book:

"Four hours after his failed suicide attempt, he descended toward Aerodrom Ljubljana."

Happy reading!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Win a book about a pivotal city

The TBR pile is high with books set in turbulent cities of the highest historical importance: Berlin, Vienna, Potosí.

Potosí? These days it's not noted for much except being possibly the highest city in the world — 13,420 feet above sea level in the mountains of Bolivia. Once, though, slaves died by the thousands in its silver mines, and the metal they extracted kept the Spanish empire in business, paying that vast empire's entire military budget for years.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Potosí was one of the world's biggest and most opulent places, in the words of the excellent Larry Gonick, a "weird and lawless city." Oh, and there was the Inquisition, operating with vigor from a new South American seat established in Colombia in 1610.

A weird and lawless city sounds like a promising place to set a mystery, and Annamaria Alfieri has done so with City of Silver.

You can join me in finding out how promising. I'll send a copy of City of Silver to the person who provides the best example of a city sunk from great prominence to a humbler state. (Real cities only. Atlantis doesn't count.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The bomb

Michel Foucault yesterday, a leading American public intellectual today, but I promise crime fiction tomorrow including, possibly, a visit to the most surprising crime-fiction city you'll have heard of.

Today's subject is Garry Wills, a visitor to the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library last night to talk about his new book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.

Wills says the American presidency arrogated for itself extraordinary powers amid the Manhattan Project, then kept those powers once the emergency of World War II had passed. The results include extraordinary secrecy, disrespect for the Constitution, the undermining of Congress, "the era of undeclared war, presidential war," and the development of a massive national security apparatus not at all times zealous about the truth.

Unlike the other 300 million Americans, Wills worries about the institution of the presidency, rather than about this Democrat or that Republican, and here's where a crime fiction or thriller plot suggests itself: A president takes office and finds out from his national security apparatus about secret, perhaps dirty projects around the world. He tries to end them. What happens?

***

Wills' talk was crisp and to the point, and the program finished early. Perhaps one should expect no less from the author of a much-honored book about the Gettysburg Address.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Where is the justice in crime fiction?, or Noam Chomsky gets his ass kicked

We were talking about Madness and Civilization the other night, and not as commentary on our fellow drinkers at Philadelphia's press club.

The talk got me interested in Michel Foucault, that French historian, philosopher and public intellectual (though he might have rejected the intellectual designation), and I realized that he belongs here. He wrote and talked about crime, punishment, madness, sex and death, after all.

It's his invocation and critique of justice, though, that caught my attention because I realized how rarely crime writing concerns itself with justice, at least in the social, society-building sense. How many crime novels take the perp through the criminal justice system, for example? What does it imply about Western crime stories that they generally end just before the justice system swings into action (or before it gets a chance to do so)?

(See Foucault debate Noam Chomsky here and here. See Chomsky shrink before your eyes, especially around 3:50 of the second clip. Click here for the only effort I know to bring justice into the crime-fiction discussion.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Here's to you, Mr. Robinson, or the real secret of Nordic crime fiction

(Photo © Katja Gottschewski 2002)

Uriah Robinson of Crime Scraps published a piece of common sense the other day about why Scandinavian crime fiction is so popular.

He invoked an anecdote about a question to Atlanta students on a high school history exam: Why did the South lose the Civil War?

"Most of the class wrote reams and reams on the military, economic, social, political and demographic reasons," Uriah reported, "apart from one student who answered with one sentence: 'I think the Yankee Army had something to do with it.'"

"Scandinavian crime fiction is popular," he continued, "because it features good writing, usually excellent translation, well-thought-out plots and interesting characters."

Search his blog post from top to bottom, and you'll find no sociology, no commonplaces about Nordic stoicism, nothing about suicide or vodka or long nights. (You'll find precisely the opposite, in other words, of Laura Miller in the Wall Street Journal.)

It was a pleasure to see good writing, rather than sociology, invoked as a reason for popularity. Nordic crime writing is good? I think Arnaldur Indriðason (Or Jo Nesbø. Or Karin Fossum. Or ...) had something to do with it.

What are your favorite or least favorite takes on international crime fiction in the English-speaking world?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Hi, Chicago

My landsman Howard Shrier's High Chicago opens with protagonist Jonah Geller landing in Chicago from Toronto and tumbling into the bearlike embrace of a newly large old friend.

Whether this is a metaphor for Canada's fear of being swallowed up by its neighbor, I don't know. But, like Shrier's earlier Buffalo Jump, High Chicago plunges across a border.

That first book begins with story strands on each side of the U.S.-Canada line, then brings them gradually together in a fine piece of suspense-building. And that's a neat paradigm for crime-writing in today's globalized economy.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

No cats allowed ...

... but I'm going to make one more post about a dog, and you can't do a thing about it.

1) Recent discussion here came down against the covers of J.F. Englert's three novels narrated by a literate, reflective Labrador named Randolph. I complained that the covers might mislead readers into thinking the books cuter and cozier than they are.

In the covers' defense, though, they reproduce skillfully executed artwork, apparently commissioned for the books, if one can judge by Englert's thanks to illustrator Dan Craig. I've taken part in discussions of copycat covers, the phenomenon that results when different publishers rely on the same stock of photographic images. Why can't the publishers spend a few extra dollars for an artist, illustrator or photographer, and avoid looking cheap and cheesy? I asked. Englert's publishers do this. More power to them.

2) I also like a couple of bits inside the book, A Dog About Town, including:

"He crammed what looked like a Maryland crab cake into our deeply troubled refrigerator, the interior of which had remained a shadowland of petrified broccoli and pizza since the bulb burned out months before."

and

"His reputation in the writing life had been launched and sustained by this pedigree of mid-twentieth-century entitlement and superiority, which by the time of his death in the twenty-first century, was anachronistic."

and, for what it says about Randolph as a palatable contemporary vehicle for sentiments that might seem precious, dated or eccentric in the mouth of a twenty-first-century human fictional detective, this:

" ... the detective is the last true humanist, standing at that intersection where observation and reason meet emotion and intuition revealing the secrets that measure our fragile, inconstant, but extraordinary beings."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Niche marketing

What's your favorite example of blatantly money-grubbing niche marketing in the book trade? (Your title need not include chicken soup.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crime Factory and classical gas

Who's in Issue #1 of Crime Factory? Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, Scott Phillips and Dave White, for a start. (A hat tip to Crime Scene NI.)

Bruen offers an excerpt from an upcoming novel, Killer, that looks to be as good as anything I've read by him, and it contains as pertinent a bit of self-reference as any I've read in crime fiction.

McKinty's contribution is a "making of" journal about his novel Fifty Grand, and Phillips offers an appreciation of Charles Willeford and what Willeford meant to his own writing. Lots of places publish crime fiction. Crime Factory offers glimpses of some of the sharp minds that create the stuff. May it live long.

*******

Over at A dead man fell from the sky ... , meanwhile, blogkeeper/author/classicist Gary Corby has been soliciting nominations for song titles of antiquity. My humble suggestions include:

"Get Bacchae (to Where You Once Belonged)"

"You Can Call Me Alcestis"

"Liver and Let Die" (This one's about Prometheus)

"Saturday Night's All Right for Phaëtōn"

You might also like a contribution from another reader that I wish I had come up with:

"I Want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad" by Oedipus

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The greatest (darkest? most disturbing?) noir song ever

I've posted often about crime songs, but not until tonight did I hear the greatest noir song ever.

The song was written and produced by three of the more celebrated names of the rock and roll era and recorded by a wildly popular girl group — in 1962.

So why had I never heard it until 10:30 on a Tuesday night in 2010, when many of us have had oldies shoved down our throats almost all our lives? Maybe because I'm not as cool as I thought I was. But maybe because of good, old-fashioned, do-gooding American censorship. Fear of the truth. Misconstruction, deliberate or otherwise, of protest as endorsement. Or maybe the subject matter is just too upsetting for people to deal with, and damn it, can I blame them?

This may be the most chilling recording I have ever heard. Listen, and tell me what you think.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Edgars beyond borders

Nominees for the 2010 Edgar Awards include two beyond-borders books previously discussed here: Jo Nesbø's Nemesis, translated by Don Bartlett, for best novel, and L.C. Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice, for best paperback original.

Here's part of what I wrote about Nemesis last year:

"Nemesis may be Jo Nesbø's best novel, more tightly constructed, sticking more closely to its central story than his others, with only hints of the flashbacks that are such an integral part of The Redbreast. It muses philosophically but unobtrusively on revenge both personal and national and, as usual with Nesbø, it contains wonderful deadpan humor."

Tyler surprised me at Crime Fest 2009 when he said he admired Allan Guthrie – unexpected for a self-described author of comic cozy mysteries. The Herring-Seller's Apprentice sparked much lively discussion on this blog, including a quiz for which Tyler graciously offered a copy of his follow-up novel, Ten Little Herrings, as a prize. (Revisit that discussion here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

O, mother, where art thou?

I don't remember the details or the source, but I think Rebecca Cantrell once told an interviewer that becoming a mother had influenced her writing.

I admit a slight temptation to roll my eyes at this, a temptation, that disappeared, however, soon after I started reading Cantrell's novel A Trace of Smoke. Cantrell sets the book in the least relaxing of cities — Berlin — in the least relaxing of times — 1931. The Nazi party is on the rise, and people disappear daily, their photos to turn up in the city's Hall of the Unnamed Dead.

Hannah Vogel finds a photo of her brother there and, for a reason particular to the time, must conceal this fact as she searches for information about him. And then 5-year-old Anton turns up, claiming Hannah is his mother. Thus a second mystery for Hannah: Who are the child's real parents?

More later, but for now:

What other crime stories feature mothers, would-be mothers or motherless children? And, in a genre where victims disappear permanently by being killed, is it a surprise that more authors don't write about children and others the victims leave behind them?

(Read a short excerpt from A Trace of Smoke here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Wallace, Gromit and a cereal killer

Salient facts about A Matter of Loaf and Death, in which Aardman Animations hops on the Jason Voorhees/Lou Ford/Hannibal Lecter bandwagon and has Wallace and Gromit face down a serial killer:

1) The movie, actually a short film for television, "references" Aliens, Psycho, Batman, and Ghost, according to Wikipedia. Hitchcock lovers might also detect allusions to Blackmail, Foreign Correspondent and Vertigo.

2) Nick Park, Wallace and Gromit's creator, calls A Matter of Loaf and Death "kind of a bread-based murder mystery." Its first murder victim, Baker Bob, is based on co-writer Bob Baker.

3) The "making of" feature included on the DVD (on which Park calls A Matter of Loaf and Death a "who-doughnut") is one of the better examples of its kind, with fascinating detail about how the animators get plasticine faces with no eyebrows and some with no mouths to express such a range of emotions.

4) The term Anglo-Saxon gets bandied about pretty loosely, but Park is one of the few people I know of who has a real Anglo-Saxon name: Wulstan. (It's his middle name, according to various Internet sources.)

5) One of the characters looks like one of my colleagues. No, I won't tell you which character or which colleague.

(Read about Detectives Beyond Borders' visit to Wallace and Gromit's home town here, including a real-life tour guide who would be perfectly at home in a W&G movie.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Something new ...

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö blazed a number of crime fiction trails, among them those of social criticism, a multiplayer cast of detectives, and elevation of the investigator's personal life to importance comparable with that of the mysteries he or she investigates.

(Whether, in fact, they blazed the trails or were early followers is immaterial here. At any rate, they were among the first to tread the paths in question.)

Here is some of what I've noticed in Roseanna:

1) The team approach to the police procedural.

2) The occasional jab at military regimes, though these have been far less frequent that I'd expected.

3) Great stress on the protagonist's everyday problems.

4) And, what I consider the book's most impressive innovation, one cited by Henning Mankell in his introduction and handled beautifully by Sjöwall and Wahlöö: its portrayal of an investigation that moves in fits and starts, with long stretches when nothing happens.

If you've read Sjöwall and Wahlöö, which of their innovations most impressed you? Which have held up best? Which seem less exciting now that they might have in the 1960s? If you haven't read them, what crime-fiction innovations have impressed you most? Who introduced those innovations? Who perfected them? And what crime fiction innovations are less exciting now than they must have seemed when new?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Honey, I think the Sixties are over

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sjöwall and Wahlöö: My late start on an early source

This post is by way of atonement. If Henning Mankell is a father to the current boom in international crime fiction, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are grandparents. Their ten Martin Beck novels, from 1965's Roseanna to The Terrorists in 1975, were among the first to examine a society critically as well as tell a crime story, and authors to this day cite them as influences.

Despite this, I had not read Sjöwall and Wahlöö until now. Mankell's introduction/appreciation to the 2008 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprint of Roseanna is a brisk review of its highlights, its influence, and its remarkable freshness despite the apparent distance of its world from Mankell's and ours. I am especially impressed that the first adjectives Mankell applies to the book are "straightforward" and "clear," and that he says "Even the language seems energetic and alive."

So far he's right. The first two chapters are like an operatic overture or prelude, sounding, one by one, miniature versions of the themes that will follow until, in Chapter 3, we meet Beck — the same Beck whose ordinariness as a human being, along with that of his colleagues, was such a revelation to Henning Mankell forty years ago. I have a heady feeling that I am exploring a source of much that has become familiar to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

One more word about four-legged protagonists ...

... and then I'll return to my anthropocentric focus tomorrow.

Why read a book narrated by a dog without concealing the fact from your friends? If J.F. Englert wrote the book, because he chooses his words carefully. He narrates hilarious events in deliberately everyday language. He understates that which he might easily have overstated.

His Randolph, canine narrator and protagonist, is of scholarly temperament — a great reader when the opportunity presents itself, eager to communicate with humans but unable to do so save with great difficulty. Quite naturally, his contemplative turn of mind and bookish preferences result in occasional formality of speech in his address to us, the readers.

He has a voice, in other words, about all one can ask of a fictional character no matter how many legs he or she has.

***

Check this space tomorrow for a post about humans.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Good books, bad covers

Yesterday's post about J.F. Englert's A Dog at Sea mentioned in passing the book's cloying cover.

The covers to Englert's first two novels are borderline cutesy, I told a commenter, but the current cover goes over the top. More than that, it's misleading. Readers looking for a cute doggie book might be disappointed, and the cover might repel readers who would otherwise enjoy the intelligent story that lies within.

To ensure that you don't judge this book by its cover, here's an excerpt from A Dog at Sea. Here's a bit from Englert's A Dog About Town. Here's some graceful, amusing prose from A Dog Among Diplomats. Here's what I wrote about that last book.

And here's your question: What good books that you've read were ill-served by off-putting or misleading covers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Good dog book!

(Photo © Susan Stava)

Back in 2008, I risked obloquy and ostracism when I read a book with an animal protagonist. But J.F. Englert's A Dog Among Diplomats was a pleasant surprise, a sharp, intelligently written tale leavened with enough wit and even melancholy to elevate it above the run of mysteries narrated by non-humans.

I am happy to report that, barring the cutesy cover with which its publisher has saddled it (not pictured here), Englert's new A Dog at Sea is off to just as promising a start. Never have I known an author so able to wring suspense and menace from an approaching plate of shipboard hors d'œuvres:

"The crew member sensed the pack movement in his direction and looked ready to retreat, but then a two-footed animal — a used-car salesman from Pasadena, California — gestured for him to approach ... "

(Read more about Englert and his protagonist, Randolph, here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Police and thieves

Confinement must give one lots of time to think and observe, or so I am told, and I bet John Lawton would agree.

His 2007 novel Second Violin puts co-protagonist Rod Troy in one of Winston Churchill's internment camps for internal aliens. There, Lawton offers the funniest and most moving portrait of national character I have read in any crime novel.

A Little White Death, published nine years earlier, has Rod's brother Frederick, Scotland Yard's chief detective, in a sanitarium recuperating from tuberculosis. Troy knows he will hate his confinement, yet two of his fellow inmates — a sharp-tongued workingman and an old general — are both more than they seem and vehicles for Lawton to poke and probe English class structure.

Why do you think Lawton set the scenes where he did? What makes confined settings attractive to a writer?

+++

A Little White Death takes place in 1963, just before "The Sixties" hit Britain with full force. The characters, of course, have nothing more than ominous presentiments, but we — and Lawton — know everything: Carnaby Street, sexual openness, the reaction against sexual openness, the rapid commodification of personality, police brutality and more.

Lawton finds several ways to foreshadow this — retrospective foreshadowing, one might call it — most effectively in understated accounts of police brutality and in references to police lying. In the latter cases especially, we readers are clearly meant to reflect bitterly that 1963 England could still be shocked at such a possibility. More on this interesting subject, perhaps, later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What a difference a word makes

I was boosting my spirits with some rock and roll two days ago, and I came across this, which I then compared with this. The first is the Clash doing "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)." The second is the same song by Bobby Fuller Four, who first made the song a hit.

"I Fought the Law" occasionally comes up in discussions of crime fiction and music, but I'd never considered it a noir song until last night. That's when I listened again to the Clash's version, and I heard the one-word alteration that plunges into noir hoplessness. See if you can find that word.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Montalbano and the slip of the sheets

Thanks to resolution of technological and delivery issues, I'm again watching the Italian television series based on Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels.

The Snack Thief, from the book of the same name, offers something missing from the TV versions of The Shape of Water and The Terra-Cotta Dog: Montalbano dining at the Trattoria San Calogero. I'd wondered if the director had dispensed with such scenes as part of the trimming necessary when adapting a book. But a short scene at the San Calogero about a quarter of the way through this episode has all the easy intimacy and food-loving joy of the books.

One minus: Television is less able than books to supply information for a gastronomic illiterate like me, and I can't always tell what Luca Zingaretti, as Montalbano, is eating on screen. One plus: Perhaps better than books, television can convey the pleasure that Montalbano takes in his food even when eating alone.

=============

I complained in November about Katharina Böhm's performances as Livia, and comments on my post suggested interesting reasons for the complaint. Böhm gives a better account of herself in The Snack Thief, possibly because the story makes greater demands on her.

And a simple slip of the sheets in one of her scenes highlights a difference between Italy and America. Livia and Montalbano are talking in bed, and they are fully awake as they do so. That means they're sitting up rather than lying down, and that means none of that nonsense one gets on American television with the woman pulling the sheets up to cover herself.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Ten Lays That Shook the World

I've been writing about John Lawton's novel A Little White Death, whose plot includes a scandal similar to the Profumo Affair of 1963, a sex-and-spies caper that contributed to the downfall of a government in the United Kingdom.

At the same time, Adrian McKinty has written about Iris Robinson (left), a Northern Ireland politician whose hot pants he suggests could derail the peace process there.

(That Iris Robinson is a born-again Christian who has railed against homosexuality and proclaimed that "the government has the responsibility to uphold God's laws" makes her own downfall especially delicious. Robinson has said she has been treated for mental illness. If she's telling the truth, I wish her well. I am also suspicious about the timing of her revelation, since she has also been linked to financial scandals, and mental illness, like addiction, is a convenient excuse for politicians caught with their hands in the till or other places where they don't belong.

(One of McKinty's comments also includes a well-deserved slap at the New York Times which, in a desperate grab for both relevance and snob appeal, takes a gratuitous shot at bloggers and "local newspaper headlines" for their coverage of the Robinsons' affair. We at the Times, reporter John F. Burns as much as sneers, would never descend to the level of "local" newspapers.)

I'll invoke Lawton's novel to claim this post's relevance to international crime fiction. And I'll ask your help: What are the most influential sex scandals in history? Extra credit for scandals that do not involve conservative politicians.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Won't you help?

The following appeared in Saturday's Boston Globe newspaper about the Celtics basketball team (the sportswriter was one Gary Washburn):

"For those who question gambling among teammates, you can do only so much sleeping, listening to music, watching movies, and eating while on long flights."

Can you think of anything these college-educated professional athletes could do to while away their time in the air when not playing cards and pulling guns on one another?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Verbal champagne and the other kind, too

I wrote yesterday about verbal champagne in the prologue to John Lawton's A Little White Death. I had no idea at the time that the first chapter proper would offer the real stuff, too. Here are the protagonist, Frederick Troy, and his brother Roderick after the latter has fled their game of Monopoly in disgust:

"`What have you found?' Troy asked.

"Rod wiped the label with his sleeve.

"`The paper's a bit perished, but it says 1928 and I'd lay odds of ten to one it's Veuve Clicquot.'

"`Does champagne keep that long?'

"`Haven't the foggiest. But there's only one way to find out.'"

"Pure," as loyal reader Loren Eaton likes to say, "gold."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What makes a novel worth reading?

I don't mean all that stuff about a compelling story and vivid characters and giving your protagonist an obstacle to overcome. I mean the bits of verbal champagne that make you want to tell your friends or put up a blog post.

The prologue of John Lawton's A Little White Death, third of his Frederick Troy novels, offers at least two. The first is in the book's very first paragraph:

"She knew revolutionaries. Short men, serious men, men who marked their seriousness physically by being bald or mustachioed or both."

The second follows some amusing byplay between two characters, one of whom is a physician come to the United States to treat John F. Kennedy for Addison's disease who hooks up with his fellow Brit just before leaving the U.S. Here are the lines with which the physician ends the prologue:

"`Fine. I understand. Now why don't you hop in a cab. We can have one last drinkie before I dash to Idlewild.'"

(Read about John Lawton's Second Violin here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Updates, schmupdates

I wrote two weeks ago about the new Sherlock Holmes movie and why it works. More recently, comments on this week's post about "Jim Thompson's happy ending?" including the following exchange:

If Marlowe is going to remain relevant I think we'll have to let directors update him as they see fit, the way Guy Ritchie plays around with Sherlock Holmes, for example.

and

I'm not really interested in seeing anybody's update of Marlowe or any other period detective. I don't think Marlowe could be made "relevant" to the present. Heck, he was out of place in his own 1940s-50s. Even Chandler himself said many times there would never be a real p.i. the way he wrote Marlowe. There are plenty of contemporary detectives who would make, do make, wonderful novel-to-screen transitions, however.

The floor is now open. Which crime fiction authors, stories and characters are ripe for updates? Why? Why not? Which updates work? Which do not? And why or why not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Thrillers and character

I may be back later with a more detailed post about Identity Theory by Peter Temple (also published as In the Evil Day.) For now, though, a question for thriller readers:

How unusual is it for a thriller to focus as much attention, if not more, on the personalities and problems of the protagonists as on the plot?

Here, an intelligence dealer, a mercenary, and an ambitious reporter become involved with a piece of film that could have worldwide repercussions, in the time-honored thriller manner, but we come to know the characters better than we do the politics of the piece. I haven't read many thrillers, but this struck me as novel.

As always with Peter Temple, the book is full of gorgeous prose, such as:

"Once Gastarbeiter from Anatolia, Anselm thought, now wealthy. Their teenage boy and girl followed, citizens of nowhere and everywhere. The pair were listening to music on headphones, moving their heads like sufferers from some exotic ailment."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Jim Thompson's happy ending?

Nope, Walter Hill's, apparently at the behest of Steve McQueen. McQueen, who controlled the production company for the 1972 movie The Getaway, based on Thompson's novel, "objected to the depressing ending" of Thompson's screeplay and had Hill replace him.

I haven't read the book, and I don't know what kind of an ending Thompson concocted for the screenplay. But he was not a happy-ending type, and I'd guess his version did not finish the way the movie does: with McQueen and Ali MacGraw emerging like transfigured lovers from a pile of garbage and trucking off to live happily ever after down Mexico way.

What are your favorite, most shocking, most surprising, most inappropriate or just plain weirdest Hollywood happy endings imposed on movie versions of novels or stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Tasty!

A pleasant surprise awaited me in the blogosphere today. Click here, and scroll to the bottom of the post, just before the comments.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

This South Africa thing ...

I've raved about Peter Temple's Jack Irish novels and The Broken Shore. But he also wrote a standalone thriller released under two titles, Identity Theory and In the Evil Day, whose opening pages include an exchange pertinent to recent discussion here about South Africa and crime fiction:

"`You always look so fucken clean,' said Zeke...

"`That's because I'm white,' said Niemand. He had known Zeke for a long time.

"`You're not all that white,' said Mkane. `Bit of ancestral tan.'

"`That's the Greek part of me. The Afrikaner part's pure white. You kaffirs get cheekier every day.'

"Ja, baas. But we're in charge now.'

"'We? Forget it. Money's in charge. Took me a long time to understand that. Money's always in charge.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Global Reading Challenge: Africa

Here in North America, I've been asked by a reader in Europe to prepare a list of crime fiction from Africa for a Global Reading Challenge. In the interest of promoting understanding in this globalized, interdependent, multipolar world, I'm happy to comply. Here's a selection of African crime writers and stories I've written about here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

I've recently featured Roger Smith, Meshack Masondo, Richard Kunzmann, Deon Meyer and Michael Stanley from South Africa. Mike Nicol, a novelist and keeper of the Crime Beat South Africa blog, has contributed to Detectives Beyond Borders as well. Crime Beat will also serve as a guide to far more African crime writers than I can mention here.

But there's more. From Algeria (actually from France, where he went into voluntary exile) Yasmina Khadra writes bleak, occasionally grimly humorous detective novels set amid the strife and carnage of 1990s Algiers. The Congolese author Alain Mabanckou wrote the satirical, creepy inside-the-killer's head African Psycho.

Daliso Chaponda, born in Malawi and subsequently a resident of Canada and the United Kingdom, offers a broadly satirical vision of dictatorship in his short story "Heroic Proportions."

Africa also gave the world one of the most distinguished authors ever to turn his hand to crime writing: the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. His novel The Thief and the Dog is a bleak yet touching noir tale worthy of Jim Thompson or David Goodis.

Africa has also attracted the attention of crime writers from elsewhere, including Patricia Highsmith and Michael Pearce, who set his Mamur Zapt series in late colonial Egypt. Among Australia's fine crime writers, Peter Temple was born in South Africa, and David Owen was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Malawi and Swaziland. Both are worth reading whether or not they satisfy the rules of this Global Reading Challenge or any other.

Happy reading wherever you may roam.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Meshack Masondo

Let's stay in South Africa awhile longer, this time with Meshack Masondo's "The Love of Money" from the Bad Company anthology of short South African crime fiction.

The author says in an introduction to the story that "While based to an extent on the English model, the Zulu detective novel adds its own themes ー related to social problems caused by the meeting of modern life and Zulu traditional customs ー to the `classic recipe.'"

In time-honored manner, the detective protagonist of "The Love of Money" relates his solution to the crime. But his account has an edge that must make South African readers smile ruefully: "So many security firms springing up all over the place, you'd think there was room for all of them with this crime wave, but no. Your husband needed money."

Masondo writes for the most part in Zulu; I'm not sure if he wrote "The Love of Money" in that language or in English, but, like Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead, the story manages the difficult task of conveying in one language the cadences of another:

"Magwegwe replied feebly, `Nobody was injured, my wife. It is just that... "

"Popi persisted: `What is wrong, love?'"

Omitting a contraction goes a long way. South Africa is a country of many languages. Perhaps hearing this Babel of tongues makes authors sensitive to the rhythms of languages other than their own.

Masondo's Detective Themba Zondo is capable of delicious deadpan, and there's the hint of amusing interplay between him and his sidekick, Sgt. Thulani Zungu. Masondo's 1987 novel The Hunter and the Snakes features the two and is to appear soon in English translation, according to the introduction in Bad Company. I'll look forward to it.

(Click here for discussion of another short story from a non-traditional crime-fiction country that adopts a traditional crime-fiction form.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Roger Smith's urban dystopia

I've come under the sway of graphic-novel readers and urban-fantasy lovers in the past year, and I've dipped into a dystopian comic or two myself. Maybe that's why I pick the following as an emblematic sentence from Roger Smith's South African thriller Wake Up Dead:

"A woman in a Muslim headscarf scuttled across the road, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a tub of Kentucky chicken, and disappeared into Dark City. Otherwise the road was empty and silent."

Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steam-punk Victorian hell hole, and none of his characters ー rich, poor, black, white or colored ー has anything better than a bleak present and an infernal past.

The novel's flashbacks, narrative asides and occasional political jabs, even the inflections of its characters' speech, contribute to a vivid sense of place. The only question is whether that place is Cape Town or hell.

==================

Here are two more bits I like:

"But he would rather give his life for that dream. ... Or, rather, the lives of the ragtag army of boys who had come to believe in him as some kind of hip-hop Selassie."

and

"Two years before, Billy Afrika had stood there, over Clyde Adams's gutted body, and made another promise. Swore he'd take care of his friend's family. He'd handed in his badge and become a mercenary. No one had used the word mercenary, of course. You were a contractor, skilled in close protection."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bullitt: Sounds of the '60s

I've just watched Bullitt for the first time, and I don't remember ever having seen a movie so self-conscious about its sound editing.

Footsteps clatter loudly and significantly. Characters gesticulate and argue behind glass, seen but unheard. Pumps pump menacingly. Characters breathe loudly, and if you know Jacques Tati, you know where the movie makers got their idea for the hospital lobby scene with its busy ambient sound and utter absence of dialogue.

A lot of this stuff comes across today like '60s artiness, but it works better than do the period touches in other '60s movies I've written about here. For one thing, the filmmakers took music more seriously and used it a good deal more effectively than did the makers of Harper. And they did just about everything better than did the folks who turned Modesty Blaise into an unfunny proto-Laugh-In sketch in 1966.

All right, folks, what defines period style for you, whether in movies from the 1960s or from any other period? If you behave and answer this question, I'll let you watch Bullitt's famous car chase. (One feature of the scene's soundtrack struck me as odd, another as interesting. I'll be interested to see if anyone else notices them.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

South African thriller opens with a barrage of good lines

The thumbs-up on Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead comes once again from the energetic David Thompson of Houston's Murder By the Book. He recommended this South African thriller, and I think I'll like it because the opening pages are full of quotable lines. Here are some of my favorites:

"The night they were hijacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukrainian whore."

and

"The cannibal elbowed her beneath her plastic tits. `Go and piss.' Coming from his mouth it sounded almost like a benediction: Go in peace."

and, maybe best of all:

"They walked into the tiled and scented bathroom, Michael Bolton dribbling from the ceiling speakers."

The challenge will now be whether Smith can sustain and whether the story can bear that much verbal panache for 290 pages. I think I'll have lots of fun finding out.

(Wake Up Dead is Smith's second thriller. Read more about the author here. Read more about South African crime fiction at the Crime Beat Web site. And does the prose in these brief excerpts remind you of anyone?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Leighton Gage's latest

A good start to Dying Gasp, Leighton Gage's third novel about Chief Inspector Mario Silva of Brazil's Federal Police:

"The bomb aboard the number nine tram claimed seventeen lives. Sixteen were passengers.

"The seventeenth was the driver of a nearby postal truck. Mail from his shattered vehicle littered the cobblestones in front of the Museum of the Tropics and fluttered, like tiny flags, from the branches of the linden trees."

That's a nice bit of lyricism, perhaps unexpected in the description of a terrorist act's aftermath.

Another early chapter has Silva acknowledge what might be the most calculatingly reprehensible act I have ever read by a crime fiction protagonist who is ostensibly a good man. Moreover, Silva's own rashness and stupidity may have forced him into the act. I'm not sure this will play a large role in the story, but it does remind me of what Gage said about Silva and his colleague in the first part of last year's Detectives Beyond Borders interview:

"Silva and Hector Costa are rare cops by Brazilian standards, rare because they’ve both achieved positions of influence while retaining, and often acting out of, a sense of justice. Please note that I’m not using the word honest. Silva is not honest. Costa isn’t either. They’re merely just. In Brazil, honest men seldom seek out careers as cops. And if they do, their likelihood of promotion is slight. Silva and Costa are realists. They know, from the very beginning, that if they want to enforce the spirit of the law, they’re often going to have to break the letter of it."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Olha, que coisas mais feias!

Leighton Gage writes about the ugly side of a beautiful country: Brazil.

"You can believe in cops who murder people because there are cops who murder people," Gage told Detectives Beyond Borders last year. "You can believe in people that will kill you for your cell phone because there are people that will kill you for your cell phone; you can believe in the impunity of the rich, because it’s a fact that rich Brazilians seldom go to jail – no matter how grave their offense."

Now you can catch up with the corruption. I'll send Gage's second Mario Silva novel, Buried Strangers, and the soon-to-be-released third book, Dying Gasp (one book per person), to the two readers who make the best cases for why they should get a book. In the meantime, read excerpts from both novels at Gage's Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Wooden Overcoat

I've just begun another of the books I bought on David Thompson's recommendation at Houston's Murder by the Book (May its profits increase!): The Wooden Overcoat by Pamela Branch.

I've waffled over whether the book is too cozy for my taste, but an informative short biography of Branch, available on the Rue Morgue Press Web site and as an introduction to the novel, may have resolved the issue in the book's favor. The biography likens Branch's "madcap black humor" to that of such British movies as Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Branch published the novel in 1951; Ealing Studios released Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949. Throw in another Alec Guinness movie, The Ladykillers, and there's reason to regard The Wooden Overcoat as a literary version of a subgenre I'd known previously only through movies: the macabre cozy. (Be sure to watch the original Ladykillers and not the wretched Tom Hanks remake.)

(Branch's novel offers one big surprise in its opening chapters, at least for me. And wooden overcoat is slang for coffin. At least one source says the expression may be of U.S. origin, while others call it Cockney rhyming slang, without, however, explaining the derivation.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

New Guy Ritchie movie honors Irish crime writer

Well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, but the Doyles were an Irish Catholic family, and Doyle's mother was Mary Foley.

OK, I admit that that was just a hook. I mentioned it because several minor characters in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie, Sherlock Holmes, speak with what sound to me like Irish accents. I eagerly anticipate a critique from the blogosphere's leading critic of Irish accents in movies.

More notable is a scene of Holmes fighting a bare-knuckles boxing match to the accompaniment of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing "Rocky Road to Dublin," even though the band members did not write the song, as the movie's credits say they did.

The film also makes interesting use of the vaunted Holmes logical method, alluding to it at the very beginning, and then having Holmes do so just a time or two later on. This lets Guy Ritchie do his action/special effects thing without getting bogged down in old-fashioned mannerisms.

What other contemporary touches does Ritchie bring? In the aforementioned fight scene, he turns Holmes' famed logical method into a kind of Zen-like meditation that will be familiar to a generation raised on latter-day, glossy martial-arts-influenced movies. And the central plot strand, more thriller than detective tale, has a steam-punk overtone.

Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes is more dissipated than the typical Holmes, falling into a depressed funk and letting his room fall into an alarming state of disorder. (The emphasis on the dark side goes only so far, though. Holmes used cocaine, but probably could not be shown doing so in today's moral environment. See Smithsonian.com for interesting speculation on a possible literary source for the darker side of Sherlock Holmes. That source, too, is Irish.)

That's how Guy Ritchie updates Sherlock Holmes. How do other directors update old stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Season's greetings beyond borders

Merry Christmas. Happy Christmas. Joyeux Noël.

Gledileg Jó. Buon Natale. God Jul. Feliz Natal. Nollaig Shona Dhuit. Vrolijk Kerstfeest. Meri Kirihimete. Sung Tan Chuk Ha. Eid Milad Majeed. 圣诞快乐. Sretan Bozic. Sawadee Pee Mai. Geseënde Kersfees. Feliz Navidad.

Bon Nadal. Hyvää joulua. 聖誕快樂. Froehliche Weihnachten. Baradin ki shubh kamnaaye. Souksan van Christmas. Heughliche Winachten un 'n moi Nijaar. Gledelig Jul. Shub Naya Varsh. Buorrit Juovllat. Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun. めりーくりすます. Nadolig Llawen.

===============

Each of the above -- with one exception -- is in a language spoken where a novel or story discussed on this blog or a post that appeared here was set. Find the exception, and I'll be highly impressed.

Now, excuse me while I go investigate some strange noises on the roof.

Merry Christmas!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bad manners, crime and Colin Cotterill

"Hilda knew the lass would be making people's lives a misery when she was sixty. She'd decided then and there to make an example of her."

The perp/protagonist of "Gran Larceny" is a senior citizen, which is the point of Colin Cotterill's Ageing Disgracefully, a collection of short stories about "murderers, bank robbers, practical jokers, serial killers, perverts and just plain liars, all of whom are old enough to know better."

She also shares a trait with the killer in Ken Bruen's Calibre: She targets people with bad manners.

(It is just coincidence that I am trapped in the Pen & Pencil Club with a roomful of a) flacks and political operatives who [though it's redundant to say so] are b) unnecessarily loud and are also listening to c) reggae.)

Who would you bump off, rob or set up because of their rudeness, thoughtlessness, lack of consideration and other offensive carrying on? How would you do it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A real cool comic and a real free sample

I've now caught up with all but an issue or two of the Scalped saga, and I can say a few things about the characters and about how the story fits into the noir and hard-boiled traditions. I can also speculate about how long writer Jason Aaron and artist R. M. Guéra will continue this superb comic-book series.

Scalped works as high-intensity noir because every major and significant supporting character is driven by traumatic, unresolved events in his or her past. It works as fast-moving narrative because Aaron jumps back and forth in time, more distant flashbacks always building toward the present, and thus averting the danger of losing focus.

It works as believable, contemporary storytelling because it is unsparing and unsentimental in its depiction of the fictional Prairie Rose Indian reservation, and because its Native American, Asian and black characters can be driven and corrupt. There is little guilty-white-liberal breast-beating at work here. It works as hard-boiled because it's harsh and violent and because Aaron puts wisecracks in the mouths of tough characters at the grimmest moments.

Vertigo has just published or is about to publish Issue #33 of Scalped, and I wonder how long the series will continue in its current narrative form. A number of stories to this point include lengthy flashbacks to a given character's back story, and Aaron will run out of characters sooner or later, or at least risk seeming soap-operalike if he introduces new characters for the sake of giving them dramatic backgrounds. Already, the two strongest characters — the gone-but-returned Dashiell Bad Horse and the violent, corrupt, venal, haunted casino owner/police chief/boss/ex-activist Lincoln Red Crow — overshadow fellow characters given equal back-story treatment.

But that's a quibble. Scalped is one of my best crime-fiction discoveries in recent years and certainly the most unexpected.

(Read Scalped #1 free here.)

***

I've read Scalped in trade paperback collections and regular monthly issues. One of the latter offers on its back cover an advertisement for Star Wars: Space Chicken. That's a cartoon comedy based on the Star Wars™ "universe," but the ad copy makes fun of the Star Wars™ fan phenomenon, with references to nerds and such. The idea of a movie/television/action figure empire so all-encompassing that it can make fun of itself is disquieting. Satire is good. Officially licensed satire seems somewhat worrisome, totalitarian and beside the point.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Billy Boyle and Ireland's secret World War II history

I neglected to mention yesterday what sparked my interest in James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels. Here's the beyond-borders connection:

Benn's current and fourth novel in his World War II-based series, Evil for Evil, has Boyle in Northern Ireland investigating theft of arms from a U.S. base for possible use in a Nazi-sponsored IRA uprising. (For some reason, IRA ties to Nazi Germany are not much discussed in the United States.)

The first book, Billy Boyle, which I'm reading now, has explored no such politically dangerous territory yet. But it does lay the groundwork for interesting internal conflict. Boyle, a young Irish American police officer from South Boston, heads to war in London with no particular military ambitions and a family legacy of ill will toward the English.

Young Billy, also the novel's first-person narrator, scorns advice that he be discreet about flaunting his American cash in front of the beleaguered and relatively impoverished English — until, on his way to his new assignment, he sees a wounded woman flashing the V-for-victory sign as she is carried from a pile of rubble on a stretcher:

"`Welcome to London,' Harding said as the traffic moved forward.

"`Yes, sir,' Maybe I wouldn't wave those sawbucks around for a while."

This shapes up as a compelling, politically charged take on the loss-of-innocence-in-war theme. It also makes me wonder how big a readership Benn has in South Boston.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Billy Boyle's life during wartime

Billy Boyle, first of James R. Benn's four mysteries about a young Boston police officer who winds up in World War II England, has a long, leisurely buildup to what I suspect will be its central plot, and that suits the context just fine.

Billy's arrival in London is full of walks about town that take in tourist sights, wry observations, innocent wisecracks, loneliness, and the curiously unreal (to an American, at least) spectacle of a city trying to go about its business in a war zone:

"We turned a corner and had to stop as workers in blue coveralls hauled bricks away from a smoldering pile of debris that had slid out into the street. People going to work walked around the mess, carrying their newspapers, umbrellas, and briefcases as if it were completely normal to walk past bomb-damaged buildings. Shops across the street had OPEN FOR BUSINESS painted on wood plans nailed over shattered windows."

Young Billy, like virtually all Americans, has no experience of war on his own soil, in his cities, on his own streets. Benn's leisurely introductory chapters lay the groundwork for possible conflicts, but mainly they give the innocent protagonist a chance to take in the strangeness of his own situation, and they invite readers to do the same.

(James R. Benn was part of the "War Crimes" panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis. Read more about Benn at his Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Tower

One advantage of a book cowritten by an Irish and a Jewish author is the enhanced possibility of good Irish and Jewish humor. The concision of this novel occasionally means both in the same scene:

"`Your father and books, don't get me started.'

"As if she needed an excuse. She was Jewish, she was born started. To say they were a poor match? Man, they were the worst marriage on the block and we had some beauties there. See the street on a Saturday night, after a ballgame and the brews had been sunk? Buckets of blood and recrimination.

"Did the cops come?

"Yeah, right.

"Most of the participants were cops.

"Mick neighborhood, what'd you expect?"

I'm just halfway through this short novel, but that's enough to note that it's hard, violent and funny without, however, making light of violence. It also has much to say about friendship and loyalty and, though it has the feel of an old-time gangster story, its setting is very much of our own globalized world ("Nick discovered he had a talent for boosting cars. He made Boyle and a lot of Third World bastards happy.").

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Red, white and a bagful of noir

I bought six issues of Scalped at my local comics shop this week and was surprised and pleased when I brought my purchases to the cash register to learn that the 50 percent off sale was still on. Then, when I found three back issues of 100 Bullets in the dollar bin, the proprietor let me have them free. Net result: nine dollars for nine books of the best noir being written and drawn today.

(Of course, in my day one could buy nine comics for $1.08. Even nine DC 80-page giants would have run $2.25, but who could have dreamed of such a bounty back then?)

Writer Jason Aaron situates Scalped on a fictional Indian reservation in South Dakota, and if you think the stories offer alcoholism and despair, you're right. But they also offer struggles for power, love, sex and money and, in a brief prologue to one story, a noirish flashback to Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Aaron and illustrator R. M. Guéra do a fine job creating a sense of place, in other words. Highly recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Don't hate me because I brood": Now with 60 percent fewer words!!!

Someone remarked recently that Nordic crime novels tend to feature whiny male detectives. I suggested that morose might be more accurate than whiny, and someone else added that Nordic crime fiction offers whiny female detectives, too.

Yet another observer offered the off-hand but accurate observation that a Nordic crime novel is likelier than an American one to include immigration as a major theme.

It would be a shame if anyone thought they knew what they were getting with Arnaldur Indriðason, though, just because he has that odd letter in his patronymic and because his protagonist lives alone in a cold country and broods occasionally and eats lots of lamb. He is a remarkable writer.

(Read all my posts abour Arnaldur here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Another great Brazilian noir song

Last year I nominated "Ocultei," recorded by the Brazilian singer Elizeth Cardoso, for a place among the great noir songs ever. There's something about the last verse, which runs tremulously thus (tentatively translated from the Portuguese by your humble blogkeeper):

"And my most ardent desire
May God pardon me the sin!
Is that another woman by your side
Kill you in the hour of a kiss."

If you think that looks good on your screen, you should hear Elizeth sing it, her voice melting from dreamy resignation to trembling passion, jealousy and anger.

This week, I finally paid attention to my second-favorite song on the album, "Só Voce, Mais Nada," which I think means "Only You; Nothing Else." Translating even more shakily than before, I hear the first verse as:

"Only you, nothing else
In the silence of the night
The emptiness of the street
When nothing happens
Only you go on."

The first song covers obsession and doom. The second has atmosphere down, I'd say.

What new noir songs have you heard since last year's list? And what makes noir noir for you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Long-lost James Ellroy story found ...

... in an anthology I'd had for some time without knowing the Ellroy tale, "Gravy Train," was in it. The book was in the bathroom, too, just like that first edition of Origin of Species.

Back in the fall, I was surprised how funny Ellroy was in print and in person. Had I read "Gravy Train" at the time, the humor would not have surprised me.

The story, published in Armchair Detective in 1990, is over the top, a full-out spoof of '40s and '50s hard-boiled P.I. stories. It's full of lines like "My trigger finger itched to dispense .45 caliber justice" and "I ran up and bashed his face in with the butt of my roscoe." There are also blackmail, a shady lawyer, and an inheritance scam.

Oh, yeah: There's hot girl-girl sex (it's relevant to the plot), an allusion to Ellroy's own reputed sordid past, and the protagonist falls in love with a dog. And, unlike most stories by the authors whose chains Ellroy yanks here, this one has a happy ending.

"Basko attacked; the schmucks ran for their car; one of them whipped out a cylindrical object and held it out to the hot pursuing hound. A streetlamp illuminated the offering: a bucket of Kentuck Colonel ribs.

"Basko hit the bucket and started snouting: I yelled "`No!' ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

That's Baron de Montesquieu to yuieu

I found a nice prediction in the Persian Letters, Montesquieu's epistolary narrative/satire of a Persian who journeys to the exotic land of France.

Usbek, having stopped in Smyrna, writes to his friend of the corruption and decadence of the Ottoman Empire: "There you have it, my dear Rustan, a correct idea of this empire, which will be the scene of some conqueror's triumphs in less than 200 years." (Italics mine, not Montesquieu's.)

The Persian Letters appeared in 1721; the letter quoted above is dated 1711 in the book. Historians date the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to 1908, and the empire fell in 1922. Montesquieu had a keen mind or perhaps good intelligence (or "intel," as today's jargon-worshiping newspapers would have it).

Later, bound for Marseilles and urgently eyeing Paris, Usbek writes to another friend that "Travelers always seek out the big cities, as they are a country common to all foreigners." As yesterday, so today, except for those travelers who always forgo the big cities to seek out the all-inclusive resorts.

(Read the Persian Letters free here. The Ottoman prediction is in Letter 19, the observation about cities in Letter 23.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Camilleri's Italian covers

My reading of and about Andrea Camilleri has led me to a Web site that offers a gallery of his Italian covers and links to tantalizing summaries of books not yet translated into English.

Camilleri's eleventh novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano has just been published in English as The Wings of the Sphinx; the site offers covers and summaries of fourteen novels plus two collections of Montalbano stories, an omnibus edition and a non-Montalbano book.

One of the novels takes the investigation into Montalbano's beloved Mediterranean, "the most marine of Montalbano's investigations," according to Camilleri. A collection of long stories, La prima indagine de Montalbano (Montalbano's First Investigation), takes the reader to a time when "Montalbano is 35 years old, an adult but still professionally naive and not so astute ..."

Now, there's something for Camilleri's readers to look forward to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The season: How do you give away books?

I love my readers; I steal some of my best ideas from them. The erudite Elisabeth has reminded me of a discussion some time back about the charms of passing books on to others once one has read them. So here's what I'll do:

Be one of the first five Detectives Beyond Borders readers to take a book you've read and send it to someone else, and I'll send you a book. Be honest, now; I'll have to take your word for it. The only condition is that you can't wipe toast crumbs from your face and pass the book to a spouse or child over the breakfast table. The book has to go to someone outside your household, whether across town, across country, or across the world.

I'll start the ball rolling by sending copies of Sandra Ruttan's two most recent books, Lullaby for the Nameless and The Frailty of Flesh, one to ccqdesigns and one to that old tooth-puller, Uriah Robinson, for their answers to the question I posed last week in Chasing the three-headed protagonist.

Write to me at detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net with instructions on where to send the books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Free crime for Christmas

If you're wracked by the recession or strapped by Christmas giving, here are four links that could keep you reading for a while and all for the right price: free.

They are Project Gutenberg's Crime Fiction, Mystery Fiction, Detective Fiction and Crime Nonfiction Bookshelves, and they offer free versions of classics to read or download by people like E.W. Hornung, creator of Raffles; Maurice Leblanc (Arsene Lupin), Poe, Dickens, John Buchan, E.C. Bentley, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Roberts Rinehart, G.K. Chesterton, Baroness Orczy (The Old Man In the Corner, The Scarlet Pimpernel), Joseph Conrad, Wilkie Collins, and many more, including some guy named Dostoyesvsky.

Season's greetings to all, and thanks to the good people at Project Gutenberg.

Now, it's your turn: What good no-cost gifts can you think of for the crime-fiction fan on your list?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Just call me Daddy War Books

Readers responded in good number to Friday's post about wartime crime fiction. One suggested I post a list of the nominated books and authors, and here it is:

— Alan Furst
— John Lawton
— Andrew Taylor's Lydmouth series
— David Downing, Silesian Station and Zoo Station
— Jo Walton: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown
— Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels
— Jacqueline Winspear
— Rebecca Pawel's Carlos Tejeda series (suggested by Rebecca Pool in response to a post about Rebecca Cantrell)
— City of Gold by Len Deighton
— Marshall Browne, The Eye of the Abyss and The Iron Heart
— Charles McCarry

Some readers noted that their suggestions would usually be considered espionage novels or thrillers, but they offered good arguments for including them on a crime reader's list. I made the post to increase my own TBR list and to give a shout-out to good books I might (might!) not get around to reading right away. You helped me do both. Thanks, gentle readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Norbert Davis' hard-boiled slapstick

I like to stick to my topic — crime fiction from outside the United States — so I was apprehensive about this post's subject, an American story by an American author. But the story appeared seventy-two years ago and, as Leslie P. Hartley reminded us, the past is a foreign country. Besides, the story is short, it's funny in some interesting ways, and you can read it free here.

Norbert Davis wrote novels with a dog as co-protagonist. He wrote stories set largely in a restaurant, and he created characters named Bail Bond Dodd and J.P. Jones (the J.P. stands for "Just Plain." That's the man's name — Just Plain Jones.) Yet despite those slapstick touches, and plots, dialogue and action to match, the stories work as hard-boiled tales. Little touches in some of the stories may even reflect the grimness of the Great Depression; he published his first stories in the early 1930s.

Here's the opening sentence of "Something for the Sweeper":

"Jones limped slowly along, his rubbers making an irregular squeak-squish sound on the wet cement of the sidewalk."

Is that slapstick (squish-squish), or is it gritty urban realism? In Davis, it's both. When you get to the end of this tale of murder and deception, you'll find the story has come full circle.

Find more free Norbert Davis online here, including his three man-and-dog novels featuring Doan and Carstairs, the former a deceptively harmless-seeming detecive, the latter a Great Dane Doan won in a card game. And read more about Davis at the Thrilling Detective Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Read On ... Rebecca Cantrell and wartime crime novels

Three years ago I wrote about an efficient little reference book called The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction. That book expanded its range through such clever devices as entries on themes and a handy "Read On ... " addendum to many author entries that referred readers to similar books and writers. This made the book a guide to many more authors than the 220 who received entries of their own.

I thought of the book today when I received Rebecca Cantrell's A Trace of Smoke in the mail. I heard Cantrell on the War Crimes panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, and I liked what she had to say about her book, a tale of death, intrigue and secrets in interwar Berlin. Among her fellow panelists, James R. Benn and Charles Todd also set novels in that jolly time between the start of World War I and the end of World War II.

I'll read A Trace of Smoke when I get some deadlines out of the way, and Benn is also in my TBR pile, along with Olen Steinhauer, whose novels are set amid the Cold War. I'll want to read more John Lawton, whose Second Violin chronicles inglorious episodes in English history before Word War II, as well as Charles Todd.

And then there's ... Well, here is where you come in. Help me build a "Read On ... " list of current crime novels set in Europe between 1914 and the early 1960s, Europe in World Wars and Cold Wars. What are your favorite crime stories set in these times and places? Why do you like them? What is the appeal of such books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Chasing the three-headed protagonist: Your chance to win a book

Posting may be sketchy for the next couple of weeks thanks to a pair of looming deadlines. Fortunately, a thoughtful author has stepped in to help.

Sandra Ruttan's new novel, Lullaby for the Namless, like its predecessors, The Frailty of Flesh and What Burns Within, has three police-officer protagonists: Nolan, Hart and Tain. Ruttan recognizes the increased dramatic possibilities multiple protagonists offer, and she says she's surprised that publishers are not more open to this format. We may never have another Ed McBain, she laments.

Is Ruttan right? Is there a prejudice against books with three (or more) lead characters? If so, why? What are your favorite such stories?

Best answer wins a copy of Lullaby for the Nameless signed by the author. And stay tuned for more Ruttan book competitions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How series change over time: Montalbano and performance

Conversation during and after yesterday's Sandra Ruttan-Jeff VanderMeer reading in Baltimore turned to the joys and frustrations of writing a crime-fiction series and the changes authors make from book to book. Ruttan's new novel, Lullaby for the Nameless, jumps back and forth between plot lines in the present and in the past. And VanderMeer makes changes in narrative form and even, to some extent, in genre from City of Saints and Madmen to Shriek: An Afterword to his new novel, Finch.

Talk of these radical formal and stylistic changes within a series struck me all the more because of the subtle changes within the series I'm currently reading, Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels. Early in the series, Camilleri exploited his theater background for metaphors and similes. This tendency is especially notable in Excursion to Tindari, the fifth book, published in 2000 and translated into English five years later.

That novel includes an admonition to "Calm down, you look like a character in a puppet theatre." A few pages later, "As if following a script, Montalbano first wrung his hands ... " and, my favorite of the bunch: "`The stakes are extremely high.' He felt disgusted by the words coming out of his mouth. ... He wondered how much longer he could keep up the charade."

Elsewhere, Montalbano impersonates Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot and, as if to underline the motifs of performance, toward the end of the novel Montalbano reflects on the town of Tindari, destination of the couple whose murder triggers the story: "What Montalbano remembered of Tindari was the small mysterious Greek theater." And that's not Camilleri's only invocation of Athenian drama. Several novels in the series feature family dynamics unmistakably redolent of Greek plays and epics.

That's why there's a decided edge of humorous introspection to an exchange in August Heat (Italian publication 2006/English translation 2009) between Montalbano and his junior colleague Fazio as the two speculate over the case of man whose stepson has been found dead"

Montalbano: "In short, you don't see Speciale as a
murderer?"

Fazio: "No way."

M: "But you know, in Greek tragedy—"

F: "We're in Vigàta, Chief, not Greece."

M: "Tell me the truth: Do you like the story or don't you?"

F: "It seems okay for TV."

(Click here for more on how series change over time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Crossing borders in Baltimore

Attended a reading and signing tonight with Jeff VanderMeer and Sandra Ruttan in Baltimore. VanderMeer is author or co-author of titles that include Why Should I Cut Your Throat? and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, so you know his imagination ranges widely.

His talk and, more important, his fiction, including his current Finch, bring in fantasy, noir and hard-boiled, and why not? The man's all about crossing borders. In Finch, a non-human force has stepped in to occupy the city of Ambergris, rent asunder by civil war between competing merchant families.

Finch, a human, is "asked by the occupiers to solve a difficult double murder" amid the city's seedy underbelly, and if that reminds crime-fiction readers of Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Rebecca Cantrell, J. Robert Janes, David Peace and so on, great. VanderMeer could well get this crime-fiction readers reading fantasy, just as Brian Lindenmuth got me reading comics. Furthermore, VanderMeer cited John Burdett, Colin Cotterill and Derek Raymond among his favorite crime authors, and that prepares me for a richly detailed setting and a dark story for when I read Finch.

VanderMeer also said: "I don't really see any difference between the setting and the character," which endeared him to your humble blogkeeper.

Ruttan's Lullaby for the Nameless has just been released, the third novel in her Nolan, Hart and Tain series, and the triple protagonists are one indication of what she does differently. No surprise, then, that she expresses a certain nostalgia for Ed McBain and the large cast of his 87th Precinct novels. Oh, and the opening of Lullaby for the Nameless focuses as harrowingly and unsparingly on the victim as does any Scandinavian crime writer you'd care to name.

And here's a tantalizing hint of what she may be up to in the future: "I think I'm becoming a little more interested in the subtle crimes we tolerate day to day," italics mine.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Persistence of— Er, what was that again?

Last week I praised the makers of the Italian Commissario Montalbano television series, based on Andrea Camilleri's novels, for Montalbano's dance of hysterical joy when his scheme to lure a political fixer works.

I remembered the novel, The Shape of Water, only as describing Montalbano's thoughts when the scheme succeeded, and I gave the moviemakers credit for turning the thoughts into action. But I was wrong; the scene is an accurate transcription of Camilleri's original, as I've discovered on rereading the book:

"Montalbano covered the receiver with one hand and literally exploded in a horselike whinny, a mighty guffaw. He had baited the Jacomuzzi hook with the necklace, and the trap had worked like a charm ... Montalbano heard Rizzo yelling on the line.

"`Hello? Hello? ... What happened, did we get cut off?'

"`No, excuse me, I dropped my pencil and was looking for it. I'll see you tomorrow at eight.'"

I was so impressed with the filmmakers' adaptation that I credited them with invention when they were really just following the book. My favorable impression made me misremember. What tricks has your memory played on you? What scenes from books or movies have surprised you on rereading or re-viewing because they were not the way you remembered them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Finnish lines

An American Detectives Beyond Borders favorite makes it into the Finno-Ugric language family. Read an interview (in English) with the author here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More Montalbano: Good writing in novels and on TV

I've commented caustically about television crime shows, and Declan Burke has commented even more caustically on a highly successful agent's pronouncement that "Good writing is the last thing, and we can work with authors on that."

In a comment to Burke's post, John McFetridge notes that

"Sure, the movies still make money, but almost every prize-winner, almost every movie for grown-ups, almost every movie with real people and not cartoons or cartoonish stories is based on a novel filled with 'good writing' because it turns out that's the part you can't 'work with,' so you have to buy it somewhere else.The 'original screenplay' movies are for kids – cartoons or slapstick comedy, action and horror."

That's why I'm happy to be reminded that, given a good novel to work with, an intelligent screenwriter can adapt the material to the demands of a different medium and come up with something not quite identical to the original but true to its spirit. Call it good screenwriting, if you like.

The subject here is The Shape of Water, both Andrea Camilleri's novel and its adaptation for Italian television's Il commissario Montalbano series. The novel opens with two desultory trash collectors in an open-air brothel called "the Pasture" or La Mánnara. Camilleri then offers a pointed, funny social history of the Pasture, introduces the family of one of the collectors (the family will play a role later), and has the two workers make a pair of important discoveries and a critical phone call.

The TV film, on the other hand, opens with a prostitute witnessing the crime that gave rise to the action described above, and that was a good move on the filmmakers' part. Camilleri's opening is one of slow, leisurely, at times very funny discovery, and someone made the wise decision that such an opening would be difficult to translate to the screen.

Elsewhere, the filmmakers combine two minor characters into one and change her nationality. They also cut out a comic sexual/romantic subplot and work gracefully around the cut. Again, it's hard to argue with the decisions. The filmmakers knew their material, they knew the media of books and television, and they knew what each could do best.

Finally, I hope no one will accuse me of Communistic tendencies if I quote with approval and amusement Camilleri's description of the Pasture:

"Most of the meat came from the former Eastern Bloc countries, now free at last of the Communist yoke which, as everyone knows, had denied all personal, human dignity; now, between the Pasture's bushes and sandy shore, come nightfall, that reconquered dignity shone again in all its magnificence."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Arnaldur's latest, plus reasons to be thankful, Part I

I've just started Arnaldur Indriðason's sixth Inspector Erlendur novel to appear in English, Hypothermia, and I hope you'll forgive me for calling that a very cool title. Here are a few bits of the first chapter:

"She drove over Mosfellsheidi moor where there was little traffic, just the odd pair of headlights passing by on their way to town. Only one other car was travelling east and she hung on its red rear lights, grateful for the company. ... Karen was aware of the mountain Grimannsfell to her right, although she couldn't see it ... The red lights accelerated and disappeared into the darkness ... She had difficulty identifying the landmarks in the gloom ... "

What kind of story does that remind you of? Yep, me, too, and sure enough, after poor Karen discovers her friend's body, here's an investigating detective at the scene:

"He walked over to the shelving unit and noticed the brown leather spines of five volumes of Jón Árnason's Collected Folk Tales. Ghost stories, he thought to himself."

I don't know yet if ghosts will figure in the story, but Arnaldur sure knows how to create atmosphere, doesn't he?

***

On a more earthly plane, the Rap Sheet's J. Kingston Pierce offers a longish list of things he's grateful for as the United States heads into Thanksgiving Day. He saves for last a sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly:

"Let me voice my appreciation, too, for the authors and critics who have made me feel welcome among them. ... I’ve been looking during my entire earthly existence for what sociologists would call `my tribe,' the folks among whom I fit best. I thought that tribe was made up of journalists, the professionals I trained with and learned from for so many years. But the fact is, I might have been looking in the wrong place. Turns out, where I feel most at home is in a crowd of crime-genre fans, all of whom have traveled the same dark (fictional) thoroughfares over which I’ve trod in my mind for decades. I hope to see you all again next October in beautiful San Francisco."

Amen, Jeff, and thanks, crime guys and gals. You've made my year. Happy Thanksgiving.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Montalbano on TV and in books

I've managed to avert technical glitches long enough to watch two episodes on DVD of the Italian Commissario Montalbano television series, starring Luca Zingaretti as Andrea Camilleri's choleric, intuitive, food-loving, commitment-avoiding detective.

Zingaretti was several years short of forty when the television series first aired on Italy's RAI network in 1999; Camilleri's Montalbano is around fifty in the first book and ages from there. Zingaretti is bald and clean-shaven; Camilleri's Montalbano is neither. Zingaretti looks less like a young Montalbano than like an older Jason Stethem. (Or maybe all bald men look the same.)

In any case, despite the startling physical departure from Camilleri's original, Zingaretti does a brilliant job, coming up with actions that match beautifully what Camilleri conveys through interior monologue and free indirect speech. One favorite example from the episode based on The Shape of Water has Montalbano silently pumping his fist and exulting when he receives a late-night phone call from a political fixer, a call for which he had laid the groundwork carefully by planting a leak to the media. Television can't convey thought and indirect speech except through the clumsy medium of a voiceover; Zingaretti and director Alberto Sironi find the perfect objective correlative for the delight Camilleri has the character take in his own schemes.

***

Katharina Böhm is less satisfactory as Montalbano's lover, Livia, but that must be a hell of a difficult role. In the novels, Livia is less a physical presence than a voice on the phone and a constant prod to Montalbano's conscience. I don't know how a screenwriter and a performer could capture this successfully.

Isabell Sollman as Ingrid, on the other hand, is as richly physical and humorous a presence on the screen as the character is in the books. I especially liked her accent, just strong enough to remind viewers she's no native without lapsing into over-the-top Swedishisms. The high, wide sweep of her cheekbones helps, too.

Which movie or TV characters do what Zingaretti's Montalbano did: surprise you by not looking or acting the way you expected based on the book while remaining faithful to the book's spirit? Which have matched exactly what you pictured from books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Politics, smoking and bullshit

As soon as the man closed the door, Montalbano felt a violent need to smoke. But it was forbidden, and rightly so, since, as everyone knows, passive cigarette smoke kills millions, whereas smog, dioxin and lead in petrol do not.

– Andrea Camilleri,
Excursion to Tindari

As in Vigàta, so in Philadelphia. The city where I live was in the forefront of the movement to ban smoking in public places, and the most recent former mayor may be best remembered for urging the city to lose weight.

These are worthy goals, but I can't help suspect that they were at least in part diversions to take the city's mind off its shrinking population, constant threats of reduction in city services, and winking disregard of laws that are supposed to regulate billboards and mandate public access to sidewalks, among other things. One could make the case that Philadelphia has been in decline since the middle of the nineteenth century, but to acknowledge this would be unoptimistic – that is to say, un-American. Alternately, elected officials may have gravitated to mom-and-apple-pie issues like smoking and obesity because they felt helpless in the face of larger economic forces.

It's no stretch to suggest, as Camilleri does, that individual smokers make easier and safer political targets than do big industries.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Salvo Montalbano looks back at the 1960s

Excursion to Tindari, fifth of Andrea Camilleri's novels featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano (eleven of the books have been translated into English to date), contains an assertion of political maturity and independence surprising from a man of the left who has remained steadfastly so.

Montalbano is musing over the news that a friend from the heyday of European radicalism, has been named president of the second-most important bank in Sicily:

"What Montalbano remembered most from those days was a poem by Pasolini, defending the police against the students at Valle Giulia in Rome. All his friends had spat on those verses, whereas he, Montalbano, had tried to defend them. `But it's a beautiful poem.' If they hadn't restrained him, Carlo Martello would've broken his nose with one of his deadly punches. ... At any rate, over the years he'd seen his friends, the legendary comrades from 68, all turn `reasonable.' And by dint of reason, their abstract fury had softened and finally settled into concrete acquiescence."

In the U.S. confessions of radicals-turned-conservatives are an established sub-genre, I think. Less familiar are figures such as Montalbano (and Camilleri himself, perhaps) who can look back on the excesses of the 1960s, heap scorn on the perpetrators of those excesses, and remain a sardonic, committed man of the left.

Dominique Manotti's novels also cast a critical eye on the afterlife of 1960s activism. What other crime writers do this? What is their attitude toward those old days? Repentant? Scornful? Forgiving?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Not crap

Jedidiah Ayres' Hardboiled Wonderland blog offers If it's not Scottish – It's Crap!, an interview with author/agent/editor Allan Guthrie. By coincidence, the happy resolution of a mix-up at my post office brings a bumper crop of books, among them The Good Son by Dundee's own Russel D. McLean.

That novel's lead blurb from Ken Bruen says the novel has all the merits of Jean-Patrick Manchette "with the added bonus of a Scottish sense of wit that is like no other." Not crap, indeed.

Back to Guthrie. Ayres asks good questions, and Guthrie's answers are full of insight, humor and evidence of his knowledge of noir and its history. If he and Megan Abbott ever team-teach a course in noir, I'm going back to college.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More novel graphics

Last month Jon Jordan sent along a generous package of graphic novels. Last week at Murder and Mayhem in Muskego, I talked with Brian Azzarello, author of one of the books.

In the opening pages of Filthy Rich, Azzarello's words and Victor Santos' art combine to tell the story in ways words alone could not, at least not so concisely.

The art plays against Azzarello's captions and moves the book into disquieting irony. The narrator, a football player forced out of the sport by a knee injury and something shadier as well, wryly casts his life as a fairy tale and himself as "a handsome prince, that everyone loved." Santos' rich black-and-white drawings, meanwhile, show the same narrator engaged in decidedly un-fairy-tale-like acts.

In Muskego, I buttonholed Azzarello, told him I admired his work (which also includes 100 Bullets and The Joker), and said I was fascinated, as a novice comics reader, by the ways pictures and words work together. I was pleased that he singled out the opening pages of Filthy Rich, just as I had.

Pages two and three tell us the fairy tale has ended, page three in five panels of jump cuts, from long shot to two-shot to extreme close-up to two more long shots from sharply different points of view. It's kinetic and exciting, and we don't know what it all leads to until a panel that takes up all of page four. The pace tells the story, but so do the words and the hulking size of the page-four panel.

(See two previous posts about comics here and here. In the first, I discuss graphics carrying the opening of an original story. In the second, art adds new dimensions in the graphic-novel adaptation of a great French crime novel.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Murder is Everywhere in the blogosphere

Another group of crime writers from around the globe has banded together to form a collective blog. Murder is Everywhere is Leighton Gage, author of the Mario Silva series set in Brazil; Cara Black, whose Aimée Leduc investigations take readers all over Paris; Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, collectively known as Michael Stanley and the authors of the Detective Kubu mysteries, set in Botswana; Iceland's Yrsa Sigurdardòttir; and, from the exotic land of England, Dan Waddell.

Initial offerings include Gage's account of a crime reporter from northern Brazil, with emphasis on crime and reporter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Murder and Mayhem in Muskego, Part 4: Wisconsin cozy

No one knows exactly what noir is, but everyone wants to be it. No one knows exactly what cozies are, but even authors who write them shy away from the term.

One panel at Murder and Mayhem in Muskego comprised writers whose work fits comfortably under the cozy umbrella, yet when the panel's moderator brought the subject up, he asked, "What about the c-word?" The ensuing discussion revealed that matters could be worse. In Canada, someone said, such books, low on graphic violence and usually with female amateur sleuths as the protagonist, are called fluffies.

On a 1-10 scale, cozy to noir, my own crime reading probably falls between 7 and 9. But I spent a good part of Bouchercon 2009 annoying people with my suggestions for clever titles, so I have a soft spot for the author of books such as Hail to the Chef and State of the Onion.

[Click here for one definition of a cozy mystery, here for Ruth Dudley Edwards' discussion of why the term is problematic — and almost uniquely American — and here for my own previous discussions of this question (scroll down).]

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Wisconsin noir: Murder and Mayhem in Muskego, Part 3

(Megan Abbott, F. Paul Wilson, J.A. Konrath, Joe Schmidt, Ann Voss Peterson)

Laura Lippman said something else I liked during her Murder and Mayhem in Muskego discussion with Jan Burke: "My pitch is, in the next year, read something out of your comfort zone."

Burke herself talked about the first line of her novel Goodnight, Irene. The line — He loved to watch fat women dance — deserves a place on any list of evocative openings, and Burke said the line gave birth to the book. "Two people and a plot in that line," she said.

In his own interview session, F. Paul Wilson said we might be in a second Golden Age of crime fiction. His evidence? The proliferation of graphic novels and noir.

Noir came up, too, in an informal chat at Casa Jordan. We threw out names of authors we thought wrote noir, and three of the first names among current writers were women: Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks and Christa Faust. What this means, I don't know, but their writing has that delicious, doom-laden embrace of the dark side that defines noir for me. Who else has it? Paul Cain and Jean-Patrick Manchette come to mind, and perhaps Yasmina Khadra as well.

Who is noir for you, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Murder and Mayhem in Muskego V, Part 2

Other than that photo of me swathed in a towel and just out of the shower already posted elsewhere on the Internet, Murder and Mayhem in Muskego V was everything I'd grown to love about crime-fiction conventions.

Intelligent people talked seriously about interesting matters, and those same intelligent people then mingled in warmth and good fellowship. This time they did not even have to pay for their own food or drinks.

I liked Laura Lippman's criticism of the oft-given advice that beginning writers write what they know. She said the advice served her poorly in one of her own embryonic, excessively autobiographical early efforts. "Write what you know," Lippman said, is "well-intentioned, but it's poorly put. [Better to] write what you want to know about."

Brian Azzarello said his characters "become really special to me after I kill them." Azzarello, author of, among others, the graphic novels 100 Bullets, The Joker and Filthy Rich, also said, "I don't write protagonists. They're all antagonists." Based on the first trade paperback collection of 100 Bullets, that's an accurate description.

(Judy Bobalik, Jeffrey Deaver)

Sam Reaves told one aspiring writer that "You don't want a tender-hearted agent, you want someone who will tell you the truth." And, for professional reasons, I had to enjoy Jeffrey Deaver's account of what happened when he rented a porno movie called Blonde on Blonde as research for a book he was setting in the porno world:

"Except in the editorial community these days," Deaver said, "the e [at the end of blonde] signifies that it's a woman." It did not so signify to the labellers of Deaver's porno movie, he said, and he and his girlfriend received a surprise when they slipped the tape into the Betamax. It's always pleasant to be reminded of what happens when copy editing goes bad.

***

The convention, largely centered on the efforts of the most excellent Ruth and Jon Jordan, also included its lighter moments. Here are my three favorite utterances from outside official conference proceedings:

"They've got your cookies."

"I'm a dick as a father, but people still like me."

"Sleeping and passing out aren't the same."

(More Murder and Mayhem snippets from Sandra Ruttan here.)

Finally, here's the picture referred to above. Don't blame me; I didn't take it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Murder and Mayhem in Muskego V

I finally made it off the ground after nine hours at Philadelphia International Airport. Ruth Jordan had driven to Milwaukee's airport to pick me up. Unfortunately I was in a taxi to the Jordans' house at the time, and I was at the top of the stairs to welcome Ruth back to her own hospitable home.

I've learned from Brian Azzarello the inspiration for 100 Bullets (a driver who cut Azzarello off) and that Sam Reaves, who also uses the name Dominic Martell for his Barcelona thrillers, likes that other Barcelona crime writer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. (He likes Jean-Claude Izzo, too.)

I also found interesting C.J. Box's answer to a question about authors, blogs and social media such as Facebook: "Modern readers, I think, require some kind of interaction with the author."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sitting back and watching the action

A little more than three chapters into Christopher G. Moore's Paying Back Jack, two hit men have been incinerated during a botched assassination, a woman has plunged to her death from a hotel window, and two mysterious military figures have arrived in town.

Yet even amid the bursts of action, the pace is relaxed, the dominant mood that of a slow feeling-out, an openness to Bangkok's strange and wonderful sights. Some amusing and telling lines help:

"A couple of yings dressed like Japanese geisha called out to him. They liked his jacket. They smelled money.

"`I'm not Japanese. I can't go inside,' he called back in Thai.

"`No problem. You not come in. We go out. Sure.'"

and

"He'd packed Graham Greene's The Quiet American -- on the basis that he'd never met such an American -- and George Orwell's Burmese Days."

and

"There were other private security contractors like them mixing in, looking for new recruits, talking about the situation in Baghdad and the bad old days of Desert Storm. That storm had left the desert and pretty much spread everywhere. That much everyone agreed on as they bought each other rounds of drinks and waited to crank up one more Cobra Gold exercise."

That last passage reminds me of a remark in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's The Man of My Life about the "theology of security." What other crime fiction alludes or refers explicitly to our post-New World Order, post-9/11 worlds?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How Christopher G.Moore crosses borders

Christopher G. Moore calls his P.I. protagonist, Vincent Calvino, "a cultural detective. He sifts through the evidence in a way that makes sense of the location and people living in Southeast Asia."

Moore lived, worked or studied in Canada, England, the United States and Japan before winding up in Bangkok. He writes of seeing Thailand come out its isolation, of people everywhere "inching closer to a common center."

Calvino is a former lawyer who similarly wound up in Bangkok. I'm not sure he has arrived at that center yet, but it's fun to watch his trip. Here's a bit from the opening chapter of the tenth Calvino novel, Paying Back Jack:

"They'd suggested that he try looking at things as if they were fresh, new, and of another time and place.

"I've just arrived, and this is the first street in Asia I've ever seen. A smile crossed Calvino's face as he moved down the soi. Each step was a foot deeper into the freak show, starting with the huge banyan tree. Its large, twisted trunk wrapped with dozens of thin, colored nylon scarves, the tree had long, stringy veins that hung like gnarled tentacles over the soi. A dwarf stood on the broken sidewalk in front of a bar, dressed in a vest, a white shirt, and a bow tie. Holding up a sign for happy hour beer, he tagged along after each passing tourist for a few steps. Then, exhausted, he'd stop and retrace his steps to the bar and wait to strike again. `Come inside!' he shouted. `Many pretty girls!' The dwarf was right."

There are no twisted banyan trees in Philadelphia, and if the city has dwarf touts, I've missed them as well. But I'd call Calvino's approach a nice way of opening one's eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a new place -- or to an old one whose initial excitement has begun to pall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Augustus Mandrell is coming back!

Back between 1965 and 1971, Frank McAuliffe brought out three collections of linked stories about an amazing international hit man and master of disguise named Augustus Mandrell. Another Mandrell book lay unpublished for more than forty years, scuttled, it is said, by the unfortunate coincidence of its title with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Shoot the President, Are You Mad? will finally see the light of day in the first quarter of 2010, thanks to The Outfit, a new crime-fiction publisher headed by JT Lindroos and Sean Wallace. The book will take its place beside the first three Augustus Mandrell books: Of All the Bloody Cheek, Rather a Vicious Gentleman and For Murder I Charge More.

Here's what I wrote after reading Of All the Bloody Cheek:

"McAuliffe must be one of the slyest, hippest, funniest, sharpest, most satirically minded writers who has ever written crime fiction. He offers the reader thrills, surprise endings, laugh-out-loud jokes, and a memorable protagonist. Mandrell may remind you of the Saint or of James Bond, but he's deadpan funnier than both without being at all groaningly spoofy. And he's not all thrills and laughs, either. The third story in Of All the Bloody Cheek, for example, has a rather poignant moment just before its end."

Read all my raves about Frank McAuliffe and Augustus Mandrell to learn why I'm so delighted that another book is on the way.

N.B. The forthcoming book is usually discussed under the title They Shoot Presidents, Don't They? but Lindroos says The Outfit is publishing it with the title McAuliffe intended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A few more Houston pictures and your chance to win a book

Here's something Houston has lots of.

Here's a celestial body with which Houston will forever be linked.




The third scene, slightly expanded, reveals a clue at lower right. The clue suggests, correctly, that the pattern is in a roadway. The colorfully painted crosswalk is one of several such in Houston's Museum District. Two readers guessed accurately enough to win book prizes. Congratulations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Plots without guns

Five stories into The Big Score, a collection by Australia's godfather of crime fiction, Peter Corris, I'm struck by the low number of killings.

One story involves a con, one a counter-con and another vandalism against trees, believe it or not. All work because of the amiable but tough P.I. protagonist, Cliff Hardy, and the deft, sympathetic pictures of the con artists and victims -- with a wink for the plucky souls who come out on top, which ever side of the law they're on.

Hardy has a certain admiration for the smaller-time criminals whose world he shares: "It takes all kinds," Hardy muses about one imprisoned client, "and he was far from the worst."

I also enjoy the occasional slang and colorful turn of phrase, as I do with much Australian crime writing. Here's a character complaining about the boredom of life post-work: "As I said, this retirement stuff's got whiskers." That's a nice way of saying "It's getting old."

And here's Corris/Hardy poking fun at Americans who don't get the wordplay: "Being American, irony and puns aren't Hank's strong suit. I suppressed a laugh."

Now, your question: Name crime stories that don't involve murder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I found my kicks on Route 59

For me, Houston will always mean the sweetish scent of fried food and auto exhaust.

Saturday night flat on my back in a pickup truck by the Gulf of Mexico. More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More great first lines

Two days ago I wrote about my haul of five books at Murder by the Book in Houston (since augmented by four more titles).

I've been flipping through my new acquisitions feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. The first three of them reminded me how important it is to grab the reader from the start, whether with the title, the opening line, or both -- and how thrilling it is to be so grabbed.

Colin Cotterill's Aging Disgracefully is subtitled "Short Stories About Atrocious Old People." Know that, and you'll love the title of the first story: "Gran Larceny."

Bill James' Off-Street Parking pulled me right in by addressing and challenging me directly: "I'd like to put you right on something. OK?"

Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, offers two grabber opening lines, the first to a short prologue, the second to the novel proper:

"Griffin coughed blood into my face when I made to slip the chains under his shoulders."

and

"`He beats me.'"

What are your favorite openings? How did they pull you into the story? Why did you like them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Old and new

(Right: Female figure, attributed to the Ashmolean Master, Greece, Cycladic Islands, Naxos Early Cycladic II, Dokathismata variety, 2400–2300 B.C. The Menil Collection, Houston. Below: A building considerably newer in another part of town.)

You know what Houston is, don't you? It's an intoxicating mix of old and new.

The new I knew about (Houston has no zoning to speak of, and residents say it eats its old buildings for breakfast); the not-so-new I didn't know until now.

The not so new came in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum and the Menil Collection (neither of which is depicted at left). The latter is home to the Cycladic woman pictured above and to collections from the Byzantine and Medieval worlds, Africa, the Pacific Islands (notably a giant anthropomorphic slit drum from Vanuatu and a war and hunting god from Papua New Guinea), the Pacific Northwest, and, from closer to our own time and place, rooms devoted to Cy Twombly and surrealism.

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum offers an evocative setting for some thirteenth-century church paintings that have an interesting history.

The two museums are recent foundations, both having opened since 1987. The founders came from oil-drilling money. It's always good to reflect on the wealth and power that brought great art collections together, whether in the museums and the National Gallery founded by the railroad and steel barons from Boston to Washington, or in the Vatican museums. It's one more layer of pulsating life behind all that art, and it's nice to know that rich people can find good things to do with their money.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A rage in Houston

One thing I love about crime bookstores like Houston's Murder by the Book and Belfast's No Alibis or Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street is the sense of community among workers and readers. Here in Houston, it's de rigeur to belong to at least two crime-fiction book groups, and some people are in more.

Tonight it was the noir group's turn, and they discussed Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and The Jook by Gary Phillips, led by the capable Anita Thompson.

Before and after, I bought books by Bill James, Peter Corris, Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen, and Colin Cotterill. David Thompson is no relation to Anita, but he does help manage Murder by the Book, and he founded Busted Flush Press, and he'll recommend mysteries if you tease it out of him. He suggested The Wooden Overcoat by Pamela Branch, and I bought it.

Oh, and Houston also has good Mexican food.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Final Bouchercon photos

Here's my last batch of photos from Bouchercon 2009. Some are from me, 1, 4 and 6 are from Anita Thompson, and I may add some from Ali Karim if he puts them up.

(Left: A wary waitress.)




(Right: Anita Thompson in profil perdu.)




(Left: The rubber duck that came with my room. The duck looks less cheerful than it ought to, as if wistful for the wide-open ducky spaces far from this bath tub in Indianapolis.)




(Right: Another episode of The Bridesmaids' Quest.)





(Left: Ali Karim, Martyn Waites, Christa Faust on the Sunday comics-buying expedition.)



(Right: Jon McGoran, Scott Phillips, Anthony Neil Smith)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Yep, there's no crime in this post and no beyond borders, either, just frontiers.

But I'm telling you about this eye-opening little collection of four essays by Frederick Jackson Turner for a shopping list of reasons:

1) The man came from that great age when historians could write.

2) It's a commonplace now that the American frontier had closed by 1890, but Turner said it in 1893, and he teased out the implications of the centrality of the frontier back to the first European arrival in what later became the United States. Great ideas haven't always been around. Someone had to think them first.

3) The format. The book is a slim volume, part of a Penguin series called Great Ideas. It dispenses with introductory material, footnotes, end notes and bibliography. It permits intimate, portable, easy acquaintance with one of the great historical thinkers ever. What a great idea.

4) The essays, written between 1893 and 1910, are full of statements and propositions that remain richly suggestive today. Here's my favorite:

"So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency, and wild-cat banking."

Hmm. Maybe this post is about crime and crime fiction after all.

(Read Turner online here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Publisher saves on costs, passes savings on to authors (Just kidding)

Macmillan is is lowering its royalty payments to authors on e-books, the New York Times reports.

I thought the whole point of e-books was to lower production, shipping, storage and distribution costs — to save money, in other words. Would it hurt Macmillan to throw a bit of that extra money to the people who write the books instead of squeezing them even more? I have only the most cursory acquaintance with publishing, but it's my understanding that authors are now expected to assume (and pay for) promotional and even editing responsibilities that publishers once assumed.

From my outsider's perspective, one quotation in the article makes a lot of sense: “I don’t really understand the logic since e-books really do not require any additional work on the part of the publisher.”

(From my insider's perspective, the Times article refers to a cut of 5 percent when it really means 5 percentage points. Who needs copy editors, anyhow?)

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Crime fiction of the past that looks to the future

A discussion on Adrian McKinty's site takes me back to an eye-catching passage from John Buchan's spy thriller Greenmantle:

"The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet — I don't know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number."

Such a passage, a prediction that Islam is not quite a spent force, has to capture the attention of anyone who reads Greenmantle today, yet Buchan published the novel in 1916.

What other striking foreshadowings or predictions have you found in your crime or other reading? (I can think of one especially chilling one that I'll tell you about if you're good.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Andrea Camilleri: Death to the information dump!

I occasionally cite what I take to be an author's clever solution to a problem. There's one such example in The Wings of the Sphinx, Andrea Camilleri's eleventh Salvo Montalbano novel, scheduled for publication in English early next year.

Camilleri's readers will have come to enjoy Montalbano's squabbles with the dedicated, ill-tempered and amusingly sarcastic pathologist Pasquano. Here, in addition to a brief insight into the sympathy of temperament between the two, Camilleri uses a shouting match between them to convey information.

By the time the antagonists have finished bellowing at each, the reader has been entertained. Just as important and perhaps more impressive, the reader knows how the murder victim was killed, about marks on her body, about traces of material found inside her fatal wound, about what she may have been wearing when she died, and about a possibly significant substance found under her fingernails.

That's a brilliant way to avoid the dreaded information dump, always a hazard when forensic pathologists come on the scene. Man, does that Camilleri ever know what he's doing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

New Andrea Camilleri novel

I'm feeling ethical today, so, yes, Federal Communications Commission, I received my copy of Andrea Camilleri's new Inspector Montalbano novel, The Wings of the Sphinx, free from the publisher.

And yes, publisher (Penguin), I will not quote from this uncorrected proof until I have checked the finished book first.

I think, though, that I can offer a general observation or two about how Camilleri keeps the series fresh into its eleventh installment. One is that the quips and political jabs are sharp as ever. Another is that Camilleri finds new ways to express his protagonist's aging.

Montalbano has moved into his fifties as the series has progressed (He's in his mid-fifties here), and Camilleri does much more than have him complain about creaking bones or occasional inability to sleep. In recent books, Montalbano has come to regard his lover, Livia, with increasing tenderness even as the relationship remains as tempestuous as ever. In the new novel, Montalbano finds youth itself ever more precious, rebelling against the obscenity of children's or young adults' slaughter in war or at criminals' hands.

I have heard that one reader, somewhere, complained of "all that growing-old stuff" in Camilleri's recent books. But what could be more universal, more human, than aging? What could be more touching than the spectacle of a character (and an author) finding life ever more precious? Camilleri never gets old.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Self-reference from South Africa

For this post, I revisit my old friend self-reference. My guide is Richard Kunzmann's story "If Nothing Else," from the Bad Company anthology of South African crime stories.

Kunzmann is a youngish author, born in 1976. I don't know how much death and violence he has seen, but his story confronts a difficulty that must plague many serious crime writers: How does one write about death without having seen it up close?

"Rarely are we treated to the spectacle of what is guaranteed to one day happen to all of us," muses the first-person narrator, a crime writer named Sam Engels excited to be joining police at a murder scene. "Modern society robs us of a unique experience on a daily basis, and this is why I wanted to relish the moment."

The story is a bit talkier than I'd have liked, but I like Kunzmann's sly use of the difficulty mentioned above. And I like the rhythm of the story's opening even more: "It was a desperate death to look at."

***

Fiction from Africa is bound to have a bit of the allure of the strange and new for North American readers, and that can be a good thing. One Bad Company story's passing reference to an officer's being the only Xhosa on the force is a reminder that the possibility of ethnic tension need not be limited to black vs. white – an especially salutary thought for those of us who live in the United States. (A similar light goes on above my head when Helene Tursten writes about tension between Swedes and ethnic Finns in her Göteborg-based Swedish crime novels.)

Now, let's bring back that other old friend, the question to readers: What kinds of unexpected racial, ethnic or other tensions have you found in crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bad Company: Short fiction from South Africa

The first days after a crime-fiction convention are a strain on the mind; one never knows what to read first. Compounding the Bouchercon plenitude, I've done a bit of secondhand shopping at Philadelphia's Whodunit Books since I got back.

One of my favorite Bouchercon pickups, and one not easily available in the U.S., is Bad Company, a collection of short stories by South African crime writers. I got my copy from Stanley Trollip, one half of the writing team known as Michael Stanley. Trollip was a jovial presence on Bouchercon's "Murder at the Edge of the Map" panel, a fashion hit in his stylized-hippopotamus T-shirt, and an enthusiastic promoter of South African crime writing who had brought ten copies of the collection to sell.

Stanley's own story, "Neighbours," is an intimate tale of death in a village, relations among neighbors, and the strengths and dangers of living in a community where everyone knows everyone else. Among other things, it makes elegant, unobtrusive use of cliffhangers.

Deon Meyer's "The Nostradamus Document" is a police procedural with a real punch, something like Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories, but with greater focus on the dangerously intertwined personal and professional lives of one cop, Detective Sgt. Fransman Dekker. The story contains bursts of hard-hitting, elliptical dialogue, all the more impressive since what we read is a translation; Meyer writes in Afrikaans. A high vyf to his translator, uncredited here, as near as I can tell.

More to come the more I read.

(Read more about Bad Company and about the South African crime-fiction scene at Book Southern Africa's Crime Beat Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

There goes the bride: An Indianapolis chase scene

(Photos courtesy of Anita Thompson)

Our small gang had set out for a late lunch and agent's party at Bouchercon when we met what appeared to be a body of vestal virgins delivering pizza.

"Have you seen a bride?" one of them asked me.

Alas, I had not.

I don't know if they ever found what they were looking for, but Bridesmaid #1 seemed determined to lead the satin-swathed entourage through every park and monument in downtown Indianapolis if she had to.

Later we saw a banquet setting up at the restaurant where we'd gone for the lunch/agent's shindig — a wedding reception, perhaps? — but no bridal party.

Sounds like a mystery to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon X: Asleep in the lobby

Inspired by the excellent Christa Faust, I'll make one more Bouchercon 2009 post before heading out to sell a kidney so I can afford a hotel room at Bouchercon 2010.

Christa wrote about the strange attraction of the hotel bar, a region of Bouchercon where many ventured, but only the strong escaped. My favorite example came Sunday evening as I relaxed in the lobby, marshaling my strength before repairing to the bar for a preprandial schmooze. I fell asleep with my feet on a table, and when I awoke, not only were Ruth and Jon Jordan and company still in the bar waiting for me, not only had no one said, "Would you please remove your feet from the table, sir," but a member of the hotel staff had placed a second cup of coffee on the table for me. Damned enablers.

Best underrated part of Bouchercon: the music in the hotel lobby. Bossa nova, and not just the old classics, either. Plenty of stuff by new Brazilian musicians, too, and the perfect music for the location, soothing for those who needed a rest, compelling and rhythmically dynamic for those who listened more closely. Someone’s prayers to nosso senhor do bonfim were answered.

I got to Sunday's book bazaar around 10 a.m., hoping to score some books by Rebecca Cantrell and Christopher G. Moore, whom I’d heard on panels. Instead, all that remained were scraps of human flesh, huddled and quivering cozy fans, shell-shocked noir writers whimpering for their mothers, and a UN relief crew cleaning up the remains. I like the idea of a new twist on the old free-book goodie bag, but perhaps this could use a bit of refinement. Spread the frenzy out over three or four days, maybe?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives beyond glitches: International crime fiction on the radio

Missed Bouchercon? Still have a hunger for international crime fiction? You can hear an archived version of Leighton Gage's Blog Talk Radio Webcast with Yrsa Sigurdardòttir, Michael Stanley, Stuart Neville and Cara Black. Click here to hear the program, Around the World in Crime Fiction, first broadcast today. That address again: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Leighton-Gage.

Technical glitches marred the show's first few minutes, but you can get around that by hitting download rather than play, then advancing your player to 3:15, at which point the problem clears up, and discussion ensues.

I especially liked some of Yrsa's observations about the exigencies of writing about crime in a country where everyone knows everyone else, as well as some suggestions from Stanley Trollip (half of the Michael Stanley writing team) about South African crime authors.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon IX: Death during wartime

The funniest moments of my Bouchercon came during Reed Farrel Coleman's Saturday panel on "Dark Books for Dark Times." Coleman's swift dispatch of long-winded audience members helped, as did Duane Swierczynski's laugh lines and the fortuitous tension between Larry Beinhart (an atheist) and Michael Lister (a prison chaplain).

I was having too much fun to take thorough notes, but I did note a consensus among the panelists, who also included J.T. Ellison, that the putative restoration of order at the end of a crime story is illusory (Coleman) or, at best, temporary (Ellison).

Nothing impresses me as much as intelligent people who think deeply and seriously about what they do, so this panel was one of the conference's highlights. "I find nothing funny about murder," Coleman said, and he quoted with approval the pronouncement that "A cozy is a book in which someone gets murdered, but no one gets hurt."

***

I found a similar seriousness earlier Saturday at "War Crimes: How war shapes characters and crime novels." The four panelists set their novels during or between wars.

"War creates opportunity," said moderator Suzanne Arruda, a suggestion immediately endorsed by the panelists. James R. Benn, author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries, noted the immense attraction of military supplies for black marketeers, but also a loosening of social structures and inhibitions that allowed black marketeers and others to act in ways they never would during peacetime.

Martin Limón noted the dreadful toll of the Korean War and the country's current success as a robust, if sometimes spectacularly fractious, democracy. The intervening years, he said, offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime." Limón, who served twenty years in the U.S. army, said there was much to admire about that institution. Nonetheless, he said, "the military does not talk about crime unless it has to." And that sounds like a superb source of tension for a crime novel.

The seven deadly sins are with us at all times, said Charles Todd, "but war magnifies it. ... War is a tremendous opportunity to make money."

And what about the odd, poignant task of a wartime crime novel: to single out one death as pivotal amid the deaths of hundreds and thousands? Perhaps the surrounding carnage makes a murder victim's killing all the more tragic. "I do think that once you've waded through death, said Rebecca Cantrell, "you don't want to see any more of it."

Said Benn: "It is a grave offense for someone to be murdered when they could have survived the carnage of war."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Me llamo Peter, plus international crime on the radio

The good folks at Yareah Magazine: Literature, arts and Myths. Literatura arte y mitos have reprinted one of my blog posts as a short article in their October issue.

"The detective who almost loved Berlioz" is my contribution to an issue featuring articles in English and Spanish about cover boy Emile Zola.

***

Detectives Beyond Borders friend Leighton Gage takes his panel-moderation skills to blogtalkradio.com this Saturday, October 24th at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time. He'll host "Around the World in Crime Fiction," a discussion with four more D. Beyond Borders favorites: Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Michael Stanley, Stuart Neville and Cara Black, and they'll field calls from listeners. If you miss the live broadcast, the program will be archived for a month.

Tune in, click on, and support international crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon VIII: Roll, Jordans, roll

A tip of the battered baseball cap to Ruth and Jon Jordan of Crime Spree magazine, honored at Bouchercon 2009 with an Anthony Award for special services.

I got to hang with Ruth and Jon throughout the convention, and their warmth, energy and brains are contagious. They plan Bouchercons. They put out a magazine. They love crime fiction and its community, and they are full of creative ideas for bringing new readers to the genre. They are the sorts who make one want to roll up one's sleeves, get to work, and have fun doing it. I feel quite sure that no one has deserved an award more. (Visit the Rap Sheet for a complete list of Anthony Award winners and nominees.)

***

I occupy a fairly specialized niche, and one of the pleasures of conventions is the chance to break out, to meet authors and even entire genres outside my specialty of international crime fiction. In the past, this has led me to Scott Phillips, Megan Abbott, Christa Faust and, through Brian Lindenmuth, back to comics and graphic novels. In Indianapolis I met, mingled, dined, drank at the same table as or schmoozed with Victor Gischler, Kelli Stanley, Heather Graham, Theresa Schwegel and Rosemary Harris, among others whom I had known previously just by name or not at all.

Practitioners and fans of crime fiction's various subgenres sometimes spit on the ground at the mention of each other's specialties, so it was nice to see the hard-boiled and the cozy breaking bread in good fellowship in Indianapolis.

Of course, I had good fun with the usual suspects, too, notably talking P.G. Wodehouse with Ruth Dudley Edwards at a dinner outing that also included Leighton Gage, who started the Wodehouse ball rolling; Cara Black; and Stuart Neville. The latter drank a Newcastle Brown Ale.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon VII: Gods and ends

(Indiana War Memorial)

John Maddox Roberts sets his S.P.Q.R. mysteries in the first century BC in the waning days of the Roman republic. Kelli Stanley set her novel Nox Dormienda in the first century AD under Domitian, not by reputation one of the good emperors. I asked Stanley and Roberts which periods they would choose if they were to set a book in a different period of Roman history.

Roberts would go back earlier into the Republican period, because once the empire was instituted, he said, politics started getting dynastic and boring. Stanley, on the other hand, would jump forward, to the fourth century under Constantine, who granted official approval to Christianity. Stanley said she was interested in the various religions to which the Romans were open.

One author is attracted to political unrest, another in change of the religious kind. The common factor: Upheaval is good, at least in historical crime fiction.

(Stanley is a classicist by training. So is Lindsey Davis, author of the Marcus Didius Falco series. Davis sets her books in the time of Vespasian, who came to the plate two spots before Domitian in the imperial batting order. Had a good chat with Stanley about Italy and its art at the convivial post-convention dinner Sunday night.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009