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

Bouchercon VI: Post-con posting, Part I

I will get back to serious Bouchercon 2009 reporting, but for now, the fun stuff:

1) The Weinman doppelganger attended, but Weinman stayed home this year.

2) The convivial post-convention dinner is a Bouchercon tradition of several years' standing, according to Crime Spree's Jon Jordan (above right with Ali Karim), and who would know better? Seventeen people attended this year's version, and a good and possibly productive time was had by all.

3) A small but dogged United Nations of smokers continually braved the cool weather to indulge its insalubrious but sociable habit. Last night I tore down the "No Not Smoking Allowed" sign and joined the group outside the hotel for a pleasant after-convention chat.

4) Here's my annual Christa Faust picture.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon V: Remembrance of crimes past

David Liss invoked one genre as a key to success in another at Saturday's panel on crime stories set in the past: "Historical fiction," Liss said, "has more in common with fantasy than we like to imagine."

The remark clicked with me because Liss' novel The Coffee Trader, whose central theme is commodities manipulation in the coffee trade of seventeenth-century Holland, is the most thorough and convincing fictional world in which I ever been immersed, and creating convincing worlds (and universes) seems to this outsider to be much of what science fiction and fantasy are about.

A second panelist, Kelli Stanley, called into service a concept dear to this blog's heart in discussing the fiction she sets in first-century Rome: "I translate history," she said. Translating Latin curse words, she said, "I would use the vernacular" -- plenty of "Goddamnit!" and no "By Jupiter's nose!" And that get right at the heart of questions a translator faces whether translating a language or a period of history.

Panelist number three, John Maddox Roberts, whose work also includes Roman mysteries, noted that while the Julius Casears and Antonys and Cleopatras of the world are long dead and can't sue him, their defenders and detractors are still around: "All of these people have their fans" -- partisans who honor and embellish their names millennia after their deaths.

The fourth guest, Sharan Newman, who has been honored for her career achievement in historical mysteries, offered a practical solution to the problem of how to integrate necessary information about unfamiliar settings without turning the story into a travelogue or a lecture: Let a character do it. "In medieval mysteries," Newman said, "it's often someone who comes from another country and doesn't understand how things are done in Paris."

Next: God, truth, war and opportunity

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon IV: Among the headhunters ...

... and I don't mean the kind who specialize in executive job searches. Tamar Myers' discussion of her novel set in the former Belgian Congo was a highlight of today's entertaining panel called "Murder at the Edge of the Map."

Myers is the author of more than thirty mysteries in two series, one set amid the Pennsylvania Dutch and another in the world of antiques. One presumes none of this prepared her fans for a novel that stems from her childhood experiences as the daughter of missionaries in Africa among a tribe called headhunters at the time.

Old friend Yrsa Sigurðardóttir was on this panel as well along with Christopher G. Moore and Stanley Trollip, one half of the writing team known as Michael Stanley. This meant fifty-five minutes of tales and observations from Iceland, Thailand and Botswana in addition to Congo, and I can think of no pleasanter way to pass the convention time.

A salute to Leighton Gage, a prince among moderators.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon III: Iceland update

At last year's Bouchercon I asked Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and her husband whether they thought the collapse of Iceland's banking system could mark a turning point in the country's crime fiction. Too early tell, they said.

This year, when the topic turned to Iceland's low crime rate and the challenges this poses to crime writers, Yrsa said that crime had risen in Iceland — financial crime. Her matter-of-fact regard of financial manipulators as criminals was refreshing.

Later, after our panel, Yrsa's husband said burglaries were on the rise in Iceland. Not a great subject for crime writers, one author observed. So, here is my prediction: Some time in the near future, an Icelandic crime author will write a noir novel of a simple burglary, due perhaps to the burglar's economic hardships, that goes wrong and turns into a murder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon II — My translation panel

This Bouchercon is set up a bit differently from the 2008 version in Baltimore, with more panel discussions in each time slot, and most taking place in smaller rooms. Four simultaneous events was the norm in Baltimore; here in Indianapolis there are six or more.

The smaller rooms meant a near-full house for my translation panel with Robert Pépin, Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I was especially pleased that the panelists asked questions of one another, which meant good give and take. Nunnally told the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-stew story that led to her removing her name from the British translation of Smilla's Sense of Snow. In this case, one of the cooks was the author.

Robert Pépin had little patience with the suggestion that translation is an art, though his description of his own practice sounded suspiciously like art to me. He was also a bit of a jambon, a lively presence who was the first of the group to comment on another panelist's reply. Happily, the rest followed suit, and we had a real discussion going that ended far too soon. Fifty-five minutes for four intelligent panelists, me, and a roomful of questions? I ask you!

Nunnally's translations include works by Karin Fossum, Mari Jungstedt Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), and quite a few more. She has also written two mysteries whose protagonist is a translator. I hope to have more to report about the books soon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon I

Arrived in Indianapolis a full day ahead of the formal start of Bouchercon, which meant a few hours for socializing and for taking midnight pictures of the city's imposing Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

Ran into old friends from previous conventions -- Anita Thompson, Dennis Tafoya, Toby and Bill Gottfried, Janet Rudolph, Jon Jordan (who is already hard at work on Bouchercon 2011) and so on. Ran into Ali Karim as well, but then, one is always running into Ali Karim at these affairs.

Dinner turned into a Pied Piper parade that dwarfed what I'd experienced at previous cons. About thirty of us all told wolfed down pasta, and each of us was asked to stand, introduce him or herself, and name the best book he or she had read this year. A few votes came in for Louise Penny (Canadians were well represented at the dinner), and one each for Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water and Megan Abbott's Queenpin, both of which I endorsed.

Donna Moore stood and thrust her head straight into the low-hanging lampshade at left. It set off her hair nicely.

Tomorrow, my translation panel, plus an Irish crime fact and fiction discussion that includes Ruth Dudley Edwards and Stuart Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sports is the continuation of politics by different means

For all kinds of reasons, sports and politics seem less intimately connected in North America than in Europe.

Perhaps that's because on my continent, most major-league cities have just one team in each sport. That means fewer politico-religious divides like that between Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, and fewer teams with noxious political associations like Italy's Lazio.

I thought of this most recently when I came across the following in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's novel The Man of My Life. The protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, recalls a stage comedy with Catalan nationalist undertones from his youth:

"It was the period when the Catalan language was undergoing a timid revival, and the Franco authorities allowed the play to be put on in church halls. Despite the restrictions, the actors usually managed to insert a few subversive jokes. Carvalho recalled how the Devil, defeated yet again by the Archangel Michael, and flattened on the stage with the angel's foot on his back, lifted his head a couple of inches and shouted: `Miquel! Miquel! Sembles el Real Madrid, que sempre vol guanyar!"*

* Michael! Michael! You're like Real Madrid, you always want to win!

It will surprise no one to learn that Vázquez Montalbán was both a man of the left and an FC Barcelona supporter. In fact, I may prepare a post on why Vázquez Montalbán's politics are so engaging.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The medium is not the massage

I like to think I've helped lay to rest any suggestion that the Nordic peoples are stolid and humorless. (See here, too, for further evidence.) Now I'll take on that other base canard: that they like nothing better than to have the bejesus whaled out of them on a massage table ("Swedish massage" and all that):

The worst of it was over; the woman had stopped massaging and begun arranging hot stones in a row down her backbone ...

"Will it be much longer?" Thóra asked hopefully. "I think the energy's penetrated every single cell. I'm beginning to feel great."

"What?" The masseuse was incredulous. "Are you sure? It's supposed to take a lot longer."

Thóra suppressed a groan. "Positive. It's brilliant. I can tell I'm done."

The victim here is Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, the lawyer/investigator/protagonist of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's crime novels, and I sympathize with her. I once paid ten dollars for a neck massage in Central Park. I expected relaxation. Instead, I discovered aches and discomfort in parts of my body I'd never been aware of.

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

(Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be a member of my crime fiction and translation panel Thursday morning at Bouchercon 2009 along with Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Robert Pépin.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Man of My Life by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

A cover blurb for this new trade paperback of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's The Man of My Life (Serpent's Tail) says the author "does for Barcelona what Chandler did for Los Angeles."

Does for the 21st century ... would be more accurate. Detective Pepe Carvalho has returned to Barcelona after the events in the previous Carvalho novel, The Buenos Aires Quintet, and he does indeed offer pungent commentary on what his city has become:

"Barcelona ... was not the anarchists' fiery rose, because the bourgeoisie had won its final victory by the simple trick of changing its name; it called itself the `emerging sector' now, and how on earth could anyone throw a bomb or build a barricade against an `emerging sector'?"

He notes bathers and cyclists "equally keen on the sea and getting something for nothing," a mordant observation on our prostration before the God of the Free Market. And, he tells his first prospective client, things are tough for gumshoes, too:

"Globalisation has hit us hard. The multinationals control all private security business, and one-off detectives like me are seen as anthropological curiosities. There's never been so much Theology of Security around, nor so many crooks and murderers in the market, but we can't compete with the multinationals of oppression. What NATO is doing beggars belief. For now, they're just using intelligent missiles, but soon they'll be arresting and imprisoning people with magnets that can detect defeated human flesh from hundreds of miles away."

"Does for Barcelona what Chandler did for Los Angeles" falls short of Vázquez Montalbán's compass, I'd say.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Stuart M. Kaminsky, 75, dies

The American author Stuart M. Kaminsky was a prolific writer and a fine respite for my occasional busman's holidays from crime beyond borders.

Kaminsky was probably best known for his lighthearted Toby Peters mysteries, set amid the singers, stars and other celebrities of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the Inspector Rostnikov series, set in Russia. (I believe he wrote at least the first of these before ever visiting the country.) He also wrote television tie-ins, stand-alone novels, and several books about American movie figures.

I especially liked two of his other series. The news of Kaminsky's death comes by way of Sarah Weinman. Here's a comment I left on her blog:

Someone recently commented that female crime authors write happily married protagonists more than men do.

Kaminsky’s Abe Lieberman is not just happily, lovingly married, he’s a grandparent. He’s also a detective unafraid to use violence when he has to, and he’s Jewish. That’s not a typical combination. More to the point, the religion and culture are not mere ethnic window dressing. They figure prominently in some of the stories. Lieberman has to be one of the more underrated characters in American crime fiction.

And Lew Fonesca springs from one of the more beguiling premises I know of. How can you not love a character who hits the road after his wife dies, settles in Sarasota, because that’s where his car conks out, lives in his office, and hangs out at the Dairy Queen?

(To clear up a frequent faux-pas and to facilitate searches if you try to track down Kaminsky's work, Fonesca is the correct spelling in the preceding paragraph. The character's name is frequently misspelled Fonseca.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Nothing if not diacritical: More conventional wisdom

On the eve (or, if you prefer, the brink or the cusp) of Bouchercon 2009, here are some favorite things that fellow convention-goers have said or written at, about or after my three previous crime-fiction conventions:

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

"Chubby Cambodian hotties."

— Christa Faust, Noircon 2008

"A KNOB is a COCK!"

— Ali Karim, Bouchercon 2008

"For years I wrote poems, nothing but poems, and all but about five of them were shite."

— Ken Bruen, Noircon 2008

"Tense vowels don't do a man's reputation any good."

— Don Bartlett, Crimefest 2009
(After I'd worried about pronouncing
Jo Nesbø's name correctly. If "Joe
Nesbow" is good enough for the man
who translates Nesbø's books into
English, at least when he's addressing
an English-speaking audience,
it's good enough for me.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Too pooped to post: A Bouchercon flashback

Received two books in the mail yesterday to aid in preparation for my Bouchercon panel, then spent a couple of hours writing up questions for the panelists and reading the books. Since that left little time for the new post I like to make every day, here's one of my favorite old ones, from Bouchercon 2008.

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

Lots of people loved Bouchercon 2008, but I bet I was the only one who had such a good time that he came, left and came back again. It all started on a hot, post-boozy Sunday ...

The official part of the conference had wrapped up, and the unofficial part seemed ready to follow. Suitcases littered the hotel lobby, and among them flopped bodies of exhausted convention-goers. I don't know about the rest of them, but my body was subsiding comfortably into the floor, and my mind was close behind.

I'd arranged to split a taxi to the train station with a fellow convention-goer, and I looked forward to the peace of the quiet car. I feared only that I'd be roused from sleep in time to get off at Philadelphia and make it back to work Tuesday.

But the train was far more crowded than a train has the right to be on a Sunday afternoon, and we had to grab any seats we could find, quiet car or otherwise. We couldn't find two seats together, but I did get one next to a woman having a family crisis over her cell phone.

By Newark, Delaware, I'd had enough, and I jumped the train. The hour I spent in the cool of a fall afternoon waiting for the next train back to Baltimore and the remnants of Bouchercon was the only chance I'd had all week to read, relax and recharge. But would anyone still be around when I got back to the hotel?

I felt good about my chances when I called Sandra Ruttan on her cell phone, and she couldn't hear me over the noise of the hotel bar. Seventy minutes later, I was back in the lobby feeling as if I'd never left and ready for an evening that was to include two of my most memorable Bouchercon experiences.

(Coming soon: A curious case)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Prize for Priest

With a hat tip to Crime Scene NI, Crimficreader of It's a Crime ... and others comes news that Ken Bruen has won the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière 2009 for La main droite du diable, the French translation of his novel Priest. The choice is worthy; last year I called Priest "Best crime novel of its year and any year?"

Two Grands Prix are awarded each year, one to the best crime novel, and one to the best international crime novel in France. They've been awarded since 1948, which suggests the French got onto this international crime fiction thing before many of the the rest of us.

Plenty of big names and talented authors have won the international prize, including one to a superb crime writer for a book that I thought his weakest. Shows what I know.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

What's happening in Indianapolis

My Thursday morning translation panel will not be the only one at Bouchercon of interest to fans of international crime fiction.

Thursday afternoon (Oct. 15) offers Irish Crime in Fact and Fiction with Kathryn Kennison, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Stuart Neville, and O Canada: Crime North of the Border.

On Friday, convention-goers can attend Murder at the Edge of the Map, where moderator Leighton Gage and panelists Christopher G. Moore, Tamar Myers, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Michael Stanley will discuss what mystery novels can tell us about international and exotic settings.

Saturday brings Criminal Consumables: The Craft and Popularity of Food and Drink in Mysteries and Crime Through Time: Research Versus Imagination in Historical Mysteries, the latter in a panel whose members include John Maddox Roberts and the excellent David Liss.

Also on Saturday, War Crimes: How War Shapes Characters and Crime Novels and The Humor Panel: Why Do Humor and Death Go So Well Together?

Those are just some of the panels on topics that have come up for discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders. Lots more panels promise to be interesting, too, as do some of the off-site, non-panel events. My favorite of the latter is probably Friday's tour of the Hachette warehouse.

Click here for a complete Bouchercon program. If it's not too late, register now, and I'll see you in Indianapolis.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Novel graphics

A week and a half till Bouchercon, which means I'll be Bouchercramming for my panel on crime fiction and translation. And that means posting may be a bit sketchy for a few days.

Speaking of sketches, I received a nice package of graphic novels this week from Generous Jon Jordan. The opening pages of one, Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos' Filthy Rich, tell a story in ways words alone could not, and I may discuss some of those ways when I'm more fully awake.

Azzarello's words and Santos' pictures work together at least two ways, and I thought back to a post I once made about how another comic created tension yet a third way: a wordless opening, the narration entering only after the art has created the tone.

This is all heady stuff for a words guy like me, so help me, comics readers: How do words and pictures combine to tell stories in ways neither could do by themselves?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Three" winners

Here are the winners of the Sept. 21 “Sign of the Three” competition, which asked readers to name books in which the number three figures prominently in the title or the story:

1) Fred, because a title like Wycliffe and the Three-Toed Pussy (W.J. Burley) cannot go unrecognized.

2) Kerrie, for the clever choice of Karen Slaughter's Triptych and for the sheer profusion of her suggestions.

3) Simona, for her nomination of Il mistero delle tre orchidee (The Mystery of the Three Orchids) and L'albergo delle tre rose (The Three Roses Hotel) by Augusto De Angelis. All I need now is for those novels by that intriguing Italian author to be translated into English.

4) Oh, what the hell. Elisabeth is the fourth winner for seeking the ancient Chinese roots of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries and their narrative structure, in which the judge often works on three cases at a time.

Some miscellaneous facts about the competition:

1) At least three titles were nominated by more than one reader: Der Tee der drei alten Damen by Friedrich Glauser; Agatha Christie’s Three Act Tragedy; and Thirty-three Teeth by Colin Cotterill.

2) Nobody mentioned James Ellroy. Indeed, he never would have occurred to me had not an audience member at his Sept. 24 reading in Philadelphia asked Ellroy why so many of his novels revolve around groups of three men. But there it is, right on the back cover of The Cold Six Thousand, which I was reading at the time: "On November 22, 1963, three men converge in Dallas."

===========

Thanks to all who entered for your thought-provoking and reading-list-enlarging suggestions. If the winners will send a postal address to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net, I'll sent them their books. Indicate a preference of author, genre, country — anything you can think of — and I'll try to send something close to what you want.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Silence of the Grave

This second of Arnaldur Indriðason's crime novels (The sixth book, Hypothermia, has just been released in the UK) is a heartstring-tugger that gradually turns into a hell of a mystery.

It also marks the first consistent statement of protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson's (and his creator's) equivocal feelings about postwar Iceland and their place in it, a preoccupation that has remained through the subsequent novels:

"[Erlendur] had been born elsewhere and considered himself an outsider even though he had lived in the city most of his life and had seen it spread across the bays and hills as the rural communities depopulated."

The novel is a story of domestic abuse in the past and its echoes and consequences in the present, and if you even think of rolling your eyes, then you haven't read the book. Not only is Arnaldur unsparing in his description of the abuse, he has a character remark the woeful blandness of the term domestic abuse, its insufficiency to describe acts of such enormity. (I wonder that the Icelandic term is and what its connotations are.)

Arnaldur also has a way of investing crime-fiction conventions with resonance they lack elsewhere. The protagonist whose personality clashes, sometimes humorously, with a colleague's is one such convention. Here, a human skeleton uncovered under grimly humorous circumstances triggers the investigation. The burial, it transpires, may be decades old. For Erlendur, haunted in his personal and professional lives, the past is a constant presence. His colleague Sigurdur Óli is of no such gloomily poetic temperament:

"`All these people are dead and buried long ago,' Sigurdur Óli said wearily. `I don't know why we're chasing them.'"

Erlendur knows why.

(Here's what the Crime Writers' Association said when it awarded Silence of the Grave its Gold Dagger for best crime novel in 2005.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Mystery

Our lives are suffused with it, and one of life's mysteries is why, if the Free Library of Philadelphia is going to host such compelling speakers as Karen Armstrong and James Ellroy, and if it insists on ending the programs at the library's normal closing hour of 9 p.m., it does not begin the evenings earlier than 7:30.

Quite a number of audience members' questions went unasked, and mine, at least, would have been good. I'd have asked this scholar of comparative religion, this preacher of compassion, this advocate of religious practice and of the ineffable that lies behind the words we use to delineate the divine, why the scriptures of the three religions she discusses most (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) so seldom if ever acknowledge the mysteries that lie at their own heart. Why has it been left for rabbis, exegetes, sages, interpreters and scholars of later times to do so? (And why, one might add, do the oldest Indian scriptures explicitly embody mysteries in ways that Western ones do not?)

Armstrong's current initiative is the Charter of Compassion, and this reminded me of one of the unforgettable crime novels of recent years.

We now return you to our regular programming.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Dope Thief visits Noir at the Bar

Manny and Ray work in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, making a nice living ripping off drug dealers, but they're a pair of crooks with intimations of their own mortality:

"You could only do this shit so long. Someone was going to recognize them, or follow them, or just do something brainless when they came in the door. They wore the cop jackets and badges and they moved with purpose and told themselves they were smart, but there was only so much luck and then it was gone. At the end of the day they were as doomed as the goofy bastards they were ripping off. Manny and Ray would do lines in the truck before they went in, getting their edges sharp, making their minds fast. It couldn't go on forever. Everyone was high. Everyone was stupid. Everyone had guns."

That's the end of Chapter Two of Dennis Tafoya's novel Dope Thief, and such weighty sentiments so early in the book are a key to Tafoya's purpose. "Showing the consequences of violence, the panic, is the thing I think is missing from TV shows" — at least until The Sopranos and The Wire — he told a gratifyingly crowded house at this evening's Noir at the Bar in Philadelphia. (And thanks to the good people at the Pen & Pencil Club for being such good hosts.)

I'm unsure how much more to report, since political events at the Pen & Pencil are traditionally off the record, and I don't know whether similar etiquette applies to readings, but Tafoya also had some sobering words about current conditions in the publishing business, conditions to which he seems to be adjusting exceedingly well.

Pete Dexter read next in an event independent of mine. That legendary newspaper columnist, novelist and screenwriter told fine old newspaper stories and read a heartbreaking section of his new novel, Spooner. I shall follow his future and his past career with interest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Voices: Arnaldur Indriðason's parallel inner lives

Yesterday I compared Voices unfavorably to Arnaldur Indriðason's other novels about Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. Today I'll highlight some of the good things and talk a bit about what I think Arnaldur was up to in that book.

I wrote that the novel's constricted setting (almost all the action happens inside a Reykjavik hotel) de-emphasizes the connection with Iceland and its soil that is usual in Arnaldur's books. But this does not preclude his customary wry observations about his country and, given the hotel setting, about its visitors,

"Tourists who were planning to spend Christmas and the New Year in Iceland because it seemed to them like an adventurous and exciting country. Although they had only just landed, many had apparently already bought traditional Icelandic sweaters, and they checked into the exotic land of winter."

There is Erlendur's spare, pointed retort to a hotel manager more concerned about business than about justice:

"I hope you're not disturbing my guests," he said.

Erlendur took him to one side.

"What are the rules about prostitution in this hotel?"

And there is Arnaldur's delightful deadpan slapstick. Here, Erlendur's investigation has him interviewing a prostitute whose stitches from her recent eye-catching breast-enhancement surgery are bothering her. The manager sees Erlendur and the woman, misinterprets their meeting, and tries to throw the woman out:

"Watch her tits!" Erlendur shouted, not knowing what else to say. The hotel manager looked at him, dumbfounded. "They're new," Erlendur added by way of explanation.

One reader complained here that the victim in Voices was especially pathetic and therefore less interesting. I think this is due to Arnaldur's narrow focus on the victim. Furthermore, he also focuses in more detail than usual on Erlendur, and the two characters form a pair of solitary bookends.

I respect Arnaldur for choosing bravely to turn his back on interaction, the stuff of which most novels are made, and concentrate so heavily on the victim's and Erlendur's parallel inner lives. I just don't think it works as well as his other novels do. It will be interesting to see if he tries this strategy in the future.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Dennis Tafoya/Pete Dexter in Philly tomorrow!

If you're within driving, biking, walking or public-transportation distance, or if you can catch a cheap flight, come out to America's oldest press club Wednesday evening for Noir at the Bar with Dope Thief author Dennis Tafoya and columnist/screenwriter/National Book Award-winning author Pete Dexter.

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

When: Wednesday, September 30th at 6:00 p.m.

Where:The Pen and Pencil Club,

1522 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, 215-731-9909

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Indoors and out in Arnaldur's Iceland

I've been reading more of Arnaldur Indriðason, one book that I think is his weakest, and another that seems likely to be up there with his best.

The weaker book is Voices, and I believe its weakness stems from its reliance to a greater extent than Arnaldur's other books on melodrama. More than usual as well for Arnaldur, the action, the pivotal events especially, happens indoors.

The site is a Reykjavik hotel where an employee has been found murdered and where Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson stays for the course of the investigation because he does not feel like going home. The employee is an ex-hotel doorman and holiday Santa and a former child star with a number of financial, personal and family entanglements.

In The Draining Lake, Silence of the Grave and Arctic Chill, bodies are found outdoors. In the first two, especially, this reinforces the intimate connection with Iceland and its soil that is the most distinctive feature of the Erlendur books. In Voices, everything happens inside, and the melodrama has to carry the book. This melodrama is sharper, sadder and more affecting than most, but I miss the connection with the land.

The connection promises to be present in Silence of the Grave, second of the five Erlendur novels and winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2005. As in superb Draining Lake, Iceland's soil yields up the body that sets the story in motion. Here, its discovery is odder and funnier:

"He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it."

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

At least two of Arnaldur's characters share their names with characters from the Icelandic classic Njal's Saga. Arnaldur has said the sagas influenced his prose style. Perhaps they influenced him in other ways as well.

On the other hand, Iceland is a small, historically homogeneous society. Perhaps it's no surprise that traditional names are especially prevalent. The names Arnaldur gives his characters may be no more significant than those of fictional characters such as Hieronymus Bosch or Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Out of English, into French: A translation question

I hadn't read Michael Connelly before. Now I'm reading him in French in preparation for my panel at Bouchercon 2009.

Deuil Interdit (The Closers in the original version) brings Harry Bosch back to the Los Angeles Police Department after a three-year retirement. Among other things, I learned in the opening chapter that the French word for badge is badge.

Elsewhere, the police chief asks Harry if he had heard talk of the décret dit de consentement (roughly decree — that is, of consent) under which the department now operates. The term has the air of something the translator thought needed explaining to French readers, and I presume it means consent decree. This raises an interesting question: When translating legal and other technical terms, how does one strike a balance between fidelity to the original sense, and comprehensibility to readers in the target language?

(Michael Connelly's French translator, Robert Pépin, will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon 2009: Quiz the translators

I'm cramming for the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2009 in less than three weeks. The panel is called Lost in Translation?: Translators and writers discuss the challenges of translating the crime novel, and it features Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally, Robert Pépin and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. We take the stage Thursday, Oct. 15, 10:30 a.m.-11:25 a.m., with yours truly asking the questions and lending a firm but gentle guiding hand.

The group's three translators have impressive lists of credits, including such works as Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow rendered into English and such authors as Michael C0nnelly, Jonathan Kellerman, Deon Meyer, Charles Bukowski, T.C. Boyle and Joseph Wambaugh translated from English into French. Yrsa's novels have been translated into at least ten languages, and I'm developing a nice list of questions for all four panelists about the joys, sorrows, anxieties and surprises of translating and being translated.

What about your questions? What would you ask? What should I ask? Come up with a good suggestion, and I just might bring a book back for you.

=========

The panel happens the Thursday of Bouchercon. If you're around Friday, check out the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards banquet, for which extra seats have just opened. That happens at the Slippery Noodle blues bar Fri. Oct. 16, 6:30 to 9:00. Tickets are $50. E-mail Bob Randisi at RRandisi@aol.com by Oct. 1 for details.

Click here for a complete Bouchercon program.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

James Ellroy, Part II

I don't know if anyone could justly accuse James Ellroy of humility, but he did show some candor when a member of last night's audience in Philadelphia asked if he had a favorite among movie adaptations of his novels.

L.A. Confidential was a fine movie, he said, and I believe he remarked that sometimes one gets lucky with adaptations, and sometimes one does not. But, he said, "I would never criticize an adaptation, because I took the dough."

Ellroy read from his new novel, Blood's a Rover, at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library. Perhaps because the library had recently survived a city budget crisis and the threat of closure, he stressed the formative roles that public libraries and reading had played in his life. And he repeated, amid many plugs for the new book, that "if you don't have the cash, the gelt, the dinero" to buy the novel, you can read it free at the library.

He also told the crowd that the pillars of his upbringing were the Lutheran Church and Confidential magazine, where he could read "who was a homo, a nympho, a dipso, a lesbo," and he invited "the most invasive questions" the audience could come up with.

These questions naturally concerned sex and money, and Ellroy neatly, gracefully and amusingly sidestepped them. A showman he is, and one who, at least last night, knew for every second exactly what he was up to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Cool Six Thousand

Yes, James Ellroy could have read with drums and a saxophone behind him tonight at Philadelphia's Central Library. The jazz cadences were there — great streams of words, startling verbal BLAAATS! and outrageous proclamations. Oddly enough, the only musical reference he made was to Beethoven, whom he called "my greatest teacher."

The man is capable of great hyperbole and verbal music, but I believe his invocation of the titanic Beethoven was sincere, and it was certainly quite moving. How can he, Ellroy, complain, he said, when Beethoven wrote such music while mired in poverty and imprisoned by deafness?

"What about Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice?" someone asked.

"SNORE!" replied Ellroy.

"Why did you end the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy just before Watergate?" someone else (me) asked.

"Watergate?" said Ellroy. "The biggest SNORE! since Thomas Pynchon."

In short, Ellroy gave the happiest, most buoyant, most joyously self-aggrandizing performance I can remember from an author, perhaps because of a new love whom he mentioned several times and to whom he blew a kiss as he took the stage. And yet he was capable of moments of great earnestness, as with Beethoven, or in reply to the inevitable question about his writing process. Such a question often induces groans. Here, Ellroy somberly outlined his procedure: For Blood's a Rover, his new book, a four-hundred page outline, research reports, then sitting down and making the stuff up.

Of special interest, perhaps, was his answer to the questioner who asked "Why Los Angeles" as the archetypal noir city?

"Because Raymond Chandler wrote there," he said, and because that's where the movie studios were, and that's where the great films noirs were made.

More, perhaps, to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Camilleri and the geography of insults

Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano is not a bad driver, though his occasional preoccupation and sudden, blinding insights do sometime imperil his fellow motorists. Two such instances in The Paper Moon call forth bursts of invective that are, like Camilleri's scenery, food and dialect, reliable guides to Sicily (as always, with the aid of translator Stephen Sartarelli's informative end notes*):

He got in the car and left, but after he'd gone a hundred yards, he slapped himself on the forehead, cursed, began a dangerous U-turn, and the three motorists behind him vociferously let him know that:

One, he was a tremendous cornuto*.
Two, his mother was a woman of easy virtue.
Three, his sister was worse than his mother.

And, seventy-nine pages later:

(H)e crept along at barely five miles per hour, driving everyone who happened to be behind him crazy. Every motorist, when each managed to pass him, felt obliged to insult him. Thus, he was a(n):

faggot, according to a trucker;
asshole, according to a priest;
cornuto, according to a nice lady;
ba-ba-ba-, according to a stutterer

Sartarelli's decision to retain the Italian cornuto does much to convey the novel's local flavor. It was a laudable decision.

What memorable crime-fictional insults have you read?
=============
* cornuto: Italian for "cuckold," cornuto is a common insult throughout the country but a special favorite among southerners, Sicilians in particular.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Camilleri and Pirandello

"The rules of the game. Wasn't there a play of the same name by the above-mentioned Pirandello?"

That's from Andrea Camilleri's The Paper Moon, and, if memory serves me well, it's not the only time Camilleri mentions Pirandello. The two were born fifty-eight years apart in the same area of southwestern Sicily, Pirandello in Grigenti (Agrigento), Camilleri in Agrigento's port, Porto Empedocle (which appears under the name Vigàta in Camilleri's Montalbano novels). By various accounts, Pirandello knew Camilleri's grandparents or parents or was even a distant relative.

The mention may also be of thematic interest. Pirandello "is always preoccupied with the problem of identity," and so, in The Paper Moon, is Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano:

He knocked a third time. Still nothing. He turned around, cursing, and was about to descend the stairs when he heard a woman's voice call from inside the apartment.

"Who is it?"

This question is not always so easy to answer. First of all, because it may happen that the person who's supposed to reply is caught at a moment of identity loss and, second, because saying who one is doesn't always facilitate things.

"Administration," he said.

or

The theme was: During an investigation, does a real policeman take notes or not?

I've also seen Montalbano's favorite olive tree referred to as a Pirandellian element. I haven't read or seen Pirandello's work except in parodies, but it interested me that a playwright and novelist so well-known for his avant-garde narrative technique could be so rooted in his native soil. But then Italo Calvino, that creator of fantastic meta-narratives and member of the Oulipo group, also compiled a pioneering collection of Italian folk tales.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Sign of the Three

Detectives Beyond Borders is three years old today, and I'm celebrating by awarding books to at least three lucky readers. All you have to do is name your favorite crime tales in which the number three figures in the title or the plot. One novel or story is sufficient. Three would be fine, too.

(I decide who wins and which books the winners get, though I'll try to meet requests. This contest is not entirely altruistic, you see. By accepting books, you will help me tidy up my living quarters and bring them one step closer to fitness for human habitation.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

On Camilleri's settings, human and geographic

Clive James, whose views on international crime fiction I have not always endorsed, was right about Andrea Camilleri.

"Montalbano’s bailiwick is Sicily," James wrote in 2007. "If mainland Italy is corrupt, Sicily is corrupter, and Montalbano has some plenty-mean streets to walk down. He does so at a brisk pace, and it is because Camilleri knows his background too well to be impressed. He speaks the language. ... Camilleri can do a character’s whole backstory in half a paragraph ... "

I like that because it recognizes that setting, such a big part of the attraction of crime novels from outside the reader's home country, is human as well as physical. Two gorgeous bits of setting, one of each kind, from Voice of the Violin (English translation 2003), the fourth of Camilleri's novels about Inspector Salvo Montalbano, reminded me of this.

One bit describes a road from Vigàta to Calapiano,

"a sort of mule track that received its first and last coat of asphalt fifty years ago in the early days of regional autonomy, and finally reached Calapiano via a provincial road that clearly refused to be known as such, its true aspiration being to resume the outward appearance of the earthquake-ravaged country trail it had once been."

And this:

"`Are you cops?'

"The inspector laughed. How many centuries of police tyranny had it taken to hone this Sicilian woman's ability to detect law-enforcement officers at a moment's glance?"

Where does the human stop, and the geographic and historical begin? In Camilleri, nowhere. For him, the three are mutually inextricable.

And now a question perhaps harder than the usual questions for readers. Who else does what Camilleri does? In what other crime writers are the characters inseparable from their setting and its history?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Enough with the jokes

Last week I promised a post on small ways Arnaldur Indriðason articulates big themes. Here's one example, from the opening pages of Arctic Chill, where police are at a loss for information about a murder victim:

"Could be Thai, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese," Sigurður Óli reeled off.

"Shouldn't we say he's an Icelander until we find out otherwise?" Erlendur said.

Later, Arnaldur puts these words in the mouth of a character who is not quite the anti-immigrant yahoo he seems at first:

"I've got nothing against immigrants ... But I'm against changing everything that's traditional and Icelandic just to pander to something called multiculturalism, when I don't even know what it means."

This character expresses revulsion at crimes against immigrants and full support for government programs to help integrate newcomers into Icelandic society.

One character says: "This is all so new to us. Immigrants, racial issues."

Another muses on the problem of immigrant children who refuse to integrate: "Same problem with the Icelanders living in Denmark. Their children refused to learn Danish."

Finally, any number of crime writers might have delivered lengthy exposition on the dreary conditions under which immigrants live. Here's how Arnaldur does it: "Erlendur was astonished there was no lift in such a tall building."

No diatribe, no ringing indictment. Instead, Erlendur and his creator, in their customary manner, making a hearfelt effort to understand their country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More of James Ellroy's gentle humor

I'll let this example stand for all the laugh lines in The Cold Six Thousand because there are too many such lines to pack into one post, and I still have half the book left to read:

Littell coughed. "Bobby Kennedy will probably resign. The new AG might have plans for Vegas, and Mr. Hoover might not be able to curtail them. I'll try to do some favors for him, learn what I can and pass it along."

Sam said: "That cocksucker Bobby."

Moe said: "That bad fucking seed."

Santo said: "That cocksucker used us. He put his faggot brother in the White House at our expense. He fucked us like the pharaohs fucked Jesus."

Johnny said: "The Romans, Santo. The pharaohs fucked Joan of Arc."

Santo said: "Fuck Bobby and Joan. They're both faggots."

Moe rolled his eyes. Fuck this goyishe shit.

At least one excellent movie has been made from an Ellroy novel, but it's hard to imagine this scene being played in a movie without seeming ridiculous. And that's one more reason for you to read the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

James Ellroy, P.G. Wodehouse and Barack Obama

James Ellroy is not commonly regarded as a laugh-a-minute type of guy, but I liked this bit from The Cold Six Thousand, part of an exchange between Howard Hughes and mob lawyer/ex-FBI man Ward J. Littell:

HH: Only Mormons and FBI men have clean blood.

WJL: I'm not much of an expert on blood, Sir.

HH: I am. You know the law, and I know aerodynamics, blood and germs.

WJL: We're experts in our separate fields, Sir.

That's pure P.G. Wodehouse in its gentle putdown/evasions, more than worthy of Jeeves and Bertie, though a lethal Jeeves and a warped, racist, power-mad, billionaire, drug-injecting Bertie.

Earlier, Ellroy has J. Edgar Hoover say: "Las Vegas is a hellhole. It is unfit for sane habitation, which may explain its allure to Howard Hughes." That's not Wodehouse, but it's pretty funny.

=====

President Obama was in Philadelphia today. If you know anything about The Cold Six Thousand, you'll know why I smiled as I carried the book through a crowd of pro- and anti-Obama demonstrators on the way to work.

I could not help thinking that protest is much less spontaneous now than in Ellroy's 1960s. There were the "Health care now!" chanters with their neatly printed signs, and there was the obligatory anti-abortion placard with a bloody fetus. But my favorite was a smaller sign, on what looked like brown corrugated cardboard, that demanded: "UFO disclosure now!" Sounds like something Howard Hughes might have looked into had he lived.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thought for food

Little says as much about cultural differences as contrasting attitudes toward food. To crime writers from North America or from Europe's colder countries, food is an indicator of squalor, an objective correlative of bachelor solitude, or a sign of eccentricity.

Get closer to the Mediterranean, and food is life. Here's an example from The Terra-Cotta Dog, Andrea Camilleri's second novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano. A sympathetic journalist friend rescues the hapless Montalbano from the ordeal of a press conference that follows the mysterious arrest of a mobster named Tano:

And just to make things even harder, there were the adoring eyes of Corporal Anna Ferrara, staring at him from the crowd.

Niccolò Zito, newsman from the Free Channel and a true friend, tried to rescue him from the quicksand in which he was drowning.

"Inspector, with your permission," said Zito. "You said you met Tano on your way back from Fiacca, where you'd been invited to eat a tabisca with friends. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"What is a tabisca?"

They'd eaten tabisca many times together. Zito was simply tossing him a life preserver. Montalbano seized it. Suddenly confident and precise, the inspector went into a detailed description of that extraordinary, multiflavored Italian pizza.

And there the chapter ends.

No authors combine food and crime with greater zest than Camilleri, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Jean-Claude Izzo. And few crime writers can have been as committed men of the left as these three. Izzo wrote with great sympathy of Marseilles' Arab population, and he worked for Pax Christi, a Roman Catholic peace movement. Vázquez Montalbán was active in anti-Franco movements. Camilleri joined the Italian Communist Party, and his books are filled with funny, bitter denunciations of Italian politicians and their service to the Mafia.

This must seem especially exotic to American crime-fiction readers, for whom the words food and mystery are likely to evoke thoughts of cozies with recipes, and for whom commitment of any kind is likely to seem antithetical to anything so hedonistic as good food.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Grace note

"After turning the key in the lock, he had, for all intents and purposes, opened the door onto nothingness: a horrific explosion, triggered by an ingenious device linking the door to an explosive charge, literally pulverized the house, the businessman, and his wife, Giuseppa née Tagliafico. Investigations, the newsman added, were proving difficult, since Mr. Brancato had a clean record and did not appear in any way involved with the Mafia.

"Montalbano turned off the television and started whistling Schubert's Eighth, the `Unfinished.' It came out splendidly, he didn't miss a note."

— Andrea Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

James Ellroy and the Hollies

I was eating breakfast at my local café this week when a verse of telegraphic lyrics came floating over the stereo system:

"Bus stops. Bus goes. She stays. Love grows."

Its clipped cadence, if not the story it told, reminded me of a passage from a book I was reading at the time:

"Clouds imploded. Buildings weaved. People blipped."

Name the song and the novel from which these two pieces of terse storytelling are taken, and you win my respect.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A guest post about Fred Vargas, good books and crime-fiction awards

Loren Eaton, who maintains the I Saw Lightning Fall blog and who comments on this blog from time, is taking a break from both pursuits — some nonsense about caring for a new baby. While he takes the 3 a.m. feedings, I'm helping out with a guest post on his blog about Fred Vargas, Siân Reynolds and the ripple of dissatisfaction in some circles when the pair won their third International Dagger Award in four years for The Chalk Circle Man.

Loren has lined up an interesting group to fill in for him while he fulfills his fatherly duties. Read my contribution here. And congratulate Loren on the new arrival.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Icy jokes

Let's put to rest for good the base canard that the Nordic peoples are dour. Sure, they commit suicide a lot, and those long winter nights let them do so under the cover of darkness. ("`It was about eight o'clock,' she said. `Still pitch black, of course,'" runs one off-hand but telling bit of dialogue in Arnaldur Indriðason's Arctic Chill, italics mine.)

There are no knee slappers in Arnaldur's novel, but there is plenty of wit from this artful Icelandic crime writer. Here's the closest the book gets to a bawdy nudge in the ribs, protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson and his girlfriend, discussing whether two formerly married partners can find true love:

Perhaps, says the girlfriend. "Yes," says Erlendur, "but what if one of them finds this true love at regular intervals?"

In a similar vein is another joke that may not even be a joke in the original Icelandic but works nicely in English. A well-dressed colleague of Erlendur's is knocking on doors questioning neighbors the killing that has set the story in motion. One of the neighbors mistakes him for a Jehovah's Witness and politely but firmly closes the door in his face. He knocks again and, when the woman she opens the door a second time, says "You haven't heard the news, have you?"

"The news" is the killing, and "You haven't heard the news?" is a sly, amusing reproach to a woman who thinks she has just shut the door on a Christian proselytizer.

More tomorrow, perhaps, on small ways Arnaldur articulates big themes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Noir at the Bar with "Dope Thief" author Dennis Tafoya

Noir at the Bar

presents

Dennis Tafoya

author of

Dope Thief


“Dope Thief is first-rate literary noir, the hardest-core crime novel I’ve read this year. It manages to be funny without ever descending into the trivial, and at its core it’s harrowing. An amazingly assured debut by Dennis Tafoya.”
— Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway and Cottonwood

“The plotting is solid, and the action has a hard, violent edge that recalls Richard Price.”
— Booklist

“A boy `born into the life’ makes a wrenching attempt to change course or die trying in a first novel that marks Tafoya as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly

“An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a
reader’s heart is often as not through flawed characters.”
— Kirkus Reviews

Read an excerpt from Dope Thief here.

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

When Dennis is done, stick around for legendary columnist, novelist and screenwriter Pete Dexter reading from his new novel, Spooner.

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

When: Wednesday, September 30th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: The Pen and Pencil Club,
1522 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, 215-731-9909
http://www.penandpencil.org/index.php

The return of Pufferfish

Pufferfish is coming back in a new book, and I couldn't be happier, because that means a return of one of the more entertaining and original crime-fiction protagonists of the 1990s.

David Owen's prickly Tasmanian police inspector, Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, previously appeared in four novels:
Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995) and The Devil Taker (1997). The new book, to be published in December, is called No Weather for a Burial.

Here's a bit of what I wrote about Pufferfish back in the early days of Detectives Beyond Borders. It should give you an idea of why I'm glad the series will resume:

"I want to be Inspector Franz Heineken of the Tasmania Police Force, protagonist of David Owen's 1990s series and proud bearer of the nickname Pufferfish (`An ugly, poisonous scavenger known to bloat in times of distress,' according to one description). OK, I want to be everything but the `ugly' part.

"Pufferfish knows his boss is an oily, backstabbing careerist. Pufferfish recognizes that colleagues are vindictive and possibly bent. In X and Y, the third of the four books in the series, Pufferfish has been shot at and set up to take the fall for a drug bust gone wrong. But he's not bitter, and he's not haunted. John Rebus and Matt Scudder would sidle away from this guy at a bar. He's too psychologically healthy.

"And that's what makes him such a standout protagonist. He works in a nest of vipers, but he's an amiable zoo guide, telling the reader about the snakes' habits, rather than worrying all the time about being swallowed up by them. His attitude of amusement leavens the contempt and anger enough to set him apart from the legions of police-procedural protagonists in similar situations. At the same time, he can survive very well among the reptiles, and he's not afraid to tell his boss where to get off, only in language a good deal coarser than that."

Here's a link to my previous posts (scroll down) about the series. Here's the entry on Owen at the Australian Crime Fiction Database, including reviews of the first four books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Significant names plus a question for readers

Yesterday I awarded a copy of Arnaldur Indriðason's The Draining Lake to a reader who knew that the name of Arnaldur's protagonist, Erlendur, is also an Icelandic word meaning foreign.

The coincidence struck me and not just because Arnaldur occasionally writes about Iceland's uneasy accommodation of its recent immigrant population. More to the point, Erelendur is not always at ease in his own country. Thus, I thought, his name may be thematically significant.

Imagine my excitement last night when I read the following, in Arctic Chill, about a boy named Niran:

"`Niran,' Erlendur said to himself, as if to hear how the name sounded. `Does that mean anything in particular?'

"`It means eternal,' the interpreter said.

"`Eternal?'

"`Thai names have literal meanings, just like Icelandic ones.'"

Niran is nowhere to be found at this point in the story, and his brother has just been found dead, likely the victim of a stabbing. Eternal is a bitterly ironic name for a child who at this moment may be anything but, just one more piece of evidence that a name is more than just a name for Arnaldur.

(Arctic Chill was short-listed for the 2009 CWA International Dagger Award for best translated crime novel. The award went, as this award often does, to Fred Vargas and translator Sîan Reynolds, for The Chalk Circle Man.)

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

And now your question: You've just met characters whose names mean foreign and eternal. Both these names are at least partly ironic. What other characters have significant names?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Win The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason

Nothing in the opening pages of Arnaldur Indriðason's Arctic Chill dissuades me from my opinion that Arnaldur is one of the world's best crime writers — a master at portraying setting and conveying emotion through spare, thematically powerful details.

Now, thanks to the good people at Picador Books, one fortunate reader can win another of Arnaldur's novels, The Draining Lake, the fourth Inspector Erlendur mystery.

The protagonist's name is also an Icelandic word. Tell me what that word means, be the first to send the correct answer ...

(Here's what I wrote last year about The Draining Lake.)

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

A reader from the great state of Texas knew that Erlendur, the name of Arnaldur Indriðason's protagonist, is also an Icelandic word for foreign. A copy of The Draining Lake will be in the mail next week. Congratulations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Unspoken: Swedish mystery offers two neat solutions

That ABBA song finished, and so, a few hours later, did Mari Jungstedt's novel Unspoken. Though both have their moments, I liked the book better.

As a mystery, Unspoken is just fair. Jungstedt plants some nice red herrings, but her choice of perpetrators for the novel's two main crimes is surprising to the point of feeling rushed and arbitrary. Elsewhere, though, she comes up with elegant solutions to a pair of problems I've occasionally found in mysteries. I'll call one of these the domestic problem and the other the professional.

The first happens when an author tries too hard to flesh out a character by giving him or her a domestic life. The second happens when an author, often a reporter, assumes that his or her profession is sufficiently interesting to constitute a compelling plot element. Either or both can often be too big a burden for a protagonist to sustain while still moving the story forward.

Unspoken avoids this simply by allocating the domestic and professional angst to subsidiary characters, with a just a brief hint of domestic discord in the life of the chief police investigator, Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas. The burden of professional griping falls to Johan Berg, a television reporter sent to the Swedish island of Gotland to cover the crimes Knutas and his team investigate. The domestic travails fall to Emma Winarve, a teacher with whom Berg has had an affair. This lets Jungstedt, herself a television reporter, air her frustrations and hold forth on the heroism of conscientious reporters without slowing the narrative pace or sinking into whining or self-pity. The novel's structure of short sub-chapters, each told from a different character's pont of view, helps.

This construction is one of the more intriguing and practical I've seen in a crime novel, and it encourages me to seek out more of Jungstedt's work. (Read another discussion of the book here.)

And now, a question for readers: What crime novels can you think of where domestic description or other non-mystery elements got in the way of the story? What novels did a good job of integrating these elements?

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

(Mari Jungstedt's English translator, Tiina Nunnally, will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Unspoken by Mari Jungstedt

Early signs are good for this second of Mari Jungstedt's six novels and the second of three to be translated from Swedish into English.

I like the spare prose and the shifting points of view, with the reader only gradually learning who are minor characters and who major, who are sidekicks and who will have smaller roles. This is bracing, unexpected, and arguably truer to life, where one is never sure who the main characters are until the story is at least into its middle chapters.

Here's a bit of that spare description that I like: "Henry had been given the nickname Flash because he had worked as a photographer for Gotlands Tidningar for many years before alcohol took over his life full-time."

I like, too, that one of the characters, a television news reporter, complains of the haste, sloppiness and decline forced upon his profession by management cutbacks.

(As I write this, ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" is playing softly in the background. I am unsure that Jungstedt would appreciate the coincidence.)

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

(Mari Jungstedt's English translator, Tiina Nunnally, will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

West Coast Blues: A classic crime novel goes graphic

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was one of the great crime writers, and his novel Le petit bleu de la côte ouest (translated previously as Three to Kill) may be the essential European crime novel of the last forty years.

Now the book has made its way into graphic-novel form, as West Coast Blues, adapted and illustrated by Jacques Tardi and published by Fantagraphic Books. The story follows with hallucinogenic clarity a young businessman named Georges Gerfaut (anglicized here as "George") through an accidental encounter that leads to: beating, killing, hit men, privation, wandering then salvation in the woods, sex, revenge, voluntary uprooting from his family, clashes with a Latin American torturer on the run — and then back to the same ring road in Paris where he began, wondering, perhaps, whether it was all real and whether it will happen again. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. There is no sad ending, either. The story simply runs out.

The book is slyly funny without being jokey; thrilling without ever seeming manipulative; cool, distant and ironic in its narrative voice; immediate in its depiction of violence.

What do Tardi's illustrations add? Mostly a crowded sense of daily life, an ironic, sense-sharpening departure from the dark, shadowy atmospherics that sometimes nudge noir toward mere style. Tardi's scenes of Gerfaut and his family at a holiday resort are notable here, full of packed beaches, spilled ice cream, traffic jams, and an attempt on George's life.

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

(The new title presumably refers to Gerfaut's perferred music, the cool West Coast jazz that Gerfaut listens to as he unwinds and the tension builds.

Here's what I wrote about Manchette last year in a post called "Who is the most influential crime writer?" Here's a roundup of the year's mystery and crime comics from Brian Lindenmuth. And here's what one current crime writer, a admirer of Manchette's who has paid tribute to him in his own work, has to say.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Score some Kiwi crime books

Keeping things in the British Commonwealth, Craig Sisterson of the Crime Watch blog is offering readers the chance to sample crime writing from New Zealand, and all you have to do is leave a comment.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Just in time for Labour Day ...

... at a store near you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Those fingers in my hair / That sly come-hither stare ...

... it's witchcraft, and it figures prominently in Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's 2007 crime debut, Last Rituals.

A student is found slain in his Reykjavík university department, his body mutilated in ways that suggest occult rituals (but also outré and dangerous sexual practices). The student has been preparing a dissertation on the comparative history of witch hunts. Early investigation of his death coincides with the disappearance of a historic letter from one sixteenth-century ecclesiastic to another that may deal with witchcraft as well.

I suspect from the novel's early chapters that I will learn something about witchcraft, its history and its reception in Iceland. But I'll also keep in mind other Nordic crime novels from the late 1990s onward in which satanic or other occult practices (or fear thereof) lie at the heart of murders. I wrote about this in 2007 in a discussion of Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (published as The Savage Altar in the UK). Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil and Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star would also make the list.

While I go read more of Last Rituals, I'll throw the question open to readers, especially those from the Nordic countries: Have satanism and witchcraft been on people's minds in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland in the past ten years? If so, why? And what other crime novels have taken up the subject?

Last Rituals has had its mischievous moments, too. One early highlight is an unexpectedly lighthearted exchange over autopsy photographs that includes the line "Fancy a pizza?"

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

(Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be a member of my crime fiction and translation panel at Bouchercon 2009 along with Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Robert Pépin.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

One more thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I've just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I think things remain to be said about Stieg Larsson's much-discussed first novel. I won't say them now, though, except to note that the last few pages contain two of the most endearingly self-deprecating bits of self-reference in all of crime fiction — unless one regards the bits as self-justification, grimly ironic or not self-referential at all.

I won't give away much if I reveal that the references concern a book written by protagonist Mikael Blomkvist.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Modesty Blaise: The original girl who played with fire

I've reached the stage in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo where Lisbeth Salander is starting to come to the fore. So far she reminds me strongly of another young fictional woman with mysterious origins, a horrible past, a quiet demeanor, and wide-ranging and dangerous talents: Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise.

The affinity is so strong and so obvious that someone else must have remarked on it. Who else has noticed the similarities?

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Stieg Larsson — debut novelist

Two of the rare measured comments I've read about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo suggested that Stieg Larsson wrote too much like the journalist he was and that, like many another first-time novelist, he wrote long.

I liked the comments because they humanized the man behind the astonishing Larsson phenomenon. Once you start becoming the focus of conspiracy theories and notorious court cases (in Europe) and once your books start getting displayed next to volumes about Michael Jackson (in Philadelphia), calm discussion starts looking for its coat, making its excuses, and glancing nervously at the door.

So I regard with affection what I take to be traces of the first-time novelist in the first two hundred or so pages of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. One such trace is the occasional wordiness in routine exposition. Ordinarily I don't like that sort of thing; here, it made Larsson seem more human.

But I especially liked co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's rants against his fellow financial journalists, and I take Blomkvist as a stand-in for Larsson. Here are two examples:

"In the last 20 years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self-importance and who had no record of thinking critically."

and

"The article was written by a columnist who had previously worked for Monopoly Financial Magazine ... who cheerfully ridiculed anyone who felt passionate about any issue or who stuck their neck out. ... The writer was not known for espousing a single conviction of his own."

If that's a first-time novelist failing to separate himself from his character, so be it. Those passages are fun, and that's what reading is for.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I'm moderating a panel at Bouchercon 2009

I've just learned that I'll be moderating an exciting panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis this October.

"Lost in Translation?: Translators and writers discuss the challenges of translating the crime novel" will feature Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally, Robert Pépin and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir in conversation, with your humble blogkeeper asking the questions and keeping the peace.

This panel will bring together four talented, accomplished individuals, and it will look at translation from every viewpoint: that of translators into English (Nunnally, Murray), that of a translator from English (Pépin), and that of an author who places her creations in a translator's hands, which must feel like giving up a child for adoption or at least like sending her off to summer camp for the first time (Yrsa Sigurðardóttir).

The fun happens Thursday, Oct. 15, 10:30 a.m.-11:25 a.m. I'll see you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Flight dreck, Part II

My theory about flight crews? Glad you asked. But first, rest assured that the theory is grounded in repeated observation, refined only later into a general proposition.

One night I was having a drink at the Ledes and Layoffs Club in Philadelphia, my peace disturbed by a too-loud group pounding tables in bad rhythm and jocosely threatening not to pay for their rounds. "An airline crew," the bartender whispered. "They work for Northeast."

Next week, different crew, same airline, same behaviour.

Some months later, the club a bit more crowded, the music a bit louder, the behaviour a bit worse. "These guys fly for Northeast, too?" I asked.

"Nope," the bartender said, "Epsilon Airlines."

Now, what may we conclude? That commercial-airline flight crews, worn to a frazzle and wound tight by endless rules and procedures and by the tight quarters in which they work, rendered light-headed by jet lag, go nuts when let loose in a strange city? Or maybe these three crews (from two real airlines whose names have been changed to avoid embarrassing the club or its customers) were just jerks.

In any case, next time I go to Europe, I may take the train. (Read more about flying here, including a comment that suggests another plausible explanation for flight crews' blowing off steam.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Flight dreck

Another bit from my current crime reading, Selçuk Altun's Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, dovetails nicely with a non-crime post I had planned to make. Here's Altun:

"The stewardess of the `business class' section was presenting the flight security precautions with the usual repulsive mimicry."

Here's me:

"A train journey begins with a thrilling lurch into motion. A plane journey begins with the slightly nauseating whiff of filtered, pressurized air.

"You squeeze past your rowmates' knees to get up. You squeeze past their knees to get back. (Just don't drop anything, because good luck squeezing down between rows to pick it up.) You contemplate the condensation between the windows. You choose from a wide range of entertainment options. You enjoy the easy-going conversational genuineness of the crew ..."

Coming soon: More from Selçuk Altun, plus my theory about why flight crews, so rigidly cheerful in the air, can be so obnoxious once they land.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A novel from Turkey that won't leave me cold

Here's a bit from the second chapter of Selçuk Altun's Songs My Mother Never Taught Me:

"Today your humble servant Bedirhan Öztürk is thirty-seven years old! Instead of buying myself a birthday present I've come to a crucial decision. God willing, I'm going to break away from the business I've undertaken so patiently for the last twelve years.

"Please don't let the fact that I'm a hired killer alarm you. ...

"But retirement will come to pass, by the grace of God! Listening reverently to the evening ezan and eating my blessed pomegranate, I'll say my prayers and go to sleep, if you'll allow me. I'm sure that you've already begun to realize that your humble servant is no ordinary gun-toting operator."

I think I'll enjoy this novel's amiable tone. As a bonus, my alma mater gets a prominent mention in the third chapter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Fred Vargas in the newspaper

My review of Fred Vargas' The Chalk Circle Man appears here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Eddie Coyle's best friend

Partisans of George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle sprang to its defense last week when I wrote that some parts of the novel had aged badly. It turns out that one of the book's most ardent defenders was lurking right here all along.

The superlatively talented Bill James, author of the Harpur and Iles novels, told your humble blogkeeper in June that "the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Keeping it short, or, `The sight of the defeated is always tedious'

The title to this post includes a line uttered by a corporate official in Dominique Manotti's Dead Horsemeat, and it's typical of Manotti's technique in one respect.

It's a powerful line but spoken matter-of-factly, amid cocktail-party chatter in a luxurious apartment as guests catch sight of a banner commemorating the events of Tiananmen Square. The guests drop the subject as suddenly as they bring it up.

I don't like references to a novel's "texture" because I'm not always sure what the word means. With Manotti, it would mean terse writing, spare character reactions even in scenes of violence, low-key jokes that have a sharp effect set against the laconic prose that surrounds them. All this makes for a fast pace, especially when Manotti describes harsh but small crimes that must be building to something bigger. The resulting suspense is why I regard Manotti's novels as part crime, part thriller, or better, as crime thrillers.

This is all the more impressive because her novels range widely and cover big topics: from horse barns to corporate takeovers, from sweatshops to government security services, massive international drug smuggling and high-level assassination attempts, from factory floors to the highest offices of power in France. These could easily be earmarks of fat, sprawling doorstops, yet the three books available in English check in at about 255 pages for Rough Trade, around 200 for Lorraine Connection, and a spartan 175 for Dead Horsemeat. That's just one factor that makes reading Manotti a bracing experience.

Click here for more Manotti posts. And tell me what crime or other novels have surprised you with their brevity.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Merde!

Merde is the glue that holds Fred Vargas' three evangelists together:

"Ils cherchaient. Un autre fou dans la merde."

and

"Dans la merde" demanda-t-il?"

"Précisément. ... Ennui, désillusion, écriture en solitude."

"Mais alors il est dans la merde ... Tu ne pouvais pas la dire tout de suite?"

and

"(L)es trois chercheurs de merde se retrouvèrent tassés autour d'un grand feu."

and

"Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça."

Marc, Matthias and Lucien, the three "evangelists" of the novel's English title, come together because all are in merde. Too bad that merde, or rather its English equivalent, is frowned upon in American publications. But even then, shit is both far harsher in tone and far narrower in meaning than merde.

Siân Reynolds, who translated Vargas' Debout les morts into English as The Three Evangelists, told Detectives Beyond Borders last year that:

"Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them."

She renders merde variously as down on his luck or in a bad way, chercheurs de merde as seriously unemployed historians, and "Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça" as "Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists."

The translation loses the unifying, amusing effect of the repeated merde, both meaning and sound, but what can a translator do except shrug, mutter a quiet merde!, and get on with her work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City: A review

By Catherine Corman
Preface by Jonathan Lethem
Charta Art Books
=================

I spent a few days in Santa Cruz this spring. Wrong end of California, but I still saw parts of it through Raymond Chandler's eyes.

Others have done the same, whether in Santa Cruz or elsewhere. Jonathan Lethem's preface to this collection of Chandler excerpts and Catherine Corman's photographs accounts nicely for the rich visual associations Chandler conjures up — and the reasons have nothing to do with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall or Martha Vickers. "In Chandler," Lethem says, "the hardboiled style becomes above all a way of seeing, not so far from photography itself."

The preface and the photographer's own introduction play heavily on solitude in Los Angeles and in Chandler's own work, invoking Edward Hopper's paintings, for example. And the photos are of buildings, fences, trees, airplanes — and none of people.

Here are some of the excerpts that Corman has illustrated with her lovely, lonely black-and-white pictures:

"We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind."

and

"He had a good job in Wichita. I guess he just sort of wanted to come out here to California. Most everybody does."

and

"The guy in the sports coat and yellow handkerchief got in and backed his car out and then stopped long enough to put on dark glasses and light a cigarette. After that he was gone."

I'm ready to do some serious seeing when I read writing like that.

The excerpts are treats, bits of ominous description and philosophizing and Chandler's wonderfully erudite jokes that will send me back to my Chandler collection. Sometimes Corman makes the photo part of the story. A stark, empty corner of what looks like a street-level shop accompanies an excerpt about "Geiger Rare Books," the porn outlet in The Big Sleep. After Geiger and Carol Lundgren have cleared out, perhaps?

Two small complaints concern the book's lack of annotation. The locations lack identification, and the individual excerpts lack convenient citation by source. The former would have intrigued experienced Chandler readers, and the latter would have made a useful reading guide for those new to Chandler. But those are quibbles, for the book is not a Chandler travelogue, but a companion to his way of seeing the world.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I love Paris in November

In the tradition of my crepuscular view of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge, here's a little thing from 2007 that I'll call Paris at Night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

War! What is it good for?

Some time ago I made some posts about a great Frenchman. Now here's a word from his neighbor:

"War then is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State . ... each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men; for between things disparate in nature there can be no real relation."

Nothing there about a war on drugs or terror, as far as I can tell.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Haere mai to a New Zealand crime blog

Craig Sisterson sends word from New Zealand of Crime Watch, his new blog about New Zealand and international crime/thriller writing.

Early posts have lots of good stuff about New Zealand writers, appearances by and interviews with international authors, and one about New Zealand's own dame of crime fiction, Ngaio Marsh.

"So why a blog on Kiwi crime fiction?" Craig writes. "Well, because I think we have some fantastic authors here in Aotearoa, but we don't talk about them enough."

Craig also answered a question I had always had about his country: "What is kiwifruit called in New Zealand?" His answer: It's called kiwifruit.

(Click here for an explanation of this post's hospitable title.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

An enemy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle?

Well, not an enemy, really, but George V. Higgins' novel is such a foundational text for hard-boiled crime writers everywhere that any criticism smacks of heresy, and I have at least one to offer.

First, though, it's easy to imagine what a bracing effect the novel's style, almost all dialogue, with bits of elliptical description, must have had when the book appeared the early 1970s. That part still works fine, and it would be interesting to look back at what Elmore Leonard was doing at the time. This was just before he moved over from Westerns to crime novels. Did Higgins influence Leonard?

Second, that dialogue contains some funny lines. My favorite so far:

"`I never been able to understand a man that wanted to use a machinegun,' the stocky man said. `It's life if you get hooked with it and you can't really do much of anything with it except fight a war, maybe.'"

The substance of the dialogue is surprisingly fresh considering that the book was written amid the hangover from the 1960s, and Higgins couldn't help that he was writing during what may have been the most embarrassing fashion era in Western history. He had to describe all those god-awful fringes and suede jackets.

But the book's bad-guys-are-people-too message has dated badly, or rather, so many writers have delivered it so much better since that Higgins' version reads today as plodding, rudimentary and ponderous. Dillon's long virtual monologue in Chapter Six is so patently tendentious (It's one of the only parts of the book so far that has no funny lines; that's how we know Higgins is being serious), and it's so damned long that I was tempted to flip ahead – not a good thing in a book of just 150 pages.

Chapter Six certainly slows the story down. I don't know enough about crime writing of the early 1970s to call it a bad piece of writing. Maybe it has just dated badly. I invite friends of The Friends of Eddie Coyle to weigh in, particularly on the chapter in question and on Higgins's role as a pioneer in the bad-guys-are-just-working-stiffs school.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A return to serious posts – tomorrow

Someone suggested John R. Corrigan's golf novel Bad Lie in response to yesterday's question about sports in crime stories. What a terrific title.

This got me thinking that games, with their rules just waiting to be broken, offer apt metaphors for crime – and a rich field of over-the-top crime-fiction titles, some of them possibly genuine: Out of Bounds. Personal Foul. False Start. Long Bomb. Broken Play. Italics give even the hoariest cliché a bit of zing, don't they?

Your task today is to make up the cleverest or most outlandish sports-related title you can for a crime or mystery story. Titles of real books and stories, in the tradition of Bad Lie, are also welcome, as are suggestions from games whose terminology is unknown to me, such as cricket, darts, archery, camogie, boules, kabaddi, 43-man squamish, tossing the caber ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

In the rough

P.G. Wodehouse's Oldest Member must be turning over in his grave. First Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attacks golf as a bourgeois game, sparking a war of words with the U.S. State Department.

Then this, in Dominque Manotti's novel Rough Trade:

Police Inspector Daquin has just interviewed a powerful man at an exclusive golf club. The powerful man has urged discretion, equating his own business interests with France's national interest, to which Daquin responds on his way back to the office: "People who play golf are capable of anything."

Come to the defense of sports, readers. What are your favorite uses of or references to sports in crime fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Who is reviewing the reviewers?

I am. So is Seana Graham. Declan Burke takes a peek, too, from time to time, and that's a good thing.

The occasion is a review in the Guardian of Adrian McKinty's novel Fifty Grand. I've always been partial to reviews that establish context, that show the reviewer knows his or her subject, that could interest even a reader unfamiliar with the matter at hand.

I like that the Guardian begins by invoking McKinty's "Dead" trilogy and goes on to find traits common to that superb series and the new book. This tells me that the reviewer, John O'Connell, prepared well, embraced his subject and took his job seriously. A reviewer owes his readers no less.

Seana Graham's Things You May Have Missed blog takes up this subject in a post aptly titled What the Guardian knows that The New York Times doesn't. And Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays is apt to snap its jaws at lazy reviewers' hindquarters when they deserve it.

With newspapers devoting less and less space to books coverage, the coverage that remains had better be good. Because we're watching.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Guthrie and Weegee

(Cop Killer (left) Weegee; negative, January 16, 1941, print, about 1950, © International Center of Photography)

The cover of Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split is taken from one of the great crime photographs, Weegee's Cop Killer, though the borrowing from Weegee is unacknowledged, as far as I can tell.

The designers hired by Point Blank Press colorized the photo in hot reds and yellows, flipped it, cropped it, and jacked the contrast up to emphasize splashes and ominous blotches on and around the cop killer and the arresting officer.

It's an evocative photograph, eliciting pity for the beaten suspect even as one thinks of the horror of his deed, his desolation highlighted by the facelessness of his custodians. And that makes it a pretty good cover for an Allan Guthrie novel.

(For more on Weegee, click here. For more on Allan Guthrie, click here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Your daily crime fiction chuckle

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. One of my favorite bits mixes humor and philosophy:

"`One of the most celebrated bank robbers in the world was the American Willie Sutton,' Raskol said. `When he was arrested and taken to court, the judge asked him why he robbed banks. Sutton answered: Because that's where the money is. It's become a standing expression in everyday American English and I suppose it's meant to show us how brilliantly direct and easy language can be. To me, it just represents an idiot who got caught. Good robbers are neither famous not quotable."

I'm not sure where that stands on a scale of philosophical weightiness, but it sure adds to the pleasure of reading the novel. As always with Nesbø in English, Don Bartlett has provided a fluent, unobtrusive translation with the added small pleasure of leaving street names in the original Norwegian.

========

Nemesis, which comes after The Redbreast and before The Devil's Star in order of original publication, highlights the desirability of reading the books in that order rather than in order of their appearance in English. Devil's Star was first of the three to be translated, followed by The Redbreast and Nemesis.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Remember when computers were cool?

There's a nice bit of social observation in Jo Nesbø's Nemesis. The protagonist, Harry Hole, has sought out his cab driver friend Øystein (last seen in these parts in a highly amusing conversation about the Rolling Stones) and asked if he might want to return to his old career:

"`Still not interested in going back to computers?'

"`Are you crazy!' Øystein shook off internal laughter as he ran the tip of his tongue along the paper. `Annual salary of a million and quiet office – of course, I could do with that, but I've missed the boat, Harry. The time for rock 'n' roll guys like me in IT is over.'"

The boldface line is of especial sociological interest, I think, because computer and Internet types loved to cultivate a rogue image for themselves, and their followers in the media were only too happy to oblige. Nesbø published Nemesis in 2002. Your question today, especially if you're old enough to remember when the Internet was going to be a liberating force and the media loved scruffy young computer rebel/entrepreneurs, is this: When did computers lose their roguish glamour?

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

Nemesis is the fourth of seven Harry Hole books in order of composition, the third of four in order of translation into English, and the second in series order of the four.

In order of original publication, the four novels are The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil's Star, and The Redeemer. In order of publication in English, The Devil's Star came first, followed by The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Redeemer. I'd strongly recommend reading the books in order of original publication, at least the first three.

P.S. Nesbø has also written children's books, one whose title translates delightfully into English as Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009