Brian McGilloway's Northern Irish Western

Many in Ireland's talented wave of crime writers are forthright about their debt to American (and Canadian) forerunners. Ken Bruen has said: "All my influences are American. That's how to I learned to read. That's how I learned to write." Declan Hughes swears allegiance to Margaret Millar and Raymond Chandler. Declan Burke's Eightball Boogie is a faithful but thoroughly contemporary Chandler homage. And Adrian McKinty explores not one but several of America's seamy underbellies.

I don't know if Brian McGilloway likes Westerns, but the tumbleweeds practically whistle through the opening pages of his second novel, Gallows Lane. A mysterious figure from the past returns to town. A lawman is sent to suggest that he turn right around and head back out. And how about that title:

"(T)he lane along which the condenmed were led — Gallows Lane — still exists. The local kids believe it is haunted. They still claim, in an age when such beliefs are largely forgotten, that on a Halloween night the chains of the condemned can he heard rattling and, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the wails of the accused and the creaking of the long-dead branches."

That's not the only place McGilloway invokes death and myth. But then, the man has an eye for evocative locations, redolent of mystery and myth, even in the midst of a contemporary police procedural. His first novel, Borderlands, opens with a body dumped right on the border between two lands so recently divided. One can't get much more suggestive than that.

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

And now, while I go on reading Gallows Lane, you can read my quasi-interview with Brian McGilloway here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A novel with no heroes

As discussed in this space last week, the workers in Lorraine Connection make moral decisions, all right, but so do corporate executives at several levels in two companies, and the decisions are always callous and reprehensible. At all events, the story rapidly expands beyond the assembly floor at the Daweoo plant in Pondange, a old steel town in France's Lorraine region.

The workers do not get left behind, though. Author Dominique Manotti weaves them in and out of the story, as victims, conspirators and hangers-on, caught up in the deepening plot without being reduced to sentimental tools.

The plot is that of a corporate thriller ripped right from today's headlines: Two corporate rivals fight for control of a giant state-owned company about to be sold off by France's government. (It may be significant that no political party is named anywhere in the novel. That could lead to easy polemics, but power in Manotti's world has nothing to do with party lines.)

The weapons in the corporate battle are murder, drugs, bribery and sexual blackmail. Corporate and political battles like this must be waged at the whitest heat, yet Manotti's prose is cool, distant and choppy even when it probes its characters' emotional lives. Corruption and the risk thereof at the highest levels – in European Union privatization schemes, in the clubby nature of power in France – are cited briefly and matter-of-factly.

And, in the novel's most intriguing touch, the private eye is no hero. He's no villain either; that would be too easy. He's just one more figure in the story, employed by one of the rival corporate groups to discredit the other, a human with, like so many other characters in this short novel, a compromised past. It's not the least of Manotti's achievements that she has no truck with the ideal of the hero who can save the world through his own will or die trying. This may be the least sentimental crime novel I have read, and one of the most original and impressive.

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Lorraine Connection won last year's CWA International Dagger for Manotti and translators Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz. This year's winner will be announced Wednesday, along with the winners of the short story, Dagger in the Library and Debut Dagger awards. Read about the 2009 International Dagger short-listed titles at the CWA Web site.

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P.S. At the risk of being labelled excessively fastidious, I'll note that my only quibble with the novel is one incorrect reference to vocal chords rather than the correct vocal cords.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

What are tips for?

It was a whitefish salad with which no reasonable person could find complaint, but it came in a container on the side of my bagel. I had to spread it on the bagel myself. Milk for my coffee? I had to walk from my seat at the counter over to a separate table and get it.

Again, no complaint; the coffee was fine. But if I had to garnish my own bagel and fetch my own milk, why had the café's owners put a big jar marked "Tips" by the cash register? What did they think I ought to tip them for?

Or, if customers were now expected to do work employees once performed, was tipping etiquette similarly turned upside down? Did the jar contain the owners' grateful offerings to customers for work well done?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A new blog about international crime fiction from folks who write the stuff

It's International Crime Authors Reality Check, a cooperative effort from Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill, Matt Beynon Reese and Barbara Nadel, each of whom plans one post a week.

The opening lineup includes How the Devil Lost its Vagina from Cotterill, Quick, woman, go and get the Koran! from Rees, The Elements of Crime Fiction in Foreign Settings from Moore, and a modest greeting from Nadel.

The site also includes short biographies, information about the authors' books, and news links. I've written about three of the authors here on Detectives Beyond Borders, most recently about Cotterill's Curse of the Pogo Stick last week, and I'll look forward to adding Nadel to the list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A thick book(seller)

I visited my local comics store today to inquire about Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter. Here's what happened:

Me: "Do you have The Hunter?

Click-click-click-click. Silence.

"Darwyn Cooke, graphic-novel version of Richard Stark's novel?

More silence.

"Nothing?"

The help: "Our computer is slow."

I circle the shop, browsing.

The help: "Who's in it?"

Me (nonplussed): "Who– Why would you ask who's in a novel? It's a novel, by Richard Stark – Donald Westlake – adapted and drawn by Darwyn Cooke.

I circle the shop again and come back around to the help and the store's computer.

"Not getting anything?" (On a previous visit to the store, another employee had called up information on the book and given me an approximate delivery date.)

The help: "I'm getting too many titles."

Me: "Why are you looking for a book on IMDb?"

The help: "Oh, it's not a movie?"

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

I'll find another place to buy the book. In the meantime, read about Darwyn Cooke and the Hunter comic at the Violent World of Parker Web site. And read some of my posts about Richard Stark here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Labor pains: Organized labor in crime fiction

"`Mr Amrouche, my predecessor told me you were a reasonable man, a man of compromise, able to make allowances. So I am keen for you to be the first to know this: in one week, the works council will meet and the question of the last nine months' unpaid bonuses will once again be on the agenda. If the company were to pay those bonuses today, plus the arrears, its financial stability would be jeopardised. The financial situation is still precarious, as you well know, and there's a risk the factory will have to close. So, management is going to suggest – and when I say suggest, you know what I mean – that all bonuses be cancelled for this year and paid next January.'"

Thanks goodness that's just fiction, from the opening chapter of Dominique Manotti's Lorraine Connection, winner of last year's International Dagger award from the Crime Writers' Association in the UK.

Mr. Amrouche is the union representative in a plant that makes cathode-ray tubes, and his presence reminded me how small a role organized labor plays in crime fiction. Evil corporations? Crime fiction has them by the score, generally of the real-estate development variety, but their adversaries and victims are usually lone-wolf private eyes, individual down-and-outers, or gentrified neighborhoods rather than unions. Even the few American proletarian crime stories I've read from the 1930s tend not to feature labor unions except as extensions of and counterparts to the mob.

The passage above is from very early in Lorraine Connection, and I have no idea how Mr. Amrouche or the union will figure in the novel's action (no spoilers, please). But he is one of the few labor-union characters I can think of in all of crime fiction, and the only one that comes to mind who is shown as a moral actor rather than a victim or villain.

And now, your thoughts. What crime stories give prominent roles to labor unions or unionists? What are those roles? Is labor underrepresented in crime fiction? If so, why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

McKinty reads

In one more piece of evidence that Belfast is the center of the universe,

No Alibis invites you to an evening with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite

Adrian McKinty

to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, Fifty Grand,
on Wednesday, July 8, at 6 p.m.

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a ‘traitor’ who skipped free from Castro’s control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood Scientology set, where a façade of legality is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and laborers working for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Mercado Sr.’s dreams of fortune and freedom are shattered when he is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome, not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics at Oxford University, and after a failed legal career he moved to the US in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a school teacher. He now resides in Melbourne, Australia.

NO ALIBIS BOOKSTORE
83 BOTANIC AVENUE
BELFAST BT7 1JL
david@noalibis.com
ph. 02890-319601
========================================

Here's part of what I had to say about Fifty Grand:

"The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

"It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

"In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments."

McKinty flew all the way from Australia for this reading. Go hear him, buy a book, and stake him to a pint of correctly poured Guinness. It's the least you can do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Savage morning after: Allan Guthrie's Killing Mum

When we left our friends at the end of Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, the prospects for some were uncertain. Guthrie's new novella, Killing Mum, finds a career for one of that book's peripheral characters and looks more closely at the career of another, one work assignment in particular. Here they are, preparing to torch a van to dispose of evidence and hoping to disguise the blaze as joyriders' vandalism:

"When he'd finished, he walked over to watch Jordan's handiwork. Jordan had written FIREMEN on the side of the van and was standing staring at it.

"He noticed the beam of Carlos's torch, stepped back. I'm stuck.

"`Suck,' Carlos said, around the torch.

"No, stuck.

"Carlos took the torch out of his mouth. `Suck,' he said. `Add "suck."'

"Okay. Jordan shook the can, sprayed out the word. `Firemen suck.' Sounds a bit lame.

"`Cock,' Carlos said. `Add "cock."'

"Nice."

Guthrie has moved into darker territory with his latest novel, Slammer, but I'd like to think of Hard Man, Savage Night and Killing Mum as a fictional universe, a ****ed-up, affecting, funny, murderous family saga that does a bit of genre-jumping in the bargain.

Guthrie's Web site links to a purchase page for Killing Mum that quotes reviews of his other work. One blurb seems especially pertinent: “Guthrie’s control of this dark material is sheer wizardry.” Killing Mum contains a lot of twists for a book of about ninety pages, and they're good twists, throwing the plot in unexpected directions without seeming manipulative.

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N.B.: Killing Mum is part of a series of novellas called Crime Express from Five Leaves Publishing. Hat tip to Donna Moore's Big Beat From Badsville blog for heaping well-deserved praise on these slim, inexpensive, tough-as-nails books. And kudos to Five Leaves, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More on Colin Cotterill's spirits

Colin Cotterill is the supernaturalist's answer to readers who don't like the supernatural in their crime stories. Here's a bit more from Curse of the Pogo Stick, fifth novel in Cotterill's series about Dr. Siri Paiboun of Vientiane, Laos:

"These small bamboo structures were miniature reconstructions of actual bridges but in this case they had no water to cross. They traditionally offered a shortcut for lost souls to return to their host. One was customary. Four suggested a hell of a lot of souls had gone missing from this particular house."

"A hell of a lot of souls" is wonderful, resonant, funny and unexpected. It nicely captures the simultaneous irreverence and respect with which Cotterill portrays the worlds of the supernatural and of those who believe in it. Dr. Siri is both a scientist – the chief and only coroner in post-Communist-revolution Laos – and a shaman, an unwilling conduit to the spirit world. Does he believe in the spirits with which he comes into contact and which sometimes help him solve mysteries? He has no choice:

"My biggest problem as a practicing cynic, however, is that I'm aligned, against my will and better judgment, to another world. ... I don't know how it's possible, but damn it, it's there. So I resort to the rules of the supernatural. I begin by seeing whether the incredible can be explained through their rules. And when that world tells me something is off-kilter and implausible, I know I have to think as a human. I have to use logic. My visit to the Otherwold told me I had to look for earthly solutions to this mystery."

That's one of the nicer accounts by a fictional detective of his own methods. Among the books' achievements, in addition to their engaging, sympathetic characters, their compassion, and their jabs at Communist bureaucracy, is that they invite respectful consideration, without dogma, mumbo-jumbo or embarrassment and with good humor, of the spiritual world and its role in human lives.

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

The illustration of Curse of the Pogo Stick's UK cover comes from the author's own Web site, one of the cleverer and more amusing of its kind. Take a look.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Allan Guthrie: Family guy

I've just spent a long mid-week holiday break playing miniature golf and filling trash bags full of old shingles and insulation. This cut into my reading time, but I shall be back up to speed tomorrow. When I return, I'll have another post about Colin Cotterill's spirit explorations in Curse of the Pogo Stick, which I've just finished, and a remark or two about Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, which took up a nice chunk of my train ride back from the mini-golf and shingle-schlepping.

For now, a couple of thoughts on the Guthrie:

1) The man could write a mean sitcom or screwball comedy if he set his mind to it. I'd like to see him write a script for The New My Three Sons.

2) Page 157 contains the funniest line I have read about that staple of 21st-century crime writing, the changing urban landscape.

3) That line is not as funny as two on Page 160:

"Not that they were in a hurry, but still. Effie had a new respect for butchers."

and

"They'd all sat around drinking. Took awkward sips and smiled sadly at each other. Dad kept saying, `I can't believe he's dead,' till Effie told him to shut up."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Colin Cotterill has fun with the spirits

In previous books Colin Cotterill invoked the recent history and the spiritual traditions of Laos. In the early pages of Curse of the Pogo Stick, he has similar respectful fun with ancient history and spirits.

After narrating how the Hmong people lost their earliest written records, Cotterill offers this:

"The spirit of the first-ever Hmong shaman, See Yee, looked up from the Otherworld and was mightily pissed that his people could be so careless."

Good fun, I'd say though, on the evidence of my previous reading of Cotterill, not at all out of character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Finnish crime comes to America

Readers in the English-speaking crime-fiction world like to gripe about the dearth of translated fiction in their language. Over at Pulpetti, Juri Nummelin reports on a Finnish crime writer who took matters into his own hands and, with his brother who works on Wall Street, started his own publishing house to get his work out in America.

First up from their new Ice Cold Crime is founder Jarkko Sipilä's own Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall. And more is on the way. Says Juri:

"Ice Cold Crime is publishing next another book by Sipilä, whose work is strictly rooted in the police procedural and its hardboiled subgenre. Then they'll probably publish something by Harri Nykänen. Nykänen is slightly better known in the US, since the Raid TV series made from his novels was shown in some cable channels there."

See Sipilä's Web site for more info. Read a summary of Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A meaty book from Derry

Planning to be in Northern Ireland for America's birthday? Get yourself to Easons, Foyleside in Derry from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. July Fourth to join Garbhan Downey in celebrating the release of his novel War of the Blue Roses.

"The subject is roses," Detectives Beyond Borders wrote in April, "specifically a competition to design a peace garden for the White House – and if you think gardening is a clean pursuit, this book will shock you. Downey brings back some of the characters from his previous books, tough, savvy, engaging and, in some cases, unscrupulous folks from Ireland north and south, and he throws in Americans and Englishmen this time. These last give Downey fresh new satirical targets."

Newly pertinent professional ethics prevent me from saying much more about the book, but I hope you'll find the proofreading satisfactory.

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

Here's what I've written about Roses and Downey's four previous books of political crime comedy (His Yours Confidentially made my short list of best international crime fiction published in 2008).

And here's Downey's Web site for info about the books, a promotional video for War of the Blue Roses, and some covers that will make you smile.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part II: Bill James on dialogue, gleeful savagery, and crime fiction vs. detective fiction

In Part II of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about dialogue, jokes, crime writing versus detective writing, and a parallel that a fellow writer drew between his books and Jacobean drama. He also makes a surprising choice for the Harpur & Iles character with whom he identifies most closely.

Click here for a Bill James bibliography, including non-Harpur & Iles books. Click here for books he has written under the name David Craig. Under his own name — James Tucker — Bill James wrote a study of the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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Q: Ken Bruen told an interviewer in 2004 that “I abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent.” Peter Temple called you “a star.” John Harvey and Val McDermid are just two more crime writers who have rhapsodized about your work. What in your writing so attracts your fellow writers?

A: I don’t know why these writers think well of my books, except where they’ve published their comments. But I’m very grateful. I’d like to think it’s the jokes, two or three of which during the twenty-five novels are original. Well, two. John Harvey in the Guardian said the novels had a Jacobean drama feel to them. A sort of gleeful savagery, I think he meant.

It’s not all praise from other authors. Someone said the books were lightweight. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment, though it could be a half-compliment. After all, what’s the opposite: deadweight, overweight? Another writer-reviewer said, `Not much detection here.' Guilty, my lord. I think I’m a crime writer, not a detective novelist, although my two principal characters are detectives. They have other things to do.

Q: Panicking Ralph Ember is a drug dealer. He is at various times a coward, a blowhard, and a cheater on his wife. He also vies with Iles as the most memorable character in the series, and he is pretty likable, even charming for all his faults. Tell me about the genesis of Panicking Ralph. Why does he work as a character? And what makes him so lovable?

A: Ralph has pathetically and comically unachievable ambitions, like most of us: he hopes to change his lowlife club into the Athenaeum. He takes fright easily, as do many of us. He strives to keep up appearances, as do many of us. A French interviewer asked me if I was Colin Harpur. I said, no, I’m Panicking Ralph. Perhaps readers also feel an affinity.

Q: One distinctive feature of your dialogue is the elliptical cross-talk mainly between Harpur and Iles, but also between Harpur and other characters. They talk around each other, answering questions the other did not ask, ignoring ones that are asked. Talk about this technique, your models (if any) for it, and what it adds to the characters and the books.

A: I tend to get bored reading books where the dialogue is very sequential and reasonable. I like the talk to obscure at least as much as it tells. I don’t want the reader dozing off, so I introduce the seeming breaks from sense. Sub-Pinter? Again, guilty, my lord. Opaque dialogue can be an avoidance of a troublesome topic. The reader would spot that it’s troublesome, which means the dialogue is doing its job while appearing not to. People may be obsessed with their own concerns and will try to dominate the conversation to get these across, despite the other person’s probable wish to do the same. We get a nice helping of chaos, evasion, dead-ends, just like at home.

Q: You’ve said that you wrote the first book, You’d Better Believe It, without planning to write a series. What got you thinking about a series?

A: The first book got very few reviews and they came late. I’d already started another, The Lolita Man. The title rang literary bells. The critics woke up. It had a bucketful of good notices. Iles had appeared and seemed ready for development. Even then, I certainly wouldn’t have expected the books to go to number twenty-six (this autumn – Hotbed).

Q: The most recent Harpur and Iles novel introduces a new character and omits a familiar one. Why the changes? Was it a stroke of mischief to write a book in which Harpur does not appear and call that book In the Absence of Iles?

A: Yes, I suppose a kind of mischief. I’d introduced a new detective in a book called Tip Top, written under another of my pen names, David Craig. This is Esther Davidson. I wanted to give her another outing, and brought her over to the Bill James stable. She features in another book due out in Britain in September, Full Of Money.

Incidentally, you mention Anthony Powell. In Full Of Money a couple of crooks are big Powell fans. One of the baddies has done a lot of jail and needed a long novel for distraction. Powell`s twelve-volume work, A Dance to the Music of Time, suited. He refers to it as A Dance to the Music of Doing Time.

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(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Take a trip to Heian Japan and win a book ... and we have a winner!

I.J. Parker sets her series about the official-cum-investigator Sugawara Akitada in eleventh-century Japan, part of that country's Heian period. That long, peaceful era is known among other things for its exquisite, refined courtly literature.

Perhaps that's why Parker opens The Convict's Sword, sixth book in the series, with a squalid encounter, a shabby quarter and a brutal killing – a nice counterpoint to the expectations that her readers may have of the period.

Any author of historical mysteries must balance the history and the mystery, to entertain while remaining reasonably faithful to the historical period, to portray the period without writing a travel brochure or a textbook. Near the novel's beginning, Parker nicely integrates the sword maker, a staple figure in Japanese art, into the story and rather gracefully suggests the respect with which he regards his craft:

"Akitada received the sword and turned to Sukenari. `Please forgive my friend. He's very enthusiastic and forgets his manners when his heart is moved.'

"`I understand. Mine is moved in the same way. The gods dwell in that blade.'"

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

The Heian period is unusual in at least one respect: Its best-known authors are women. I'll send a copy of The Convict's Sword to the first person who tells me the name of either one of the Heian's two best-known writers and the work for which she is known today.

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

We have a winner! A reader from British Columbia knew that one of the titles was that beguiling book of aesthetic contemplation, refined complaining and palace gossip, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. The other is The Tale of Genji of Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Your prize will be on its way soon. Enjoy it, and thanks to all who entered.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part I: Detectives Beyond Borders talks with Bill James

Some of us remember where we were when John F. Kennedy was shot or World War II ended; I remember where I was when I first read Bill James. I was having coffee and a scone and passing the time of day at my local secondhand bookshop when the owner said, "Hey, you might like this" and handed me Roses, Roses, tenth novel in James' Harpur & Iles series.

Two pages in, I was Siddhartha Gautama under the bodhi tree. I was Hugh Hefner at that magical moment when his mother said, "Hugh! Stop studying so much. Go find a nice girl." I read a third of the book, brushed the crumbs from my upper lip, and said: "I'll take it."

James' world of cops and criminals is rich, dark and often very funny. And it offers some of the most gorgeous prose ever set to paper in crime or any other kind of fiction:

"If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."

or

"To her, garrotting looked a sinister, damnable skill; in fact a kind of art, a kind of filthy art, and Iles had about him much of the good third/fourth-rate artist: arrogance, contempt for usual social and possibly legal standards, some flair, some posturing, some taste, some vision, and the irresistible impulse to create, or its complementary and sometimes necessary opposite, to wipe out."

Hotbed, twenty-sixth novel in the series, will appear this fall. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about his rich, dark world, the people who populate it, and why he chose two high-ranking police officers as his protagonists rather than the more conventional workaday cops.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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Q: The first Colin Harpur novel appeared in 1985, and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles came along a bit later. What else was going on in British crime fiction at the time? What did you set out to do differently? Other than Anthony Powell, what writers haunted your imagination?

A: Most crime fiction deals with police at low or middling rank. I aimed to show two very highly placed officers who are committed to fighting crime, unbribable, but very fallible morally and socially. The books aim to shock and amuse by featuring two men who virtually run a police force but also conduct personal relationships in very unconventional, even dubious, ways.

I’ve said it boringly often, but 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.

Q: Iles is cruel to his chief, Mark Lane; fiercely protective of his own daughter; lecherous toward young women; yet he ultimately rejects The Girl with the Long Back. Tell me about the genesis of this complex, appalling and attractive character and how he made his way into a co-lead role in the series after not being around at the start.

A: Many detectives in fiction are portrayed as having personality faults, their creators knowing that otherwise their leading characters would be saintly and non-credible. But the faults tend to be forgivable and often part of macho-ness. Drinking too much because of job stress is a favourite failing; one I’ve used myself. I came to feel this kind of ploy was a sentimental cop(!)-out. I decided it would be interesting to see how readers reacted to someone with rather more off-putting (realistic?) flaws.

Also I tried to understand the psyche of a born second-in-command — someone who had a big job, but not the biggest. Iles will never make it to chief constable. What kind of personality does this produce? Answer: not eternally sweet; sometimes manic.

Q: Families have loomed large in the Harpur & Iles books at least since Protection, when a fellow crook kidnaps “Tenderness” Mellick’s son. Why the emphasis on families, particularly criminals’ families?

A: I like the whole organisational bit. A police force is an organisation, so is a crooked firm, so is a family. I try to put all three alongside one another and examine the friction.

Q: A related question: One motif of the series is the strange ways people build families in changing times: Harpur with his daughters and his young girlfriend. Panicking Ralph, comically overprotective of his own daughters. Iles, his wayward wife, and their baby girl. What attracted you to families as a vehicle for social comedy? For that matter, why daughters rather than sons?

A: This is part answered in 3. Daughters are more markedly outside the cop-crook scene. Sons might inherit a criminal empire. Girls probably wouldn't. I solicit their detached view, which can be funny and sharp. (Not all readers like Harpur's daughters, though. Too flip and know-all?)

Q: Families are not the only recurring motif. There are the hypersensitivity about sending officers undercover, and the persistent girlfriend who presses Harpur and Iles to probe the case of her weak, hapless criminal mate. Among other things, these create continuity. Talk about these recurring themes, why you keep coming back to them. Feel free to name any that I missed.

A: I’m a bit wary of pointing out recurring themes. They might look like repetition. However, undercover is an obsession of mine. Possibly it’s the influence of spy novels – le Carré etc. I’ve written spy novels myself and occasionally do one now: in fact, I currently have one on offer to a publisher, and the signs are promising. Secrecy, cover-ups, play-acting fascinate me. Harpur and Iles have to rehouse and hide a former super-grass in Wolves of Memory. Undercover gives great openings for dramatic irony — that is, where the reader know more than some of the characters. This can give an added complexity and shiftiness to dialogue.

I find the tensions and moral/legal/ethical problems of undercover work a very useful story source. For example, how far in criminality should an undercover officer go to convince a crooked gang he’s a genuine member? Think of the undercover officer in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. I won't describe the tricky points there, in case it gives away the surprise, for someone who hasn’t seen the film, but they are very tricky.

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(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

But wait! There's more!

John McFetridge is not the only Detectives Beyond Borders favorite offering an online preview of his latest work these days. Declan Burke, McFetridge's sometime partner in meta-fictional crime, posts a sliver of the sequel to his first novel, Eightball Boogie, over at Crime Always Pays.

Mr. Burke, you have the floor:

"The heat was fierce but I was still half-dazed, so I dived in and grabbed his ankles. One of his moccasins slipped off as he came free and at first I thought I’d ripped him in half. Then I thought he’d dropped a dwarf on the Audi. Strange the things you think about when you’re trying not to think at all."

and

"Finn played good music but you had to be in the mood. Some nights he went off on a jag: Cohen, Drake, Walker, Waits. Santa Claus with a straight razor in his mitt, black dogs howling down the moon. Spend long enough driving a cab listening to Finn, you’ll wind up with a Mohawk cruising underage whores, trying to think of a politician it’d be worth the bullet to plug."

and

"‘Might as well stay up after I knock off. Want me to grab a DVD?’

"‘Something black-and-white,’ he said. ‘The kind where they crack wise and smoke a lot.’

"I swung around by Blockbusters and picked up Duck Soup, Groucho on the cover tipping ash off his cigar."

That's good stuff.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A glimpse of John McFetridge's latest, or What do rock and rollers really want?

I am pleased to report that John McFetridge offers a preview of his novel-in-progress over on his own blog. I am even more pleased to report that the man keeps getting better and better.

No one mixes action, humor and wistfulness better than McFetridge. In this new book-to-be, members of a 1970s rock band with the wonderful name of The High have cast off their adult lives, reunited, gone back on the road, and turned to crime. What happens when old rockers get back into the life? This:

"Cliff started to follow, felt a hand on his arm and looked around to see two very hot chicks, had to be teenagers, but maybe legal, looked exactly the same; long blonde hair, tight jeans, low cut tees, like twins, same serious look on their faces and he said, `Hey ladies, looking for some fun?'

"One of the girls said, `No, we're looking for our Mom, she was talking to you before.'"

Read my posts about McFetridge here – scroll down – including an interview that will give a fair idea of what makes him tick as a writer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bits of humor in Breathing Water

I'll start from the end, with Timothy Hallinan's author's note: "Those of you who find it difficult to believe in the Bangkok that's depicted here should know that millions of people feel exactly the same way about the real-life city."

And this, about a quarter of the way into the book:

"You were–" He turns to Dr. Ravi and says, in English, "I don't know the Thai. Tell him he was appalling."

"I think ... " Dr. Ravi swallows. "I think he's already gotten that message."

"A bodyguard can level with him and you can't? What kind of amanuensis are you?"

"I'm not at amanuensis. I'm his media director."

"Goddamn it," Pan says in heavily accented English. "Speak Thai. Or translate."

Or this:

"The activity had the unfortunate effect of making him look even more like a monkey, one who is on the verge of inventing a tool but probably won't."

That sentence could do without "had the unfortunate effect of," and for all I know, it may be changed before the book goes to press. But this matters little because the passage is a gorgeous description of a big, dumb, powerful thug. And that matters. The big, dumb, powerful thug is a crime-fiction staple, and Hallinan makes it fresh. Breathing Water is a pleasure to read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Authors in the blogosphere

A couple of authors mentioned occasionally in this space have taken to the blogosphere. First up is Scott Philips (right), whose odd new collection of items bears the marvelous title Pocketful of Ginch. I don't know what ginch is, but the blog looks like fun.

Matt Rees has had a blog for a while, but he's picked up the pace lately. One post that might have readers howling for his head is a scathing discussion of Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I don't expect the book's partisans will enjoy what Rees has to say, but he more fully articulates than do most critics one fault that even some of the book's fans acknowledge, and he has some fun with another aspect that I had not seen discussed previously.

Question to readers: What's ginch?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thai anxiety: Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water

I didn't set out to do so, but I've read a number of crime novels recently that have crime writers as protagonists. Naturally this has had me looking for self-reference, and I found it, whether the authors, Chris Ewan and L.C. Tyler, intended the self-reference or not.

Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty is a different kind of author – a travel writer based in Bangkok – and Breathing Water has him serving rather more demanding editors: a shady, ultra-rich Thai patron of the tarts who grants Rafferty the right to write his life story as the result of a lost poker game, on the one hand, and on the other, competing groups of shady, ultra-rich Thais who have their own ideas of the tack the book should take and who threaten Rafferty and his wife and child if the book does not turn out right – or if he writes it at all.

That's more pressure than authors usually get, and it gives Rafferty occasion for reflections that may strike a chord with writers whether or not they echo Hallinan's own experience:

"[Rafferty] figures he'll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He's long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one."

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

Breathing Water is the third Rafferty novel. Two-thirds of the way in, it's a thriller that's hard to put down. Hallinan knows how to create suspense without resorting to obvious cliffhangers, and he knows how to maintain dual story strands and keep a reader wondering how each will turn out as well as how the two will come together. It says here that he also creates a convincing picture of Thai life among the obscenely rich and the desperately poor and that he does a neat job of injecting narrative movement into a purely expository scene – in this case, a dialogue on some realities of Thai politics.

I'll probably have more to say soon, perhaps about Hallinan's white-knight hero and brief, grim, humorous chapter titles. For background on Poke Rafferty and his creator, read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Timothy Hallinan here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

From existential angst to creative contest: Win a book!

L.C. Tyler, author of The Herring Seller's Apprentice and A Very Persistent Illusion, has graciously offered a copy of his next novel, Ten Little Herrings. The book goes to the first person who recognizes the targets of Tyler's spoofs in The Herring-Seller's Apprentice. Quoth the author:

"I'd be happy to offer a copy of my next book, Ten Little Herrings, to the first person who can identify which author I thought I was parodying in the Italian bit (clue: he's not an Italian and he didn't write crime) and which book by Sartre I had in mind. (Prize to be dispatched as soon as it is published in August.)"

Read more about The Herring-Seller's Apprentice here (scroll down). First with the correct answer gets the book, Mr. Tyler to be the judge of all answers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Existential angst in a post-Wodehousian Age: The Herring-Seller's Apprentice

No, really.

Ethelred, protagonist of L.C. Tyler's novel, is a mystery writer, several of whose discarded chapters Tyler interpolates in the final quarter or so of The Herring-Seller's Apprentice.

One of the chapters mocks the brooding nouveau roman of Alain Robbe‐Grillet and his followers, with its intense meditation on random objects. Another pokes fun at the brooding Italian fictional detective, with the loyal assistant, who likes to drink during working hours. A third is a fantasy on P.G. Wodehouse, with that comic genius' characters appearing in the guise of police.

Ethelred's protagonist, Fairfax, is a detective nearing retirement age without the rank his abilities should have earned him. He is without a wife, and he drinks often, without tumbling over into alcoholism. Ethelred has even, for reasons he does not quite understand, given Fairfax an interest in Norman architecture – you know, the strong, solid kind that prevailed before the slender fripperies and gaudy light of Gothic. Others will be more familiar with the details than I, but that moves in Morse/Wexford/Peter Diamond territory, I'd say.

Given that Fairfax begins with a typical English detective from a certain age (say, about 1970 onward) and has him try on then discard a number of other fictional-detective disguises – and given that The Herring-Seller's Apprentice was Tyler's first novel – it's reasonable to guess that Tyler thought about his own direction as a crime writer (and perhaps about the state of British crime writing as well) and decided to have some fun and let his protagonist do the same. One might even say he was exorcising some fictional ghosts.

Oh, yes. This is a mystery story. I don't know if it quite meets all the requirements of a fair-play mystery, but it does have a surprise ending along with a summation that offers a reasonable explanation for red herrings and wrong guesses throughout the story. A reader looking to do so just might be able to figure out the mystery. I did not, and it would be fun to know how many readers did.

(My emphasis on a serious side of Tyler stems from my first meeting with him, at CrimeFest in Bristol. In response to a question about crime writers who inject humor at grim, violent moments, Tyler said he liked Alan Guthrie – unexpected for a self-described author of comic cozy mysteries.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Youth serves, plus a question

Before I get back to Len Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice, one last remark about Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Paris, specifically, this bit of description toward the novel's end:

"The sky looked bleached, as though the colour had been drained from it. Shreds of cloud were being reflected over and over again in the windows of the arch; like a desktop image that had been endlessly repeated on a stack of computer monitors." (Emphasis mine.)

Elsewhere, Ewan uses impact as a verb a time or two without driving me nuts.

Why mention this? And what connection do the image and the impact have? Just this: I don't think an author much older than Ewan would have come up with the first or pulled off the second. Ewan is in his early thirties, according to his Web site, which means he's probably been around computers most of his life. They likely are a greater part of that stock of images, memories and concepts that form his world view, the familiar for which he reaches when he wants to describe something unfamiliar, than they would be for someone only a few years older.

Similarly, impact as a verb in the hands of younger writers like Ewan may be evolving from the horrible tool of obfuscation and self-importance that businessmen and politicians make of it into a more neutral synonym for affect. It may not be my favorite verb in English's rich lexicon, but it feels pretty natural in this book.

What quirks of style or vocabulary mark a writer as a member of a given age group or generation?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More self-reference

I wrote recently about a musical reference in L.C. Tyler's novel The Herring-Seller's Apprentice. In addition to citing Berlioz, the passage is self-referential; its narrator is a mystery writer relating a problem he once had writing a mystery.

Here I'll catalogue a few more such references. Along the way, I'll share some thoughts about types of self-reference – without ever using the phrase authorial consciousness.

The novel's first chapter begins: "I have always been a writer. I wrote my first novel at the age of six. It was seven and a half pages long ... " That's clever and endearing.

Chapter Ten begins: "If there's one thing that gets up my sodding nose, it's starting a new chapter and finding that the poxy narrator has changed" – narrated no longer by the author, naturally, but by his coarse-mannered agent. That's pretty funny.

Chapter Four: "Perhaps at no time other than our own could a man reach comfortable middle age without confronting a dead body in the cold flesh." Less directly self-referential, all the funnier for its jab at the tendency of amateur sleuths to find dead bodies in greater numbers than do members of the general population.

Throughout: several musings by the protagonist upon the craft of writing mysteries but, most interesting, the effect that the novel's "real" mystery – the disappearance and apparent murder of the protagonist's former and long-estranged wife – has on his own stalled writing career as the investigation of that "real" mystery deepens:

"(I)n the damp autumn Sussex countryside, I forgot such troubles as I had seemed to have and started to see a picture of a sultry summer's evening in Buckford.

"Fairfax is sitting at his desk. He is once more contemplating retirement. And he is deeply troubled, though it is not yet clear about what. ... What happens next? I don't yet know. But the story has started flowing. And this small trickle may gather pace and become a stream, then a torrent that will carry the story off, who knows where? But that hot summer night would be the starting point."

Now, let's see where the story ends.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

For Hume the bell tolls

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

Its people may not have saved civilization like their fellow Celts across the Irish Sea, but Scotland has given the world some big-name thinkers from John Duns Scotus (probably) through R.D. (not k.d.) Laing.

I've always had a soft spot for David Hume (right, in Edinburgh) because he was a leading light of the great age when philosophers could write. Indeed, he was something of a publicist, considering himself

"as a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation, and shall think it my constant duty to promote a good correspondence between these two states, which have so great a dependence on each other." (Emphasis mine.)

In addition to his essays, Hume wrote a History of England that remains readable to this day (though I seem to recall his having thought history more appropriate to women and philosophy to men). Still, in his essays and in his history, he wrote for an intelligent lay public, and what philosophers do that today outside France?

Hume was not the only big name in 18th-century thought who hung out in Edinburgh. He was not even the only hot shot in his courtyard. If you can read the plaque at left, you'll see that another famous Scot and his even more famous English friend spent time there, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

You get what you pay for

A pertinent post from Linkmeister asks "Have publishers fired their copy editors?" He headlines his post "Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy." I'd have called a similar post "Predictable, predictable, predictable."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The detective who almost loved Berlioz

I wrote during a recent discussion about Sherlock Holmes and English music that "I'd like see to how a Berlioz-loving consulting detective would go about his job. Berlioz ... might be the composer of choice for any number of hard-working but dissipated fictional detectives of a later time than his own."

"A Berlioz-loving detective would be great!" replied Lauren, who knows a thing or two about crime fiction and a thing or twenty-seven about music. "I can see the parallels between Paganini as Berlioz's benefactor and a glamorous celebrity hiring a private eye."

Lo and behold, here's the mystery-writer protagonist of L.C. Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice musing about a trait he tried to give one of his own protagonists:

"I once tried to give Fairfax an interest in Berlioz (I must have been reading too much Colin Dexter). Elsie had the blue pencil through that before you could say `Morse'. `Don't bother to develop his character,' she said. `Your readers aren't interested in character.' "

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Mystery brunch in Philly

Come meet, greet and eat with authors Dennis Tafoya (Dope Thief) and Keith Gilman (Father's Day) tomorrow, Sunday, June 14, 1 p.m. at:

BRIDGET FOY’S
200 South Street,
Philadelphia
215-922-1813

A la carte brunch is served at 1. Once you've splashed yourself awake, author presentations begin at 2, followed by a discussion and a question and answer period. The program is organized by Robin's, Philadelphia's oldest independent book store, at 110A South 13th Street.

An (inter)view to a kill

Dana King posts an exceedingly generous interview with me on CrimeSpace and on his own One Bite at a Time blog. Many thanks to Dana for asking some good questions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I joined a gym today ...

... To see if I could feel
I sweated like a tap
I'll soon have abs of steel.

Actually, I joined yesterday, but that does not lend itself as easily to paraphrasing Nine Inch Nails by way of Johnny Cash. And, unlike the narrator of the song I borrowed, I did not hurt myself. The experience was rather painless; I'll push myself gently the first few times out.

The gym I joined pipes in thudding disco, in the manner of gyms everywhere in America, but good ear plugs render the music almost tolerable. I can hear just enough to feel a sense of relief and well-being that I can't hear more, and I can ponder at leisure the mystery of why, if gyms must pipe in music, they can't pipe in good music.

I'd rather exercise in silence (and that means no cell phones on the treadmills), but if gyms must inflict music on their customers, why not flamenco? Or Irish reels? Or klezmer? Or norteño? Or Gershwin? Or the Stones? Or zydeco? Or samba? Or bebop? Or música popular brasileira? Or Spike Jones? Or ...

OK, what's your favorite exercise music?

Tomorrow: Back to crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

4x4: The meme

My fellow award-winning blogger J. Kingston Pierce has tagged me with a meme tailor-made for Detectives Beyond Borders. The meme is built around questions involving the number four, and I especially liked the ones that involved travel and places where one has lived.

Since Jeff expanded the list of questions from eight to ten, I don't feel too badly about making my own adjustments. And you can do the same.


Four places I'd like to go or things I'd like to do:

1) Visit the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia

2) Visit the Ajanta caves in India

3) Hike the length of Hadrian's Wall

4) Complete a short walk I began a few years ago, along the West Kennet Avenue from Avebury to the Sanctuary


Four places I've lived:

1) Montreal

2) Rome

3) Philadelphia

4) The Boston area, which leads to my own category of ...


Four places I've lived in the Boston area:

1) Waltham

2) Brookline, whose no-overnight-parking regulations seemed intended to keep out the folks from ...

3) Brighton

4) Somerville


Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Split, Croatia. By the shimmering blue Adriatic Sea, in a hotel within the precincts of Diocletian's Palace. One of the places that has inspired me with a desire to live there.

2) 桂林 (Guilin, China.) Sweaty, hot, amid spotty air-conditioning and other trappings of a section of China making the uncertain transition to Western-style consumer capitalism. Also home of the near-hallucinogenic beauty of the sandstone natural spires, and the only place I have seen anyone playing a guitar while passenger on a bicycle.

3) Israel/Palestinian territories. Alas, it's not as easy as it once was to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs to see blind old Muslim sage-like men praying at a site so fundamental to our sense of our own culture.

4) Istanbul, in particular Hagia Sophia, quite possibly the most influential building in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful. One can see the gallery mosaics up close, and there is something special about seeing and touching the rough, unfinished stone that lines the spiral stairways to the upper levels.


Four foods or drinks I have liked:

1) A nice, medium-rare steak

2) A good Brunello da Montalcino

3) Fresh raspberries

4) Deviled eggs


Four (with ties) books or movies I could read or watch again:

1) Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

2) Roughing It

3) Any of books 7 through 16 of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels

4) Seven Samurai, Stray Dog and, appropriately for repeated viewing, Rashomon


Four works of art before which I have stood (or sat) either in deep relaxation, as close as I get to a meditative state, or with a profound sense of receptiveness:

1) Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Montefeltro Altarpiece (Scan by Mark Harden)

2) Velázquez's Las Meninas

3) Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath

4) Trajan's Column


Four literary, scientific, artistic or political figures from the past whom I'd like to watch at work or meet for dinner and drinks:

1) Giotto

2) Jane Austen

3) Mark Twain

3a) Charles Darwin

4) Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyone who can write a book of world history from memory and addressed as a series of letters to his daughter is a man to be reckoned with. Anyone who can write a book about his own country and call it The Discovery of India has a passionate intellect that's worth anyone's interest. And the man had a few practical accomplishments as well, I think.


Answers have begun to arrive from four people I think might take it upon themselves to answer these questions:

1) Sucharita Sarkar (yet another evocative post from one of my favorite writers in blogland.)

2) Seana Graham (good reading!)

3) Adrian McKinty (good reading about bridges and food!)

4) Maxine Clarke

and

5) Kerrie, who stepped in graciously for Maxine and talks about her journey from Paradise to Hell and back. Thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Chalk Circle Man: A mystery by Fred Vargas

Fred Vargas' novels amble far from the investigations that are the staple of the traditional police procedural. At the same time, few crime stories are as apt to leave a reader wondering so ardently whodunnit.

That's because Vargas' near-constant emphasis on her characters' quirks communicates that old French message that everyone has his reasons. Here, Vargas rather skillfully manipulates the reader (OK, she manipulated me) into believing at various times that any of four characters could be the killer, for the simple reason that each of the four has a reason or character trait or behavioral quirk that makes him or her a plausible suspect.

As in Vargas' Have Mercy on Us All, a series of odd messages triggers the mystery. There the messages were odd notes slipped into a modern-day town crier's news bulletins. Here they are visual: a series of mysterious chalk circles that appear in several Paris neighborhoods, each circle enclosing some odd object. Then, one night, a dead body, throat slashed, is found in one of the circles.

The very oddity of the circles lets the intuitive commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and the analytical lieutenant Adrien Danglard consider any number of possible theories. I'll let you read the book to find out what Vargas makes of theories.

For The Chalk Circle Man, Vargas' English-language publishers went back to the first Adamsberg mystery after earlier having issued books two, four, six and seven (the eight books include six novels, one graphic novel and a collection of novellas.) The reader of the books translated earlier will here learn the secret of Danglard's fifth child (I don't remember the story being told in the later books), and there are some delightful scenes of the single father Danglard and the children he loves. If I recall correctly, The Chalk Circle Man also offers more, and maybe even slightly different, physical description of Adamsberg.

For the most part, though, readers of Vargas in English may be reassured to know that Adamsberg has been Adamsberg from the start: intuitive, occasionally abstracted, infuriatingly prone to appear relaxed when Danglard is anything but, and entranced, upset and always worried by the mesmerizing Camille.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Down These Green Streets

Declan Burke has released a working table of contents for Down These Green Streets, the collection of essays, articles, interviews and short stories by Irish crime writers on Irish crime writing for which he is acting as editor and benevolent shepherd. Who's contributing? Just about everyone in Irish crime writing: Ken Bruen. Adrian McKinty. John Banville. Tana French. Colin Bateman (It's good to see humor represented) and many more.

Declan Hughes will no doubt speak for many of his fellows when he discusses American influences on Irish crime fiction. I'll also be interested to see what a woman of Ruth Dudley Edwards' political persuasion has to say about Liam O'Flaherty, some of whose revolutionary characters were anything but heroic. Eoin McNamee's contribution ("The Puritan soul and Irish noir") looks to be fascinating, too. And I wonder if Burke and McKinty will clash over the merits of early Irish crime fiction.

Visit Burke's Crime Always Pays for more details.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Echoes from the dead

Is it my imagination, or have many recent acclaimed crime novels built their plots around the lingering echoes of a decades-old crime , often involving a child? Tana French's In the Woods, The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr and Dennis Lehane's Mystic River come to mind, and I'm pretty sure there are more. And have Scandinavian writers written more than their share of such books?

What other novels fit this plot profile? And are such plots really more popular these days? If so, why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Arthur Ellis Awards

The Crime Writers of Canada have bestowed the 2009 Arthur Ellis Awards. The winners include Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home for best novel, Howard Shrier's Buffalo Jump for best first novel, and Jacques Côté's Le Chemin des brumes for best crime writing in French.

Find a complete list of winners and a list of all nominees. The awards, by the way, are charmingly named for the nom de travail of Canada's official hangman, according to the CWC.

And click here for previous discussion of Shrier on the blog, including his appearance at the first cross-border Noir at the Bar.

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

N.B.: Here's a bit about Arthur Ellis, his name, his career as a hangman, and why that career came to an end on March 28, 1935.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The day of the short(list) Daggers

The Crime Writers' Association has announced most of the short lists for the 2009 Dagger Awards. The International Dagger list for crime novels in translation reflects the continuing popularity of Nordic crime fiction, with three Swedish novels and one each from Norway and Iceland. Fred Vargas and translator Siân Reynolds, already two-time Dagger winners for Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007 and The Three Evangelists in 2006, are the only non-Nordic contenders on this year's short list.

Shadow by Karin Alvtegen, translated from the Swedish by McKinley Burnett (Steven T. Murray)

Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indriðason, translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland (Steven T. Murray)

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds

Shortlistees for best short story include Sean Chercover, a guest at the first international Noir at the Bar earlier this year.

Read more about the nominees on the CWA Web site here and in Barry Forshaw's Times preview here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Did Watson like Holmes' music?

I've long enjoyed this observation about the composer Edward Elgar in Ethan Mordden's witty and comprehensive A Guide to Orchestral Music:

"[Elgar's] fame began with the `Enigma' Variations, a turning point for English music, for Elgar grew up in a country that had lost touch with a venerable musical tradition. Before the Engima Variations arrived, the national sound consisted of gentlemen amateurs imitating Mendelssohn; it is amazing that Elgar matured in so unstimulating an environment."

One of those amateurs, albeit a fictional one, was Sherlock Holmes. The Enigma Variations' publication in 1899 places them smack in the middle of Holmes' own career as consulting detective and amateur violinist. So, for all you musicians and crime fiction readers: What role does music play in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Was Conan Doyle a stodgy conservative when it came to music? Was Holmes? Did Conan Doyle throw his hero into Reichenbach Falls out of despair that advances in English music were about to pass him by?

(For more on Sherlock Holmes and music, see Ted Friedman's article "Music of Sherlock Holmes." Incidentally, I discovered as I prepared this post that Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson," at least not in any of Conan Doyle's stories.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Graphic Manchette

With hat tips to Pulpetti and Duane Swierczynski comes news that Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, previously available in English translation as Three to Kill, will appear in a graphic-novel version called West Coast Blues. This version, adapted and illustrated by the French cartoonist Jacques Tardi, is to appear this summer as the beginning a series devoted to Tardi and published by Fantagraphics.

Here's what I wrote about Three to Kill and Manchette's other novel available in English, The Prone Gunman:

"Manchette reinvigorated noir, inventing what French critics call the néo-polar, or neo-whodunnit, and if all that neo stuff makes you roll your eyes, stop and think for a minute: How many of the old-time hard-boiled writers make your blood run cold the way they presumably did for readers in the 1930s and 1940s? How mean, in other words, are Raymond Chandler's mean streets today?

"Certainly Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?"

Click on the Jacques Tardi link above, and you'll see why I'm excited about this Fantagraphics release.

Here are some previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts that mentioned Manchette, who figures — or at least part of him does — in Swierczynski's novel The Blonde.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The good crime writer's guide to self-reference

I've written with some ambivalence about self-reference and in-jokes in crime fiction. Done well, they can be clever. Done poorly, they can be clever – winking, nudging, back-patting and over the top.

Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to ... novels, the second of which was the occasion of yesterday's post, are bound to contain some self-reference; Ewan's protagonist is a crime writer/burglar whose novels include The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, the title of Ewan's own first novel.

I like the first big block of self-reference in Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Paris. For one thing, its introduction is a bit of a surprise. The good thief in question, protagonist Charlie Howard, introduces the self-referential note when a reader might well expect him to be raising quite another matter. For another the reference is full of good humor that ought to make all thriller and suspense readers smile.

Howard is worried about his current book, whose plot involves Rio de Janeiro, Carnival, a bank vault, and a robbery, all to be carried out by his series character acting alone. He seeks a spot of advice and sympathy from his agent, who replies:

"Honestly, Charlie, I have clients who need their hands held from time to time but you can really push it. You're concerned about credibility in one of your Faulks novels? Next you'll be telling me Ian Fleming made a few things up."

There are multiple in-jokes here, Sebastian Faulks being among the authors who have written James Bond novels as successors to Fleming. In any case, the reference is an affectionate nod to the stories that I suspect Ewan and many of his readers love.

And now, your thoughts, please, on self-reference and genre in-jokes in crime fiction. Do you like them? Dislike them? Does your reaction vary? Feel free to offer examples good, bad, interesting or indifferent.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Unconventional

I recently ran into a fellow who was in New York for BookExpo America as a fan. The man, whose professional affiliation is outside the book business, marvelled at fans' hesitation to mingle with authors outside scheduled events at book conventions. Those fans, he said, pass the evenings in their rooms among their newly acquired books, missing the chance to fraternize at the hotel bar with the people who wrote those books.

I mention this because next up on my list is a book by an author with whom I chatted while sipping dry sherry at CrimeFest 2009: Chris Ewan. Seems to me that sort of thing is part of what conventions are for.

So, here's a question for convention goers: What books have you read because you met the author or liked what he or she had to say at a convention, whether during a panel, afterward, at the bar, in the hotel lobby or otherwise?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thank you, driver, for getting me here

Two of my pleasant Bristol and CrimeFest memories involve buses. First was the tour guide, trapped by the demands of his profession on the open top level of a double-decker during a rainstorm while the rest of us fled to shelter below. There, we smiled sympathetically at his fretting and muttering over the still-operating public-address system. (My favorite bit: "[Bump, bump] Oh, heavens! My coffee's gone!")

The same day, a large concrete plaza opposite my hotel hosted a fair devoted to old buses, of which there are apparently lots of devotees in Southwest England. This meeting featured buses, models of buses, books about buses and plenty of gorgeous old photographs of buses. Some of these exhibits were beautiful examples of mid-twentieth-century industrial design, and it's easy to understand the affection one might feel for them.

It's a novel experience to see images so suffused at once with nostalgia and advanced design. One half-expects to see a long, thin tobacco pipe emerge from these buses, followed by the long, thin form of Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot.

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

The Hay-on-Wye literary mega-festival has just wrapped up. Once again, Rhian Davies of It's a Crime! (or a mystery...) was there, blogging for the BBC. Read her reports here. Go here for more BBC Hay fever.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Peace process

I've heard it said that a writer's style ought to be transparent, invisible. I've also heard it said that anyone who believes that has no style of his or her own.

David Peace has style. That style is self-conscious, telegraphic, literary. Sentence fragments to open chapters of 1977 give way to (slightly) more conventional narrative flow as chapters develop. Snippets of interior monologue in italic are interspersed in the text. Transitions are choppy.

It's literary as all hell, and boy, does it ever work. A harried cop and a burned-out reporter are on the tail of the Yorkshire Ripper, who rapes, kills and mutilates prostitutes. Cop and reporter are each involved in the victims' world more than professionally. A community terrorized? Well, yes, but here the terror seems to radiate from within the characters.

Crime fiction need not argue its case on any terms but its own. But if anyone feels a need to argue that a crime novel can be a literary novel and work as both, Peace might be a good place to start.

More later, probably, since I'm just 142 pages into one book of a quartet. For now, though, a question: What authors whom you have read, crime or otherwise, emphasize literary style the most? How do they do this? And how do you like the results?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

And another thing ...

I've written about my trip to Bristol, England, for CrimeFest 2009. I failed to mention that Bristol is home to Aardman Animations, which means it's also home to:

Unfortunately, though Wallace and Gromit are featured in a promotional poster for Bristol, our guide said Aardman offers no tours. Instead, then, why not hop over and catch the duo at their own Web site?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Swiss misc.

Hans Werner Kettenbach has won the Friedrich Glauser Prize for lifetime achievement in German-language crime writing, an especially impressive achievement since he did not publish his first novel until he was fifty. The award dovetails neatly with Bitter Lemon Press's release (this month in the UK, October in the US) of Kettenbach's novel David's Revenge. This follows its earlier publication of his Black Ice.

The prize honors the great Swiss crime writer Friedrich Glauser, a longtime favorite here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

Speaking of the Swiss, Crime Time will follow up its richly informative surveys of the French and Dutch crime-fiction scenes with Crime Scene: Switzerland. If the French and Dutch Crime Scenes are any indication, this latest will be a comprehensive guide to the past and present in Swiss crime fiction, along with guides to Web sites, bookshops, fans' organizations and more. A big tip of the headwear to AIEP/IACW (the Association of International Crime Writers) for this worthy project.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Strictly business in New York

This evening's Soho Crime event at Partners & Crime in New York was more meet and mingle than rap and read, and time passed too quickly for me to do all the meeting and mingling with the authors that I'd have liked to do. Still, editors, publicists, booksellers and a collector and fan with apparently wide Irish crime-fiction contacts made for an enjoyable and possibly productive evening.

Eliot Pattison, one of the six featured meeters and minglers, writes series about Tibet and colonial America, but he's a big fan of Irish and other Celtic music, it transpires. We didn't get the chance to chat about his Tibet books, of which I've read two and bought a third at the event. But he did tell me about some good places to hear Celtic music. (The other authors were Cara Black, Garry Disher, Mick Herron, Henry Chang and James R. Benn. I'd particularly have liked more time to talk technique with Disher.) I also saw a copy of Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand on display, and a Soho editor told me about a new title they're really excited about: Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast. There's something to this Irish crime fiction thing.

Alas, my train ride home called to mind another Irish crime novel. Three passengers on the Amtrak Quiet Car, where cell-phone use is barred, were using their cell phones. The serial killer in Ken Bruen's Calibre would have known what to do about that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Senses and sensibility: Aberystwyth Mon Amour

I'm glad I have a blog to discuss Aberystwyth Mon Amour because I could never talk about the book in person or on the phone. I'm unsure how to pronounce the name of the Welsh resort town that gives the novel its title. Nor am I much more confident with Myfanwy, Cantref-y-Gwaelod, Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn or Siani-i-Blojob and other names of people and places in the book, though I suspect the last is not pure Welsh.

Author Malcolm Pryce sets the story in Aberystwyth, a town on Wales' west coast for whose past glories he apparently has much affection. Yet the book also acknowledges, sadly perhaps, the need for Aberystwyth to update itself. In fact, it's possible, at least for a reader like me who knows nothing of Wales and its coast, to read the novel as an elegy to an old Aberystwyth of ice cream stands and whelk stalls and a final acceptance of a new one of cappuccino and biscotti.

But the book is a murder mystery and a thriller, and Price delights in deadpan humor and in words amusing for their own sake. He also excels, particularly in the novel's opening chapters, at creating a sense of place by appealing to the senses.

The mystery is the disappearance of a string of schoolboys and then of a dancer at Aberystwyth's notorious nightclub, the Moulin. Louie Knight, the private investigator whose office is furnished with old library furniture, takes the case and is soon immersed in a shady half-world of gangsters, secret societies, Welsh mythology and a plot that could destroy the town.

I suspect that reaching the book's final destination was more than half the fun for Price. Who would think otherwise with bits like:

"The grandeur was now sadly defaced by charmless municipal sign boards: Combinations and Corsetry; Two-Headed Calves and other Curios; Coelcanths."

and

"I rolled a six and a one, and set off on my journey around the board. How many other people, honeymooners and young families, had made the same journey as the rain swept in from the sea and pounded on the plywood roof of their shoebox on wheels? Families who had driven for two or three hours, stopping occasionally for puking children, to the world of gorse and marram grass, dunes and bingo and fish and chips."

and possibly my favorite:

"A gleam of comprehension appeared in the waters of her eyes and the mauve iris of her mouth opened like a sea anemone's vagina."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Night of the living neds

(City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow)

"A Glasgow stabbing is more fun than an Edinburgh wedding," runs a popular saying, and my informant tells me Glaswegians say this with pride.

I got out of town before the celebration worked its way to full steam, but I expect occasional acts of yobbery happened in honor of Glasgow Rangers' wrapping up the Scottish Premier League soccer title on Sunday.

Championship games seem to follow me around. On Friday, I joined a boatful of Leinster fans on the Belfast-Stranraer ferry heading for Edinburgh to watch their team play for the Heinken Cup in rugby (They conducted themselves well, though an Edinburgh acquaintance complained that a Leinster fan accidentally bopped her in the head with a flag.) And last year, I wandered into Dublin in time to witness what may have been the greatest team performance in the history of hurling.

(Holyrood Park, Edinburgh)

That same head-bopped Edinburgher replied (good-naturedly, I think) to a Glaswegian's comment about her adopted city last week. "Don't, she wrote, "be led too far astray by those cunning Glasgwegian types." So yes, I learned something of the rivalry between Scotland's two largest cities. (For more insight than I can offer on the passions stirred by Scottish sports, see a long, thoughtful comment here.)

Cheers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Donna, Queen of Scots

(Scottish Parliament Building, Edinburgh)

Donna Moore is pleased to announce Big Beat From Badsville, a new blog dedicated to Scottish crime fiction and crime writers. Her long list of authors includes great names from the past (Arthur Conan Doyle, Josephine Tey), current stars (Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre) and megastars (Alexander McCall Smith), and some authors whose names are new to me.

All this adds up to the promise of some enjoyable exploration. So join a most genial guide to the world of guns and haggis.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Cross-border crime-fiction events in Philadelphia and New York

Cara Black and Garry Disher headline the next Robin’s Book Store’s Crime Fiction Book Club brunch this Sunday, May 24, 1 p.m. at Bridget Foy’s, 200 South Street, Philadelphia, 215-922-1813.

On Wednesday, May 27, at 7 p.m., Black and Disher will join Mick Herron , Elliot Pattison, Henry Chang and James R. Benn for a Soho Crime chat and signing at Partners & Crime, 44 Greenwich Avenue, in New York. Call 212-243-0440.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

Ryanair had no flights available from Derry to Glasgow, so I took the Belfast-Stranraer ferry instead. Just as well; I'm reading Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth Mon Amour, and this way I was safe in case Ryanair decided to charge passengers extra for carrying books with long Welsh names in the title.

I regard with affection any novel that begins: "The thing I remember most about it was walking the entire length of the Prom that morning and not seeing a Druid" and includes exchanges such as:

"`Is that Caldy Island?' she asked pointing at the map of Borneo.

"`No, it's Borneo.'"

Had dinner in Glasgow with Donna Moore, a wonderful hostess who regretted that there was no dead body on the premises as there had been the day before; Allan Guthrie; and Ewan. Made plans to visit Edinburgh today, to which one Glaswegian replied: "You should have a lovely day as long as you don't have to mingle with the people."

Cheers,

Peter

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

True, er, crime?

Thursday's front-page story in the Derry News told of Republican Action Against Drugs' denial that it was responsible for threats against a local drug kingpin and of its warnings to anyone who made threats in its name without its knowledge. The short item included the following:

"[The warning] comes after it was reported earlier this week that the group had issued a death threat against a man referred to as the so called `Cocaine King' of Derry.

"However, in a statement to the Derry News, RAAD said they issued no such statement — but would nevertheless execute the man in question `at a time of their own choosing.'"

In other news, I took a walk along Derry's marvelously preserved walls. Enjoyed a sweeping view of the Bogside as local maven Garbhan Downey pointed out the sights and narrated the area's dramatic history. That history includes the 1689 Siege of Derry, which gave rise to the more romantic of the city's two nicknames that I learned today. (The other moniker, Stroke City, is said to reflect the mark that separates the city's two names, Derry/Londonderry, when care is taken to respect both sides in the historic Irish-English divide.

Then afternoon tea and talk of crime, fiction and crime fiction with Downey and Brian McGilloway.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pilot to control tower: Missed it by that much

Much of Brendan O'Carroll stand-up comedy act could probably not be repeated on a family blog, but he's accurate when it comes to accents; most Americans really do talk like that.

He's also dead on about Ryanair and the surreal results of its ultra-low fares and ultra-high, ultra-rigid service fees. (Ryanair is the airline that has recently contemplated charging passengers to use the lavatories on its flights.) The airline is such a figure of fun that O'Carroll got big laughs at the Millennium Forum in Derry with a mere allusion to an incident in which one of its pilots landed at the wrong airport.

The politics are pretty funny here, too, or should I say they provide rich material for comedy. I'd been impressed that Garbhan Downey could turn out that much fine political crime comedy in just a few years. After a chat with Downey today, I'm surprised the lazy so-and-so has not written three times as much.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Down time

(Dundrum Castle, County Down, Northern Ireland)

When John de Courcy founded this castle in 1177 overlooking Dundrum Bay and the Mourne Mountains, little could he have suspected that Dundrum would one day become the home of Gerard "Crime Scene NI" Brennan, blogger, wearer of several crime-fiction hats, and my gracious host yesterday. (Little more could he have dreamed that Carrickfergus, site of his other great castle, would one day become home to the Joymount Arms pub, its proprietress, and her crime-writing brother.)

Our restful drive through the fields of County Down followed an afternoon of talking, shopping and talking shop at Belfast's No Alibis. The day's bounty included books by Brian McGilloway, David Peace and Reginald Hill; a calendar with gorgeous illustrations inspired by classic crime-book covers; and the only novel ever placed into my hands by its own putative protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

F——— the New York Times

BELFAST — The New York Times writes off Fibber Magee as "a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons," and the writer sniffs that "it didn't take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts."

The same newspaper has twice devoted valuable column inches to the verbal excreta of one Paul Hewson, known to many as Bono.

Can someone tell me why the New York Times deserves to exist?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Post-CrimeFest: The legal fight over the "Millennium Trilogy"

The Sunday Times offers this wrap-up of the legal wrangling over Stieg Larsson's literary estate. The article is worth reading despite its stupid headline.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day IV

Super moderator Martin Edwards acknowledged that the members of his "Edge of Doom: What Pushes Your Characters Over the Edge" panel were previously unfamiliar to him. This may have accounted for the general nature of some of the questions. And this, in turn, let some surprising answers shine through.

Caro Ramsay put a nice spin on the old idea of writers who say their characters are in charge. For her, writing a novel is a collaborative effort, "like writing a script and giving it to actors I know very well."

"The plot," said M.R. Hall, who brought television experience to his novel writing, "has to drive the character to the edge of destruction." To this, Ramsay replied that "Plot drives the writer to the edge of destruction."

Brian McGilloway cited Shakespeare among the writers he admires and made a good case for the Bard's crime-fiction chops. Shakespeare incorporated suspense, tight structure and, of especially timely interest to your humble blogkeeper, "gallows humor following a death." (At an earlier panel, I'd cited Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie for effective use of humor at dark moments. And Shakespeare and crime has been a recurrent interest here at Detectives Beyond Borders. I invite McGilloway and other readers to have a look.)

And I cheered when Steven Hague added prose style to plot and character as key constituent of crime writing.

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

Edwards then stepped across CrimeFest's suite of rooms and retained his title at the festival's "Crossfire: Criminal Mastermind" quiz. I was torn between casting my lot with him or with Simon Brett as my choice to win. I chose Brett. Had I chosen Edwards, I'd have won a free pass to the festival next year.

A short Saturday night bar chat with Brett was nonetheless one of my CrimeFest highlights. He was honored for his long and prolific crime-writing career, but he'd worked in radio before he began writing books and was the first producer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the acknowledgements to the book version of The Hitchhiker's Guide, author Douglas Adams thanks "Simon Brett, for starting the whole thing off." I enjoyed the radio broadcasts and the first few books, so it was a pleasure to enjoy a few minutes of Guide and Adams stories from Brett.

Finally, an apology to Rafe McGregor. He, too, was on the team that kicked my own Shots Detectives squad into second place in the pub quiz.

See the complete CrimeFest program here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day III, Part II: Appetizers, dinner and dessert

Donna Moore, Declan Burke, Cara Black and Paul Johnston's panel called "Natural-Born Killers: Maxim's Picks" (the name honored moderator Maxim Jakubowski) took meandering paths with brief stops at several interesting destinations.

Moore recalled her childhood admiration for the Nancy Drew books, for the heroine, her handsome boyfriend, her fun friends and young Nancy's car. But then, she said, "I actually read one a few years ago and decided Nancy Drew was a bit of a whiner, her boyfriend was pathetic, and her friends were neurotic. I still liked the car, though." Perhaps you won't be surprised that Moore's first novel, Go to Helena Handbasket, pokes fun at every crime-fiction cliche Moore could think of.

Burke's comment that "I'm fascinated by the power of the Internet and what it can do" sparked a discussion of that medium's potential, both good and bad, for writers and publishers. Burke works hard to exploit that potential, both in his own fiction and as keeper of the Crime Always Pays blog. If Ken Bruen and Colin Bateman are godfathers to the current wave of Irish crime fiction, Burke is the godfather of Irish crime blogging, so he knows what he's talking about. Still, the discussion was leavened by a bracing sense of dread and blissfully free of the wifty optimism (pure shite, really) that can infect discussions of consumer technology.

I also quite liked Johnston's comment on writing about a country where one lives but is not a native: "That book I wrote about terrorism in Greece, I don't think a Greek could have written."

=========

The baked cod at the gala dinner in the King's Room was more than acceptable, accompanied by waves of ecstatic verbiage to my left, and graceful acknowledgment to my right. The former came from Ali Karim, world's most voluble booster of Stieg Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire). The latter came from Reg Keeland, the books' English translator.

Each guest of honor (Simon Brett, Håkan Nesser, Andrew Taylor) gave a short, funny, speech, joyously irreverent of the proceedings. My favorite of the three was Taylor's deconstruction of the prizes he'd been given for each of his many Dagger awards from the Crime Writers' Association. Fook, the gent is twisted.

=========

As a rule, the reporters' notebooks shut when the hotel bar opens. Still, I can't resist mentioning Kevin Wignall's scintillating impersonation of Marlon Brando as the Godfather, cut short only when Wignall almost swallowed one of the napkins he'd stuffed in his cheeks.

As always, view the complete CrimeFest program here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day III, Part I: Interviews

Håkan Nesser, interviewed by Ann Cleeves, shed light on that recurrent question of Scandinavian gloom and Scandinavian authors. Scandinavians, he said, are dour; their authors are not: "I wanted [my protagonist] to be, at least to start with, depressed. ... Happy people don't need their humor."

Dour Swedes may be, Nesser said, but not cripplingly so: "We're not that depressed, but we don't talk a lot. That's good for a crime story. You keep things inside for thirty years," and then they just come out.

Ten of Nesser's twenty-two novels have featured Inspector Van Veeteren; four of these have been translated into English. The remaining six would likely change Nesser's image in the English-speaking world. The books translated thus far have featured villains with whom the reader may sympathize deeply. But that changed: "There are two really bad guys in numbers nine and ten." After the fifth in the series, Nesser said, Van Veeteren retires from the police and opens a bookstore instead.

Nesser also discussed his series about a character with the whimsical name of Gunnar Barbarotti, a series as yet untranslated into English, a series whose premise seems an odd mix of whimsy and Ingemar Bergman: "It's a thing between [Barbarotti] and God, and God has to prove he exists. ... If the prayer is fulfilled, God will get one point, or, in more important cases, one or two points."

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

Two interviews with authors I have not yet read offered insights I found especially pleasing. Andrew Taylor told Peter Guttridge that he loved Jane Austen, and Simon Brett told Gyles Brandreth that Austen was the one person he'd like to meet in Heaven, Taylor also cited P.G. Wodehouse as an early love.

So I'll take a tentative stab at charting some tendencies of British crime writers: They love Austen, they love Wodehouse, and they have a decided position, yes or no, on whether their novels have fundamentally moral concerns. At least this was true of some writers here, and the penchant for Austen and Wodehouse is by no means restricted to writers of what Americans call cozies or to any other type of mystery. Not should it be. Austen and Wodehouse are towering giants, a Hammett and a Chandler of English writing.

One remark was sufficient to get me interested in reading Taylor, who is English and this year's recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement: "Until ... 1934, it would have been utterly possible for us to slip gradually into being a Fascist state."

Oh, and he offered a valuable tip for beginning crime writers: "With the first novel, I had a corpse, and I went on from there. Corpses are good."

Click here for the full CrimeFest schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day II: The spirit is willing, and the flesh makes a pretty good go as well

My own highlight from Crimefest 2009, Day II? Perhaps it was Jo Nesbø's English translator, Don Bartlett, relieving me of anxieties about how to pronounce Nesbø's name. If "Joe Nesbow" is good enough for the man who translates his books, it's good enough for me.

Or maybe it was L.C. Tyler's professed admiration for Allan Guthrie. Tyler writes comic cozy mysteries; Guthrie's work is anything but cozy. One author's respect for another who writes fiction of a different type is one of those salutary, mind-opening reminders that make events like this a joy.

Another was Leighton Gage's answer that his books begin with plot. If my memory serves me well, he was the only one of eight writers on two panels who gave that answer to the "Plot or character?" question.

Stephen Booth offered the disarming admission that "I didn't want to write about middle-aged alcoholics because other people had done it better" and the warning that too faithful a portrayal of procedure can be deadly in a police procedural.

Ros Schwartz, Dagger-winning translator of Dominique Manotti, offered shocking assessments of the miserable working conditions of literary translators in much of Europe and contrasted these with the far better environment for translators in the Scandinavian countries.

Håkan Nesser, in answer to a question about Nordic authors' reputation for dourness, noted their penchant for social criticism: "If your mission is to criticize society, you can't be very comical." (Editor's note: Your humble blogkeeper is author of an article on humor in Nordic crime fiction, including Nesser's. I believe that the general seriousness of crime fiction from the Nordic countries throws such humor as there is into especially sharp relief.)

Declan Burke, Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall made up a panel on writing about villains. An observation of Mosby's neatly encapsulated the way the line between hero and villain can blur: "Every villain is the hero of his own story."

See the day's complete program here. And Burke discharged his bar debt in a prompt, gentlemanly manner.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest Day I: It's in the bag

The formal CrimeFest proceedings got off to a smashing start, with a panel on psychological thrillers moderated by Margaret Murphy and also including Jenni Mills, Steve Mosby, Sheila Quigley and Claire Seeber. One highlight might be useful to would-be authors: Each writer talked of an experience, small or large, that germinated into a book. In one case, it was repeated visits to a young relative in a mental hospital. In another, it was panic induced when confined in a narrow passage in a cave. Lesson: Use your imagination, and see where it takes you.

My question to Mosby about serial killers who act in the name of civilized virtues won me a bag of books for the cleverest question.

A panel on historical mysteries offered a practical answer to a question I'd only been able to formulate in theoretical terms: How does one remain faithful to one's historical setting while writing for an audience of one's own time? The panelists were Roger Hudson, who sets his work in fifth-century B.C. Athens; Ruth Downie and Jane Finnis, each of whom sets her work in Roman Britain; and Roz Southey, whose protagonist is an eighteenth-century musician. Moderator was Edward Marston, whose sets work in several historical periods.

Finnis spoke of a character scarred by war, and of the difficulties writing about such a character without the psychological vocabulary that would be anachronistic to the first-century Roman world. The character suffered from what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Finnis noted, but she could of course not use that term. Nor could she offer the insight that this is what happens to people exposed for a long period to war: "It just had to be left to the reader to make that deduction."

My question to Southey won me another bag of books, or would have had not a fellow attendee pointed out that I'd already won one. I was thus deprived of the opportunity to make a magnanimous gesture and voluntarily surrender the second bag.

The panel on "The Lost Weekend: Eric Ambler and Who? — Forgotten Authors" could keep me talking and reading for months, and I'll likely read and post about some of these authors. Superbly moderated by Martin Edwards, the discussion also included Mary Andrea Clarke, Barry Forshaw, Declan Hughes and Sarah Rayne.

The current authors praised their predecessors for streaks of humor and for gorgeous prose style, two elements I love that are rare these days. Hughes said of Margaret Millar that "She's also, sentence-by-sentence, I think, one of the crime writers who can write. ... She's a great plotter without smacking the least of the Golden Age."

My question about why forgotten books are such a popular topic these days sparked a lively discussion among the panelists about nostalgia. Alas, I won no bag.

Next: The pub quiz. As my teammate Ali Karim would say, "Mental!!!"

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

NEWS FLASH: Pub-quiz result: A tie for second place. The prize: A bag of books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pre-CrimeFest

(Photo by Mike Gove)

Your humble blogkeeper was too jet-lagged and congested to do much of anything today except take a desultory walk around Bristol with a brief stop to have lunch and watch cricket on television.

I did see enough to note that Bristol seems to have done much with its old waterfront. This has included glitzy projects with lots of shiny metal and the word millennium, but it also incorporates old trains, track and tow-boats, none decayed but some with just enough of the ramshackle about them to remind visitors what this city was built on and how distant that past has become.

These reminders take in a plaque that notes Bristol's role in the dreadful triangular trade: arms and other metal goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and raw goods such as sugar back to England. The whole reminds me a bit of Belfast, with its waterfront plans that include a museum around the slip where the Titanic was built, and the massive Harland and Wolff cranes.

Tomorrow: Crime time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest — and what I'll miss by being there

CrimeFest 2009 opens Thursday with an international galaxy of crime-fiction stars. I'll be there, too.

Among those stars is Leighton Gage, author of the Inspector Mario Silva series set in Brazil. I've just started Buried Strangers, the second in the series, but that's enough to report on the opening chapters' deftly executed hook.

Amid brief reintroductions of character conflicts from the first novel, Blood of the Wicked, Gage portrays discovery of what appears a crime horrendous in its scale and barbarity. Any number of authors might have given us pounding hearts, breathless adjectives and appalled attempts to come to grips with the enormity of— but you've read that all before.

I will say no more except to suggest that Gage's severely understated execution of the scenes is one hell of an attention grabber.

Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Leighton Gage here. And next year, read the third Mario Silva mystery, Dying Gasp.

======

As CrimeFest gets under way Thursday in Bristol, England, one of America's greatest crime writers, Elmore Leonard, will be reading from his new novel, answering questions and signing books at the Free Library back in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest IV: Gonzo publishing

(Here's the fourth in a series of posts about authors who'll be at CrimeFest 2009 in Bristol, England, this week. I'll be there, too, standing on my tip-toes in the back row of the group picture.)

Big O author Declan Burke, whose name you may know, has announced an experiment in publishing. My fellow CrimeFest attendee is seeking to make his novel A Gonzo Noir, circulated heretofore in the traditional Internet mode, available in print as well. Join me in wishing the book good luck in finding a publisher.

In the meantime, click on the Gonzo Noir link above and enjoy exchanges like this:

‘If you want my opinion,’ he says, ‘the conflicts that work best are between the reader and a character they like who’s doing stuff they wouldn’t generally tolerate. Your mistake was to make Karlsson a total wack-job. No one who wasn’t a complete fruit could like him.’

‘Okay, so we make you likeable. What then?’

‘We blow up the hospital.’

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Graphic noir: Scalped, Vol. 4

Ed Brubaker's introduction to the fourth collection of Jason Aaron's comic/graphic novel Scalped offers a definition of noir that passes within hailing distance of my own. Writes Brubaker:

"[G]ood noir often has amazingly intricate twisty plots, but that's just icing on a dark, dark cake. Noir is about the characters moving through those plots, ricocheting like a banged-up pinball that only bounces

"Down

"Down

"Down

"Until — Game over. No match, no free play.

"And as you watch them move, you know their final destination, you recognize it ... because it feels inevitable. To me, that's the heart of what noir is, inevitability."

Your humble blog keeper had this to say when he set his mind to definitions (and that definition came in the introduction to an interview whose subject had yet a third definition of noir):

"For this reader, noir hits me hard in the stomach with an ending in which a protagonist goes knowingly to his or her fate. Call it resignation, even if that resignation is sometimes triumphant."

Scalped occupies a thought-provoking place in such discussions. For one thing, its setting on an Indian reservation helps freshen the noir tradition by keeping it surprising and contemporary. Noir is not a style, it's a way of grim life. For another, it's a kind of group noir. Everyone is trapped or doomed, not just some hapless protagonist.

Having said that, one story in this volume, which collects issues 19 through 24 of the comic, has a prominent character take a series of unexpectedly moral actions. I'd like to say that the character turns away from the noir and toward the heroic, but I won't. Instead, I'll take the story as gratifying evidence of noir's flexibility and vitality.

(Read more about Scalped at publisher Vertigo's Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Tradition, tradition!

Does something in the zeitgeist — the disastrous recession, maybe, the swift and terrifying collapse of vital, once-trusted industries, the newly precarious state of so many lives and livelihoods — turn readers' and publishers' thoughts to the comforts of tradition? A week and a half ago I posted some thoughts by and about those unrelated novel-writing Edwardses — Ruth Dudley and Martin — on traditional mysteries: what the term means, and how an author goes about writing traditional mysteries in these untraditional times.

This week, Sarah Weinman weighs in on "New Traditionalist" mysteries and cites some thoughts on the subject from Jordan Foster at Publishers Weekly.

Click on all those links — Sarah's, PW's, the Edwardes' and mine — and open your mind to mysteries that can be traditional and with it at the same time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Buffalo Jump up ... for an Arthur Ellis Award

Howard Shrier, a guest at the first cross-border Noir at the Bar earlier this year in Toronto, is up for an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada for best first novel.

Buffalo Jump offers funny and fresh takes on the private-eye novel and not-so-funny trips into scary moral territory. The novel is set near the Canada-United States border and crosses that border to tell a pair of stories that converge to pack a tough and thoroughly contemporary punch.

(Click here for a complete list of nominees. The winners are to be announced June 4.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives Beyond Borders is a winner

The people have spoken. Your humble blogkeeper has won a Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry, in a tie with the worthy J. Kingston Pierce of the worthy Rap Sheet.

I like these awards because the categories reflect serious thought about and great care for crime fiction. They recognize a wide range of authors, for instance, and they include graphic novels.

Both the ballot forms and the winners list include links to the nominated short stories, another sign that the Spinetinglers want to spread the news about writers and artists who might not otherwise get the recognition that they deserve. So thanks to all who voted, and I hope you'll join me in spraying some champagne on Sandra Ruttan and all the good folks at Spinetingler.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest III: Interview with Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser will be a featured author at CrimeFest 2009. (I'll be there, too, as a humbly worshipful paying customer.) Nesser's appearance coincides with the publication of Woman With Birthmark, the fourth of his novels about Inspector Van Veeteren to be translated from Swedish into English. The original version won the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy's prize for best novel in 1996, the second of Nesser's three victories in that category.

In the third of a series of posts about CrimeFest authors, here's an interview I did with Nesser last spring, upon publication of the Van Veeteren novel Mind's Eye.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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Readers of translated crime fiction know that series are often translated out of order. Håkan Nesser's is no different. The newly published Mind's Eye, third of Nesser's ten Van Veeteren novels to become available in English, after Borkmann's Point (second in the sequence) and The Return (third), is the first of the series, published in Swedish in 1993.

The novel tells the story of a high school teacher named Janek Mitter who wakes up hung over and finds his wife dead in the bathtub. He struggles to recover his memories of the fatal night, cracks jokes and makes a mockery of his trial, and finds himself confined to a mental institution. Then Mitter himself is murdered, and the investigation and mystery begin in earnest.

The book contains much that will be familiar to Nesser's readers: deadpan humor, sympathy even for unsympathetic characters, and delightfully true-to-life oddball observations. Since this was the first in the series, a reader might naturally wonder if the novel is more autobiographical than those that followed, in the proverbial manner of first novels everywhere. I did, so I asked Nesser a few questions.
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What have English readers missed by having only three of the Van Veeteren novels available in their language?

You’ve missed seven books, but hopefully Pantheon will make up for the loss. Next one is published next April. Woman with Birthmark (Kvinna med födelsemärke) got the award for best crime novel in Swedish 199-something. (Note to readers: The year was 1996, when Nesser beat a field that included Åke Edwardson and Henning Mankell.)

You were a teacher. To what extent does Elmer Suurna, the headmaster in Mind’s Eye whose only ambition was “to keep his handsome red-oak desktop clean and shiny,” reflect your own disillusionment with that profession?

My disillusionment is not that big. The main problem with Swedish schools is too much administration, too little money. Most headmasters are good. I have seen one or two like Suurna, though.

You named your protagonist, Van Veeteren, for Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier stories. What do you find attractive about Van de Wetering’s work? How is Grijpstra and De Gier’s world view similar to Van Veeteren’s?

Not sure. I enjoyed De Gier and Grijpstra a lot, of course, perhaps the way they sort of look in the wrong direction most of the time, not really concerned about their work. But perhaps Van Veeteren is different in this respect.

Minor characters in Mind’s Eye are named Joensuu, Mankel and Kellerman. Why those particular crime writers? And what other writers have I missed?

Well, most people like to have a name, and it doesn’t cost a lot to give knowledgeable readers some meaningless hints.

Both this book and The Return display strong sympathy with characters who have been in prison or otherwise institutionalized. What are the origins of this sympathy?

With different circumstances the good guy would have been the bad guy. It’s important to understand the motive, and to not demonize the criminal. Some murders are more understandable than others, and those are also more interesting to write about.

The great Swiss crime writer Friedrich Glauser also showed special sympathy for institutionalized or otherwise downtrodden characters. Do you know his books?

No, never read Glauser. Heard of him though.

What plans do your U.S., U.K. or Australian publishers have for issuing more English translations of your work?

See 1). Also I believe they’ve bought a fifth title from the series.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Hakan Nesser

More awarders recognize crime beyond borders

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays comes news of the Macavity Award nominations. CAP is excited that his fellow Irish crime author Declan Hughes is up for a best-mystery-novel Macavity. This follows on his short-listing for the best-novel Edgar Award.

I'm pleased that 3½ of the seven best-novel nominees are from beyond U.S. borders: Hughes' The Price of Blood (called The Dying Breed in the U.K.); The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason (Iceland); and The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny (Canada). The half is for Trigger City by Sean Chercover, who has divided his time between Toronto and Chicago and who blended in beautifully with the natives at the recent Noir at the Bar: TO Style in Toronto. This follows a short list for the best-novel Edgar that was 50 percent non-American authors.

Visit Mystery Readers International for a complete list of nominees for the Macavitys, which are to presented at Boucheron 2009 in October.

In other award news, Bob "I'm not Roger" Cornwell of Crimetime sends notice of nominations for the Glass Key prize, the top crime-fiction award in the Nordic countries. Crimetime announces the nominations here in a wrap-up that spins off into a look at other Nordic awards plus all kinds of neat stuff about the several languages involved as well as links to more sites on Nordic crime prizes and organizations. The article deserves an award of its own.

Read (in English) about the Glass Key nominees here, on a blog operated by the Skandinaviska Kriminalsällskapet, which awards the prize.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Les six mille froids

Per a recent comment string in which James Ellroy's name came up, here's a picture from a bookshop window in Paris in November 2007.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Inside-out in Split

By popular demand, a photo from Split, Croatia, showing some of the odd views that result when a city grows up inside the precincts of a palace, that of the Roman emperor Diocletian. The man did things in a big way.


The popular demander said he'd recommend Split highly. So would I. It's one of the two or three places I've visited where I was overcome with the spontaneous thought of how pleasant it would be to live there, even if I didn't live within the old palace walls.

The clear sea air and the blue Adriatic waters inspired in me an unprecedented desire to get up early in the morning and go for walks before breakfast.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

One city, three scripts

This has nothing to do with crime fiction, but it is pretty cool, I think.

All three of these samples are from monuments in Split, Croatia, and they reflect something of that clement and gorgeously situated city's diverse heritage.

Above, read some Latin; at right, try some Hebrew; and below, Croatian (the old Glagolitic script, I think.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sex and the country

A scene near the beginning of Pierre Magnan's The Messengers of Death nicely exemplifies an observation I made after reading his Death in the Truffle Wood. The observation concerned Magnan's convincing portrayal of rural life's human texture. Here's the Messengers of Death example that brought it back to mind:

"`Perhaps you could teach these things to me directly?' Prudence said.

"Rose's mouth fell open and stayed open. As it happened, for quite some time now she had regretted the fact that her enriching experiences still lacked an essential spice. ... [Prudence] was the one who dragged her, pushed her, willing and eager, towards the little bedroom behind the shop. And there, both of them had their first and definitive lesbian experience. After that it it was nothing more than a habit dependent on the whim of the moment.

"That's how you fight boredom in these sleepy villages."

I like the deadpan humor, the slow buildup to an unexpected punch line that you just know Magnan enjoyed as much as his readers will. (He uses the technique at least once elsewhere in the book's opening chapters, possibly to even better effect.)

I also like what the passage implies about the pace of life in Magnan's rural Provence. I'm not sure extra-marital liaisons are any more common in Magnan's work than in fiction set in cities, but they are far less fraught with anxiety, at least of the immediate kind. Consequences unfold slowly, if at all, and characters accept them stoically or with good-humored resignation or silent suffering or secret relief. The consequences are more like glaciers than volcanoes. Or maybe more like seasonal winds.

Hmm, why do I have this sudden urge to read the Book of Ecclesiastes?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

In Bruges wins the Edgar Award for best screenplay, and a word about Declan Hughes

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box has just won the Edgar Award for best novel, but I felt a certain attachment to one of the other short-listed books: The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes (titled The Dying Breed in the UK). The man is Irish, for one thing, right up Detectives Beyond Borders' alley.

Also, I wrote nice things about the book in the Philadelphia Inquirer, beginning my review thus: "A fist to the jaw carries with it an intimacy that a bullet to the gut just can't match." And Hughes' niece's husband played on my softball team. And someone snapped a photo of Hughes and me at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore.

(From left, J. Kingston Pierce, your humble blogkeeper, Declan Hughes. Photo by Ali Karim, courtesy of The Rap Sheet)

Hughes was not the only writer from beyond these shores up for the Mystery Writers of America's top award Thursday night. Also in the running were Karin Alvtegen for Missing and Morag Joss for The Night Following.

Christa Faust's Money Shot was up for best paperback original. She's American, but she wrote a book very much worth reading, and she was responsible for my favorite crime-fiction-related phrase of the year. Click this link to see and hear me using the phrase. (The Edgar for best paperback original went to China Lake by Meg Gardiner.)

Martin McDonagh won the Edgar for best screenplay for In Bruges, a beyond-borders nomination that I forgot to mention earlier.

Congratulations to the winners, and a hat tip to Sarah Weinman for providing up-to-the-minute news as the official Edgars chronicler. (See a list of all Edgar nominees here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest II: What's traditional about a traditional mystery?

(Here's my second in a series of posts about authors who plan to attend CrimeFest 2009 in Bristol, England, next month. I'll be there, too, working when I should be having fun and having fun when I should be working.)

What's traditional about a traditional mystery? If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, I might have said traditional = cozy = prominent role for old dear = village or country-house setting = knitting = cute animals.

Then I read what Ruth Dudley Edwards had to say on the subject. In the United States, she writes on her Web site, "the distinction is made between cosies and hard-boiled, terms which are unknown here except to the cognoscenti. I am definitely in the cosy league – what Reg Hill, who is there too, calls ‘the Jane Austen end of the crime writing spectrum’."

One always knew that Britain had Christie and the U.S. had Chandler and that the dichotomy might have echoes to this day. Still, having just read Edwards' The English School of Murder, I was surprised to see the author place herself in the cozy league. The novel, after all, is set almost entirely in London, and it includes passing and not-so-passing references to drug use, homosexuality, menages-a-trois and any number of up-to-date political and cultural jabs and other references, not to mention the occasional four-letter word.

I've just opened Martin Edwards' Waterloo Sunset, and I've noticed reflections on urban growth and boosterism, not to mention a character who just might be disturbingly demented. I hadn't expected this from an author who has proclaimed his allegiance to traditional mysteries. Heck, the man even named his novel for a song by the Kinks.

I know something about what a traditional mystery isn't: full of explicit sex and wrenching violence. But sharpen my thinking, and tell me what a contemporary traditional mystery is.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Who is eating the Watchmen?

I've posted a few times in recent months about the comic and movie Watchmen. Those posts were the main course. Here, courtesy of the Baixa Gastronomia blog, is the dessert, a chocolate cake with yellow icing, a chocolate smile and a blood stain of strawberry sauce, in the manner of Watchmen's signature blood-streaked smiley face.

Click on the Baixa link for the recipe. It's in Catalan, but you'll figure it out. Blogger Mar Calpena provides a synopsis in English. (Hat tip to Briciole, for its continuing mix of crime fiction, food and Italian lessons.)

Now it's your turn. What foods suit your favorite crime writers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Fifty Grand day

Today is release day for Fifty Grand by Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty. The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments:

`Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddamnit! Why don't you understand, what's the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?'

I do. It was my major.

When you're done reading the book and touting it on Amazon.com and elsewhere, try McKinty's splendid Michael Forsythe trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives Beyond Borders' CrimeFest blogfest: Ruth Dudley Edwards

I'm off to Bristol for CrimeFest 2009 next month. Between now and then, I'll devote some posts to authors and others who'll join me there.

First up is Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose novel Murdering Americans won CrimeFest's Last Laugh Award 2008. That was the eleventh novel in her series about the splendidly named Robert Amiss; The English School of Murder is the third.

I may devote a post to Edwards' satire, but here it's humor's turn, specifically Edwards' talent for maintaining a tone through incidental action and description. This line, in the fourth chapter, without having any immediate bearing on the plot or anything to do with Edwards' targets, gives a fair idea:

"`Suspicious,' observed Amiss, who was losing interest rapidly."

The novel is set in an English-language school, and Dudley is not the only crime writer to find such a school fertile ground for a story of crime and corruption. The other half of the title's wordplay applies, too. Amiss' friend Ellis Pooley is a genial and wide-ranging connoisseur of crime novels.

A special treat for P.G. Wodehouse fans: Amiss' improvised effort to trap a recalcitrant cat in an early chapter is a tribute to "Jeeves and the Impending Doom," my favorite Wodehouse story and one of his best.

More to come, maybe.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Dial M for murder: My thousandth post

This is my 1,000th post since I started Detectives Beyond Borders on Sept 21, 2006. I'd like to thank Maxine Clarke of Petrona, who left this blog's first comment. Among other things, the comments on that debut post introduced me to the excellent Peter Temple, so I'd say I got off to a good start.

Now it's your turn. What are your favorite novels or stories with the word or number thousand or any slang terms therefor in the title? Doesn't matter how many thousands, as long as the word or number thousand or some term for it is part of the name.

A thousand thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky MMIX

An Irish crime writer on Irish crime writing, plus your chance to vote

Crime Always Pays links to an article in the Guardian about Brian McGilloway's top 10 modern Irish crime novels. It's nice to see what writers read. It's a sign of Irish crime fiction's vitality that comments on CAP suggest worthy candidates that could have made McGilloway's list but did not.

Click here for McGilloway-related material from Detectives Beyond Borders.

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In an unrelated development, a team of international election observers including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter will not monitor voting for the Spinetingler Awards, where Detectives Beyond Borders is up for the Special Services to the Industry award. Vote now while you still can.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Garbhan Downey beyond borders

I owe my presence in the United States to U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy and former Representative Brian J. Donnelly, both of Massachusetts. More than twenty years ago, they sponsored legislation to let 30,000 people a year obtain permanent residency ("green cards") in the U.S. under relaxed requirements.

The 30,000 places were allotted by nation, ranging, if memory serves, from 9,000 from Ireland and 4,000 from Canada down through smaller numbers from other countries and territories.

Since the four annual incomers from New Caledonia were far less likely than the 9,000 from Ireland eventually to swell the voting rolls of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts, I am predisposed toward fond sympathy with Garbhan Downey's upcoming novel, War of the Blue Roses. As the novel opens, the (fictional) Irish taoiseach, or premier, chides the (fictional) U.S. president for overstating his (the president's) Irish ancestry. "Don't knock it," the president replies. "It was enough to get me elected." Irishness has a powerful political presence in America, and Downey gleefully follows his cast of politicians, gangsters and hangers-on to the U.S. and Canada for significant chunks of the new book.

The subject is roses – specifically a competition to design a peace garden for the White House – and if you think gardening is a clean pursuit, this book will shock you. Downey brings back some of the characters from his previous books, tough, savvy, engaging and, in some cases, unscrupulous folks from Ireland north and south, and he throws in Americans and Englishmen this time. These last give Downey fresh new satirical targets.

Pre-publication etiquette forbids my saying much more. And what does the future hold for Downey? Massive international success, perhaps, and adaptations of his work into comic operas. Is Mozart still working?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

There once was a gumshoe named Sam ...

Gerald So sends word of the upcoming second issue of "The Lineup: Poems on Crime." I posted a notice of the first issue last year, and I can tell you that some of the poems packed a hard-boiled crime punch. Fans of narrative concision and crime songs might also want to check out "The Lineup" and open their minds to poetry about crime.

Gerald says he hopes to send the second issue to print early next month. Check the Lineup blog for more information, including where to buy the books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pierre Magnan's country life, Part II

(Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912 Oil on canvas 36 3/4 x 29 1/4 in. The Art Institute of Chicago)

If this painting seems to you an odd choice to illustrate a comment about a crime novel of rural French life, you may be open to the appeal of Pierre Magnan's The Murdered House.

The book is more somber than Magnan's Death in the Truffle Wood, but it shares with that novel a careful study of mysteries and motives amid lives that move more slowly than those most of us are used to and probably would appear calm to those of us on the outside.

I'll have more to say later, perhaps about Magnan's unsurpassed handling of that crime-fiction staple, the long-ago act whose consequences unfold years later. For now, this:

"Then, as soon as Séraphin put his foot to the ground, the stranger who had been following the shepherds' retreat suddenly turned round, and Séraphin realized immediately why they had fled in disarray. He was a geule cassée: one of those men who had survived the war, but with a dreadfully disfigured face; one of those faces no one would raise a hand to, for fear that all those who had died in the war would rise in a body at such sacrilege.

"`Yes,' the man said, `there's a painter who does this now ... called Juan Gris. I could be a model for him.'

"When he laughed — and he laughed often — it was an unbearable sight."

I like that passage for its mix of compassion and horror, with no attempt to downplay or overstate either. But mostly I like the intrusion of an advanced, urban-based twentieth-century artist on a story of slow-burning rural life. Magnan's book is a reminder that the last century was more complicated than technology-minded potted histories give it credit for.

(Here's a chance to look inside a few of Magnan's books. Here's his Web site, in French.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

We have a winner

My favorite entry in last week's Raymond Chandler simile fest was this, from PKL:

"Jingo slithered into the bar like a vaseline salamander in a sharkskin suit."

If he'll send me his postal address at detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net, I'll send his prize: His choice of the copy of Farewell, My Lovely that gave rise to the contest, or Boiling a Frog, a novel by an author who goes over the top in a different way: Christopher Brookmyre. If he has those already, I'll send another book from the Detectives Beyond Borders Crime Fiction Collection.

Honorable mention goes to Adrian McKinty's "He stuck out like a reasonable man in the Fox News building."

Thanks to all for the verbal high jinks and for helping me clear a bit of space in my book-muddled house.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The essay on Raymond Chandler's metaphors hit me like an ice-cream headache

I was pleased today to find an article about metaphors and grotesque characters in Farewell, My Lovely. (I am tearing through the novel now like a vote counter in the Minnesota Senate race. I'd be reading faster, but work interrupts.)

The article's author, William Marling, writes: "Perhaps the most literate hard-boiled novel ever written, Farewell explodes with metaphors and allusions. Their density is manifest on the first page." One nice touch: Marling sees in the tarantula/cake image I cited earlier this week an allusion to Great Expectations.

Farewell, My Lovely is home to one of the most celebrated Chandlerisms: "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window," but I like this, from the novel's second page:

"He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes."

Off-the-wall descriptions are easy; "white explosions on the toes" is poetic, surprising, and a nice mood-setter for the violence that must follow in a hard-boiled novel.

The description moves from head to toe, reaching a rhythmic climax in the bit about the white explosions. How many shaggy borsalino hats have you seen? How many shoe ornaments have you seen described as explosions and how many explosions by their color? Is surprise the key to vivid description and successful metaphor?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Whom have you discovered?

I've raved recently about Pierre Magnan and José Latour, two authors I had not read until a few weeks ago. The excitement of discovery added to the pleasure of reading three wonderful books.

Tell me about some of your reading discoveries, recent or otherwise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Raymond meets Rembrandt: A brush with death

(Rembrandt, Portrait of the Artist at His Easel, 1660. Oil on canvas, 111 x 90 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris)

"They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o'-shanter which wasn't any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew."

– Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"He stuck out like a zoot suit at a Shaker funeral"

That title is mine, but Raymond Chandler blazed the trail. Here's how he sums up the big ganch Philip Marlowe meets at the beginning of Farewell, My Lovely:

"Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."

Over in Baltimore, Dave Rosenthal devoted a fill-in-the-blanks quiz to those memorable thunderclaps of over-the-top wordage. Here are his first two questions:

1) "The walls here are as _____ as a hoofer's wallet." Playback

2) "The voice got as _____ as a cafeteria dinner." Farewell, My Lovely

Get the idea?

Now it's your turn. Do what I did in the title of this post, and make up your own Chandleresque description. If it's good enough, I may award a few books as prizes. And my judgment is as good as ____

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Politics sucks, Victoria": José Latour's Comrades in Miami

How's this for a simile to make the pulse quicken?:

"For the next fifty minutes, like a nearly invisible virus invading an organism several trillion times its size, the purring outboards slipped the cigarette in."

The place is a cigarette boat easing quietly into harbor near Key West, Florida, under cover of night. The cargo and crew are six Cuban defectors. The passage is from José Latour's Comrades in Miami, and I like it for several reasons.

The simile is striking, the ominous image of the virus bumping up against the soft, reassuring purr of the motor, the tiny virus making its quiet way into the unimaginably huge organism (When was the last time you read trillion outside a story about the U.S. budget?) But mostly the little bit of wonder is both magical and touchingly human, the sort of thing I could well imagine myself thinking in a similar situation.

Latour's compassionate humanity comes through as well in his choice of multiple points of view, which permits considerable sympathy even for the novel's worst, most unrelievedly evil character.

The book's political stance is decidedly anti-communist and anti-Castro. Still, Latour is probably not universally loved by the anti-Castroites who are the Cuban-American community's public face in the United States. Here's one of the defectors, a central figure in the novel:

"`But we've reflected on the excesses of democracy and the shortcomings of communism a hundred times. Are we going to do something about it? No, right? So leave it to the naive dissidents who risk their freedom, maybe even their lives. They haven't figured out that when communism falls, Cuban-Americans will give them a medal and a pension before rigging the elections and taking charge. Politics sucks, Victoria."

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In a news note relevant to a recurring motif in Comrades in Miami, President Barack Obama will allow Americans to make unlimited transfers of money and visits to relatives in Cuba.

Click here for two more novels unlikely to earn their authors tickets to a Fidel Castro celebrity roast.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Jeg er en gæsteblogger

Find out how I look in Danish here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

José Latour on Cuban policy and politics

A passage from José Latour's Comrades in Miami, a thriller about defection and disillusionment in Cuba:

"Although he never before had visited prosperous cities in the West, the database manager was not so much impacted by affluence as by freedom. It amazed him to watch newscasts in which Spanish parliamentarians from different political parties openly and respectfully disagreed about what was best for their country. Nobody called his opponent a traitor, a rat, or a worm just because the other was a Nationalist, a Socialist, a Christian Democrat, a Communist, or a Liberal. Legislative decisions were made by majority; unanimity was something had ever heard of."

But wait! There's more:

"Under capitalism, many nations had achieved what he had been led to believe only communist societies could: free education and health care."

You may not be surprised to learn that Latour has settled in Canada and not the United States since leaving Cuba.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Snatch this award from my hand, Grasshopper

I am a double recipient of a Grasshopper Award, from D.J.'s Krimiblog and Mysteries in Paradise. Thanks, Dorte and thanks, Kerrie, though why am I so often associated with green creatures?

This award seeks to recognize good bloggery, throwing around words like taught, entertained and inspired. I blush a deep shade of green.

But what blogs make me think of insects of the suborder Caelifera in the order Orthoptera?

Well, how about:

1) Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays, a wellspring and an inspiration presided over by a doting father figure to a sprawling range of Irish-crime-fiction-related projects and blogs including

2) Adrian McKinty's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is more than just a cool name. Drop him a note and let him know how much you love U2 and Clive James.

Congratulations on your Grasshoppers, gents.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pierre Magnan's country life

I once stayed at a campground in the Dordogne region of France. On an excursion into the local village, I was regarded with great concentration by some ancient men sitting around a small table outside a shop.

My first thought was that they were suspicious of outsiders. I later guessed that village life gave them time to cogitate at great length on all sorts of things, including ephemera such as passing tourists.

I'm strongly reminded of that encounter about halfway into Pierre Magnan's Death in the Truffle Wood. Magnan sets his book in a village of 900 people in the Basses-Alpes of France. A number of people have disappeared, but the investigation gets underway slowly. Far more to the fore are the mysteries and the hints thereto in the lives of the villagers and of the commissaire called in to investigate the disappearances. This novel, in other words, uses people to create a vivid, unfamiliar (to me) setting.

Though her orientation is generally more urban than this, I'd bet that Fred Vargas reads Magnan. And I'd bet that her readers would like Magnan as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Brookmyre pro, Brookmyre con

Pro:

I want to shake Christopher Brookmyre's hand for this, from A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away:

"`They're already in briefings down there. Look, you've done a hell of a job. Lexington asked me to ...'

"Angelique stopped listening when he slipped into autopatronise ..."

Con:

Brookmyre, the book's copy editor or both should have consulted a dictionary before letting the following go to press:

"Mitigating against that was the fact that they had comped him three grammes of uncut smack ... "

The correct word is militating.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More on Christopher Brookmyre's attitudes

Read long enough, and you'll answer your own questions. Yesterday I wondered about the haughtily dismissive first-chapter narrator in Christopher Brookmyre's A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away. Did this narrator's withering criticism of suburbs reflect Brookmyre's views, in which case it would be fair to accuse the author of taking pot shots at an easy target? Or was the staleness Brookmyre's jab at the narrator's snarkiness and lack of imagination?

I got my answer three hundred pages later in a section narrated by another, more sympathetic character:

"Ray didn't fancy the place much himself back then. but wasn't so dismissive now. ... There were lots of kids playing on the pavements, bikes left unguarded outside front doors, garages open invitingly to reveal toys, garden swings and washer/driers. It was very `choose life' and twee to the point of smug, but was also obvious that crime and fear didn't stalk the place either."

Whatever Brookmyre's feelings about suburbs, suburbs of Aberdeen in particular (and perhaps that "twee to the point of smug" is a clue), he recognizes they can have appeal, and he uses this appeal to effective dramatic purpose, heightening the contrast between a villain and a relatively innocent victim.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

I'm trying to think myself into an author's mind on this. When a writer has a narrator heap scorn in the Christopher Brookmyre manner, does he sometimes reserve a dose of scorn for that narrator?

The first of several targets in Brookmyre's novel A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away is suburbia and its aspirations. Some of the barbs are funny. Trouble is, suburbia is such an easy target, which takes a bit of the edge off such lines as "Dear Lord, protect us from uniqueness. Grant unto us eternal conformity, and deliver us from distinction. Amen."

That seems — not unsubtle, because subtlety is not what one looks for in Brookmyre, but perhaps stale for a book published in 2001. Popular artists have been poking fun at the suburbs for decades, after all. Or maybe suburbs never caught on as a target for popular condescension and satire in Europe the way they did in the U.S. Or maybe, just maybe, Brookmyre means to tell us that the narrator in question is not the boldest and most incisive of social critics.

OK, point settled. On suburbia, A Big Boy Did It ... is no "Pleasant Valley Sunday." But that's just a quibble, and the suburban pot shots are just a warm-up for Brookmyre's bigger targets and funnier lines. Here's my favorite of the latter so far:

"Artro's geopolitical knowledge didn't extend very far beyond Russia being the Great Satan and the US being the Great Satan as well, and it was widely rumoured that he'd gone on the lam to Finland in the disastrously mistaken belief that Scandinavia was an entirely autonomous continent, political separate from Europe. That said, misapprehension wouldn't necessarily have led to apprehension if he'd followed the first rule of lying low, which is to lie low."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

What's your favorite chapter?

Find a reading challenge for our time here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Christopher Brookmyre is righteous

Midway through Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning, protagonist/reporter/burglar-for-good-reasons Jack Parlabane muses upon the executive jargon at a hospital he has infiltrated under false but noble pretenses:

"Parlabane found the word `pro-active' enormously useful, as it immediately exposed the speaker as an irredeemable arsehole, whatever previous impression might have been given. Once upon a time, he remembered, people and companies just did things. But that ceased to be impressive enough, and for a while they `actively' did things. Now they `pro-actively' did things, but it was still the same bloody things that they were doing when they just plain old did things. Meaningless wank-language. Every time he heard it he imagined George Orwell doing another 360 down below."

That brought back the crushing sense of abandonment I felt the first time I heard an editor use impact as a verb. Wanker.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Men, women and crime fiction

DJs Krimiblog has been discussing, in Danish and English, femkrimis, machokrimis and the notion of whether certain types of crime fiction appeal especially to men and others to women. The latest entry is a guest post from Dagger winner Martin Edwards, author of the Harry Devlin series and the Lake District mysteries.

Writes Edwards:

"Jeg skrev de første romaner, som foregik i Liverpool, med en mandlig tredje-persons fortæller, og kun én synsvinkel. Men efterhånden som jeg fik selvtillid som forfatter, gav jeg mig i kast med at variere min stil. Jeg begyndte med at indføre flere forskellige synsvinkler."

or, if you prefer,

"I wrote my early novels, set in Liverpool, from a male, third person, single viewpoint, perspective. But as I gained in confidence as a writer, I began to ring the changes. I started to introduce additional viewpoints."

Edwards has written male and female protagonists and point-of-view characters, and his guest post bears the title Krimi for alle / Crime for all. Join the discussion, and learn some Danish along the way.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009