A new blog from a blogger with good taste

Steve Lewis opens his new Mystery File blog with discussions of two subjects near and dear to me: Augustus Mandrell and Alfred Hitchcock. He says They Shoot Presidents, Don’t They?, the heretofore unpublished "fourth" Augustus Mandrell book, never saw the light of day because author Frank McAuliffe submitted the manuscript just before President Kennedy was assassinated, and the book was cancelled.

That would be interesting, because the first three books were published in 1965, 1968 and 1971. Perhaps They Shoot Presidents contains adventures that Mandrell referred to in the other books and that commentators have suggested were hints or teases, stories never actually written, in the manner of some of the never-written Sherlock Holmes cases that Watson would refer to from time to time. Maybe some of them will turn out to have been "real" cases after all.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

One of these days I'll shut up ...

... about Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell stories, but not yet. The stories themselves as well as comments from readers keep striking interesting chords and suggesting enticing tangents.

Mandrell is an interesting omission from T.J. Binyon's excellent Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Binyon's discussion of "gentleman burglars and Robin Hoods" includes the observation that "By the 1960s ... the gentleman-adventurer had become an anachronistic figure, and he was replaced by a character who was his opposite in every respect, Richard Stark's Parker."

Binyon is right; Parker is no Saint. Neither, though, is Augustus Mandrell, at least in one major respect: He's no gentleman; he works for a living. But Mandrell does have affinities with a figure Binyon cites as a pinnacle of the post-war gentleman burglar, Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar. Here's Templar, quoted by Binyon, speaking words that Mandrell might have uttered:

I'm mad enough to believe in romance. And I'm sick and tired of this age -- tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest -- battle, murder and sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn't be life as we know it, but ought to be.

I don't know why Binyon omitted Mandrell. On the one hand, it's hard to believe that the widely knowledgeable Binyon didn't know McAuliffe's work. On the other, despite McAuliffe's having won an Edgar award in 1972 for For Murder I Charge More, the third Mandrell collection, his books are hard to find today. (I'd never read a word of him a month ago.) Perhaps McAuliffe's work had already begun to slip below crime fiction readers' radar by 1989, when Binyon's book was published. Or maybe Binyon had to draw the line somewhere. As it is, he packs an amazing amount of information into a thin book.

But perhaps Binyon simply didn't know what to do with a character who combined British sensibilities with American preoccupations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell vs. Modesty Blaise

Back in the days when this blog had readers, I posted a comment about Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell's gadget-toting 1960s super spy. More recently, I've been discussing Frank McAuliffe's books about that non-gadget-toting 1960s super hit man, Augustus Mandrell.

At the time of my Modesty Blaise post, a reader commented that Blaise, James Bond and other popular spy/caper heroes of the time were products of pure wish fulfillment. "I think readers were a lot more naive then, and the heroes and plots of these books impossibly suave," my intelligent correspondent wrote. The first Modesty Blaise novel and the first Augustus Mandrell collection appeared the same year, 1965. Each in its own way seems both a reaction to James Bond and an illustration of my reader's point about wish fulfillment. The differences between the two heroes are at least as interesting as the similarities.

Both are projections of fantasy. Modesty Blaise is impossibly rich, impossibly fit, impossibly talented and impossibly accomplished. Her impossible dexterity in martial arts is supplemented by impossibly elaborate, impossibly miniaturized gadgets cooked up by her assistant, Willie Garvin.

Augustus Mandrell, on the other hand, has impossible sang-froid and an improbable skill with disguises (though the running comments he offers on the practice and the psychological effects of disguise render him a more accessible and less remote hero than is Modesty Blaise. He lets the reader in on his thinking). Mandrell gets by on guts and guile; Modesty Blaise's currency is raw skill.

Blaise works for the forces of good; Mandrell, though his sympathies are usually in the right place, works for the forces of money. Blaise has all the luxury goods that an upwardly aspiring reader in the consumer culture of the mid-1960s could wish for. Her apartment is decorated expensively but with taste, and her liquor is the best. At the age of thirty, having made her pile in ways only hinted at, she has risen above the need to work for mere money.

Augustus Mandrell cheerfully embraces the quest for cash, and his difficulty collecting the fees he charges for his "commissions" are a delightful running theme of all the stories. Could these contrasting attitudes toward money be due in part to the authors' nationalities? O'Donnell was British, McAuliffe American.

And then there's sex. Had Modesty Blaise and Augustus Mandrell ever wound up in the same story, they'd likely have been adversaries who eventually wind up cooperating. They also would have wound up in bed, where both would have performed extremely well. For her, the sex would have been a release of tension, fully enjoyed, expertly accomplished, leaving her prepared to resume her work. For him, it would have been a romp. They'd both have derived pleasure from it, but Mandrell would have experiened more joy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Ahead of his time again

I remarked here that Frank McAuliffe's amazing international hit man Augustus Mandrell had made a daring wisecrack in Of All the Bloody Cheek. There, the subject was American attitudes toward sex. In the second Mandrell book, Rather a Vicious Gentleman, published in 1968, McAuliffe delivers at least two jabs as fresh as a Paris Hilton nightclub wrangle and as up to date as the newest Bluetooth/zoom lens/Internet and TV capable/voice-recognition cell phone.

Here, a gossip columnist gives a protesting Mandrell a lesson in the technique of manufacturing celebrity:

"They didn't know your name six weeks ago," he gloated. "Now they do, thanks to `Rochey's Roundup.' When I first started mentioning you I had to identify you as `the mysterious Augustus Mandrell.' ... Gradually, using your name at least once a week, I feel I have established your identity. Thus, in yesterday's column my readers had no difficulty flashing up a mental image when they read: `Insiders of the Green Room set say it was a dispute over who would throw the upcoming Augustus Mandrell birthday party that caused that unholy din in the Poe Park Tavern powder room last P.M. ... A new art form, old man."

And here's Mandrell in a philosophical mood on the eternal demand for his services:

Ah well, like so many old fashioned business firms, Mandrell, Limited but serves an existing market. Mandrell does not, as is the new business approach, create the market and then sustain it.

Sure, McAuliffe smoothly pulls off leaps of time within his stories; perhaps I'll discuss his backward and forward narrative technique in a future comment. For now, though, here's the important thing: By God, are his books fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Love and war

Yesterday (or, strictly speaking, early this morning), I wrote about the corruption of Yasmina Khadra's Algiers in his novel Morituri. So pervasive and all-penetrating is the rot that it poisons and saps the protagonist's desire for his wife.

Today, in Philadelphia's excellent Big Jar Books, I chanced upon the following on the back cover of a Vintage paperback edition of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida:

"In medieval literature, Troy represents the perfection of normal human life on the brink of its destruction by a more corrupted force. By writing about this norm, Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

As in fourteenth-century England, so in 1990s Algeria. Khadra knew what he was doing when he opened Morituri with a scene of poisoned love.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Yasmina Khadra's images of corruption

Commentators have noticed less than complimentary remarks about women in Yasmina Khadra's novels about Algiers police superintendent Brahim Llob. Take this selection, from the first page of Morituri:

Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed -- she holds no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she's there when I am afraid of the dark.

What saves Khadra from censure for such remarks? For one thing, perhaps, Khadra himself was thought for years to be a woman. "Yasmina Khadra" is a nom de plume borrowed from two of his wife's names. Khadra's real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul; he took the alias when the Algerian army, in which he was an officer, demanded that he submit his work to military censors. (He revealed his identity only in 2001, after he had fled to France; Morituri was published in 1997.)

For another, that passage is full of pathetic, desperate tenderness. For yet another, the remark is in no way gratuitous. Disgust with the flesh is only part of the larger atmosphere of disenchantment that pervades Llob's world. The terror, the fear, the disillusionment, the political and moral corruption are so pervasive that they invade the most intimate aspects of the characters' lives. Poor Brahim Llob is alienated from even the most basic desires.

So, what saves the Llob stories from being total downers? The narrator/protagonist's grim sense of humor even among the direst circumstances. Here's Llob with Sid Lankabout ("Sid Spider"), one of the cast of vicious, slimy opportunists who populate the Llob books:

It seems (says Lankabout) that you are in the process of giving birth to a third tome.

This time (replies Llob) I'm writing about anti-matter.

Interesting. I didn't know you were an alchemist. Does anti-matter really exist?

Fundamentalism is its most active manifestation.

The defining rivalry of Llob's Algiers is that between corrupt, murderous Islamic fundamentalists and corrupt, monumentally rotten and venal government. Llob's disgust with the hypocrisy of both sides (and with the megalomania of the third side that reveals itself toward the ends of Morituri and of the second in the series, Double Blank) is characteristic of his appalling world. It also makes him an appealing crime-fiction protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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For the thrill of shooting up ...

... to the top of Graham Powell's list at CrimeSpot.net, I'll post this and join the list of bloggers congratulating Graham for CrimeSpot's Gumshoe Award as best crime-fiction Web site. If you haven't visited CrimeSpot, do so now. It tracks what bloggers are saying about crime fiction and other important subjects. That makes it a good research tool as well as an entertaining and idiosyncratic read. I fondly remember the day I first showed up on his list!

Peter Corris' settings

I've discussed setting from time to time, and I've also speculated with some readers of this blog about what sets Australian crime fiction apart. After reading Peter Temple, Garry Disher, David Owen and Shane Maloney, I found myself associating Australian crime writing with humor, of course, but also with a low-key approach and a lack of self-pity on the part of first-person narrators.

The humor part is less true of Peter Corris' The Dying Trade, the first of thirty (to date) Cliff Hardy novels by "the father of Australian crime fiction," though the novel does contain a witty observation or two. As for what makes it distinctively Australian, how about Hardy's observations on Australian cities? He clearly prefers Sydney to Melbourne or Adelaide, though he is a good enough sport to acknowledge that an Adelaide restaurant he visits on an investigation serves fine food for a third the price he'd pay in Sydney.

I have at least one more Cliff Hardy novel lined up to read. Perhaps I'll learn about the characteristics, stereotypes and rivalries of Australia's cities -- another joy of "international" crime fiction.

***

Almost all crime fiction gets compared to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Yasmina Khadra, about whom I posted most recently, for example, occasionally resembles Chandler in his wisecracking amid grim circumstances. The Dying Trade, on the other hand, resembles Chandler in some of its plot points: family secrets, rivalries, the horror of shady mental hospitals. One especially nice touch is the fondness with which Corris portrays an old couple of whom the male half once ran an orphanage. This may remind readers of the affinity between Chandler's Philip Marlowe and old General Sternwood in The Big Sleep.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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L'humour et la violence de Yasmina Khadra

Je viens de commencer Morituri, le premier roman par Yasmina Khadra qui concerne le commissaire Brahim Llob de la police d'Algers (il'y en a quatre dans la serie jusqu'à maintenant). J'essaie de le lire chapitre par chapitre -- un chapitre en traduction anglais, puis le meme en version originale. Patientiez-vous s'il vous plait, mes chers lecteurs!

Comme le deuxieme dans la serie, Double Blanc (Double Blank), les premieres pages de Morituri sont plein d'images de la violence, l'ordure, la crainte, la mort et la pourriture -- et aussi d'un humour frappant et tres noir: Le lieutenant de Llob "ne rentre plus chez lui, a Bab el Oued, depuis qu'un brelan de barbus est venu predendre les mesures de sa carotide pour lui choisir un couteau approprie."

"Sais-tu ce qui arrive aux gars qui se font trop de souci, Lino?" dit Llob a cet lieutenant traumatise. "Ils ont des enfants chauves."

Prochain: Morituri comme portrait de la corruption.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Screen chills from Iceland

From the Reykjavík-based Another 52 Books blog, by way of Petrona, comes news of a movie version of Arnaldur Indridason's atmospheric novel Jar City (also known as Tainted Blood). The novel is a creepy excursion through warped minds, hidden pasts, and a resolution that could only have happened in Iceland.
The movie has won high praise in Iceland, according to Another 52 Books, who adds that it also works around a logical flaw that one reviewer found in the novel. I cited the book as a fine example of a story's use of its setting. I'll look forward to an English-language release of the movie. Either that, or I'll learn Icelandic and read some sagas while I'm at it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Peter Corris

I'm always impressed when a writer puts a fresh spin on a well-worn convention. Doing so probably takes more skill than the desperate and self-conscious attempts at originality that some newer writers seem to make.

I've just started The Dying Trade, the first Cliff Hardy novel by Peter Corris, the "father of Australian crime fiction." Hardy, a down-on-the-heels private investigator, gets a call from a rich client just when he needs the money most. I'm guessing you've heard that all before.

At least two things make this opening stand out, though. One is what I'm coming to regard as a characteristically Australian lack of self-pity and irony on the part of the first-person narrator. The other is some fine writing on Corris' part. Here's Hardy after the fateful phone call:

I leaned back in my chair and dropped the receiver onto the handset. I traced a dollar sign with my little finger in the dust beside the dial.

That is a graceful, creative, humorous, maybe even beautiful way of making a familiar point.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell's surprises

I'd assumed from Mandrell the narrator's cheeky tone and Mandrell the character's cool demeanor that Frank McAuliffe was British. Then I guessed from the occasional jabs at American attitudes and from the (relatively) greater availability of his books in Canadian bookshops that he might be a Canadian poking occasional fun at the American military. Then I looked at a biographical note and read that McAuliffe was born in New York -- and worked as a technical writer for the Navy. The surprise was delightful, just another of the joys of reading these stories.

P.S. He aims jabs at the British and the French, too -- all amusing.
P.P.S. Bill Crider, an Augustus Mandrell fan of long standing, has some exciting news as well as biographical information about Frank McAuliffe here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Meet Augustus Mandrell

A reader who apparently wished to avoid publicity (he sent me e-mail, rather than post to this blog), introduced me to Frank McAuliffe and his stories about the amazing professional killer Augustus Mandrell. Mandrell is an impossibly suave, cool international master of disguise about whom McAuliffe published three collections of stories between 1965 and 1971.

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

The stories are set in Europe on the fringes of World War II, and a sharp vein of political and social satire runs through them. The satire is occasionally ahead of its time. Here, for example, is Mandrell, who also narrates the stories, commenting on two military men's assessment of Mandrell's methods. Mandrell, one of the men has said, operates through a network of intermediaries that includes "disbarred barristers, unlicensed doctors, a homosexual or two.":

"This homosexual angle," Lieutenant Proferra said. "What about Mandrell himself?" As I mentioned, Proferra was an American.

Click here for more on Augustus Mandrell, McAuliffe, his narrative technique, his satirical vision and more.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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No first-book-in-the-series jitters here

I recently read a comment from someone who found Stiff, Shane Maloney's first novel about Murray Whelan, a bit disappointing after having first read some later books in the series.

I mention this because my reaction was quite the opposite. If anything, Stiff is slightly more polished than the The Big Ask and Something Fishy, the fourth and fifth in the series (and I liked both, as avid followers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know). The melodramatic aspects are nicely timed, for example, and there are no examples of the one tiny gripe I had with the later books: the whiz-bang, leave-'em-hanging cliffhangers with which Maloney sometimes ends chapters.

I wonder if Maloney's attitude toward his subject has changed as he moved through the Whelan series. In Stiff, he may have been making an earnest and serious attempt to write a funny book. In the later installments in the series, he keeps up the humor, but he sometimes seems not to take his own efforts that seriously, or rather, to poke fun at them. (That self-referentiality can be marvelous fun, especially in The Big Ask.)

In any case, I recomment all three novels highly, and I'll soon read the remaining books in the series. I thank my Australian readers for introducing me to Shane Maloney, one of the highlights of my crime-fiction year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Bloody Brits

I posted in September about Bloody Brits Press, an imprint that seeks to put hard-to-find British crime fiction in American readers' hands. Their catalogue includes names such as Chaz Brenchley, Sarah Diamond, Joyce Holms, Bill Kirton, John Malcolm, Val McDermid, Danuta Rhea and Chris Simms. I remember liking the idea behind the imprint, and I thought it might be time to talk about it again. OK, I know something about Val McDermid, but I admit I've read none of these writers. What should I know about them?

Real crime beyond my borders

The excellent Bryan Appleyard offers trenchant comments here on the tendency to fall back on our own fantasies when we try to explain a serial killer's crimes.

The new Barcelona Review is up . . .

. . . here. There's no Ken Bruen short story, as there was in the previous issue, but there is a review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's cool 1981 crime classic, The Prone Gunman.

"Stiff," by Shane Maloney

We have a result in the race to determine which crime fiction I read next. Late returns give Shane Maloney's Stiff the edge in tight balloting over David Owen's A Second Hand and Chourmo, the second novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy.

All three, each in its own way, get off to starts that make me want to read more. Owen's Pufferfish is even blunter on A Second Hand's first page than in the other three novels in the series, and Chourmo's opening chapters are full of yearning and tragedy that make me feel funny discussing the book in the same post as its more lighthearted Australian counterparts. I'll surely discuss both these novels later.

But for now, it's more of Maloney's Murray Whelan, the weary but hilarious political operative and beleageured member of Australia's Labour Party. The clinchers were probably the thick, heavy lout who storms into Whelan's office demanding political action against a tattoo artist who misspelled the lout's girlfriend's name in an elaborate design on his chest, which causes her to spurn his (the lout's) marriage proposal, and this, about a sexy female political activist:

Naturally, in keeping with their advocacy role, the folks at the League went in for the customary amount of third-worldish polemic. Ayisha, for instance, tended to go about in a red keffiyeh, sounding like Vanessa Redgrave.

Much more later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Pufferfish's attitude

I've just spent another pleasant 260 or so pages with David Owen's Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, who proudly calls himself Pufferfish. This time it was Pig's Head, the first of the four Pufferfish novels Owen wrote in the mid-1990s. The scene was again (mainly) Tasmania and, as in The Devil Taker, the fourth in the series, the plot is complex yet plausible.

Pufferfish's personality vies with a compelling tale of police corruption and a grisly killing for the reader's attention. Here's Heineken, the story's first-person narrator as well as its protagonist, on an out-of-state police chief whose first goal, Heineken suspects, is to protect his own rear end:

"(H)e's a class-A manipulator, a wielder of power, an enjoyer of authority. ... He looks inordinately clever -- based on a very quick brain -- and violently incapable of being wrong."

Owen's unusual word combinations -- "enjoyer of authority", "violently incapable of being wrong" -- lend a menacing edge to what in a less gifted writer's hands might be a stock character: the scheming boss. The character is a bit player, but those few short words make him memorable.

I said Heineken's personality vies with the corruption plot for the reader's attention. In fact, they complement one another nicely. Sure, Heineken's clashes with authority are a nice character quirk, but they also add an edge. Each shifty-eyed suit upon whom Pufferfish vents his contempt could be a dangerous man, a drug trafficker, a killer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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And Europe, too.

Karen at Euro Crime sends a reminder of her equally useful future releases list, which has been lurking for some time in my side bar. But it belongs out here, where everyone can see it. Use both these lists to bring a little crime into someone's life at the holiday season. Happy browsing!

A little bit more about Australia

If you like some of the Australian writers I've discussed here -- David Owen, Shane Maloney, Peter Temple, Garry Disher -- you might enjoy the Australian Crime Fiction Database's What's New? list of new releases. One of the joys of international crime fiction is discovering news authors and new titles, and that list could be a rich source. I feel like a kid on Christmas morning when I browse it.

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Massimo Mongai comes full circle

Remember Massimo Mongai? He's the Italian writer whose lively and insightful English interview in Siamo Roma magazine came to the attention of It's a Crime! (or a mystery ... ) and from there to me. I passed the news on to my Italian correspondent Andrea Fannini, who responded: "Incredible! I know him!" He hadn't read him, though, but now, thanks to this chain of trans-Atlantic blog posts, he has -- a good thing for those of us who don't read Italian, or at least not well enough to read fiction, since Mongai has yet to be translated into English. Andrea talks about Mongai's science-fiction novel Alienati here.

"Curioso il mondo della rete e di internet, " he writes: "Curious is the world of the Web and the Internet." He tells of his acquaintance with Mongai's cultural and political activities in Rome's Garbatella neighborhood, where they both live, and he relates the exciting tale of how a blog finally got him to read a book by his writer-neighbor. And, he says, "It won't be the only one, because Mongai is very, very good."

The book concerns a space gypsy who tries to organize a meeting of creatures from everywhere: "The incredible thing is that (Mongai) makes riveting and not at all boring a novel whose narrative thread centers on the organization of a convention. Thanks to inventions and original creatures who populate this spaceship. To cliff-hangers ... to the antithesis between seriousness and nonsense that pervades the novel."

Sounds like fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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French connections

A series of comprehensive and thoughtful posts on the Ile Noire blog traces the history of crime novels in France from post-1968 "neo polar" back through antecedents and predecessors in France, England, the United States, Europe and the ancient world: "Between France and the United States, there is a cultural difference that appears in the crime novel. Where American authors have no political message, our French authors are much more politicized, including in the noir novel all it can contain of the social."

Such histories are common, but this one is more thorough and more pointed than most. The most recent post may be the most interesting, offering, among others, a gold mine of French authors perhaps unfamiliar to many readers. The section includes the author Didier Daeninckx's intriguing definition of the crime novel as "a type of novel whose object is situated before the first page."

The histories include short biographies of notable authors and publication histories. All are worth reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

A word from the publishers

It's a Crime! ... (or a mystery) links to this interview with four independent publishers, of whom Francois von Hurter of Bitter Lemon Press might be of especial interest to readers of this blog. Here's what von Hurter said when asked what he had not been seeing from major publishers:

"The recklessness it takes to publish edgy foreign novels. The ability to introduce new cultures and genre-breaking fiction."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Jim Thompson is more soulful in Spanish

Did you know that Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson's tale of an aw-shucks sheriff who kills, is called 1280 Almas in Spanish? That's Spanish for "1,280 souls." Souls -- not a word one normally associates with Thompson, the nightmarish chronicler of mental and moral degeneration. Thanks to Detectives literarios.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Q&A with Qiu

Via Sarah Weinman comes a link to Newsweek's interview with Qiu Xiaolong, author most recently of A Case of Two Cities. Find out what Qiu thinks of corruption in China and why previous Chinese translators of his novels turned Shanghai into "H-City."

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David Owen's thorough but unobtrusive research

"What would also have been easy enough to take, but not to find, were the O-BP eggs."

"The what?"

"Sorry. Orange-bellied parrot. You'd know that it's one of the rarest birds in the world. There might be one-hundred and fifty, two hundred at most."

A passage like that won't knock your socks off. But it does convey important and interesting information with concision and even a bit of humor. It’s from The Devil Taker, the fourth and last novel in David Owen's sadly missed series about Tasmania's prickliest police inspector, Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken.

Owen proved himself a master of straight-faced and acerbic humor in X and Y. In The Devil Taker, he shows he is good at conveying information about oceanography, boating and wildlife without slowing the narrative or flaunting his research. No information dumps here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Robert Wilson on the importance of setting

Today's Boston Globe offers an interview with Robert Wilson, author of the Javier Falcon novels and other thrillers. Wilson talks about research he did for his latest, The Hidden Assassin, and about the importance of immersing himself in his settings : "I wanted to get real Arab voices. So I went to Morocco; I had a contact who ran a clothes factory near Rabat, and I interviewed the workforce from the financial director to the top floor."

Wilson says his agent for foreign rights wants more books about the Seville-based Falcon. "I could move him to Barcelona or Madrid," the author says. "But Barcelona is a completely different culture; all the police work would be done in Catalan. I'd have to live there for three or four months. ... I also have the idea of setting a novel in London. But am I able to go back to London now? Could I write a novel set there?"

The Wilson interview was on one of four full pages the Globe devoted to books. It was nice to see an American newspaper recognize that it has literate readers who care about ideas. Not all American papers recognize this.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Qiu Xiaolong and his editors

Just a brief post to keep my traffic up while I'm otherwise occupied, far from the worries of work.

Qiu Xiaolong recounts here how the editor of his second novel, A Loyal Character Dancer, urged on him a more conventional opening than the slow, revelatory first chapter of Death of A Red Heroine: "With my second book, my editor insisted on the discovery of a body at the very beginning, and I complied, which may be a trick, but not really mine."

I wonder, too, about Qiu's decision to bring back U.S. Marshal Catherine Rohn to work with Chen in A Case of Two Cities. She first appeared in A Loyal Character Dancer, working with Chen to track down an errant Chinese witness scheduled to testify in a U.S. case. Qiu has Chen feel awkard and occasionally uncomfortable around Rohn, a not terribly successful attempt at sexual tension. I wonder if that sexual tension was another suggestion from the same editor that Qiu add yet another conventional touch to his writing. I'll note with interest if he integrates the character better into A Case of Two Cities.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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