Deadline in Athens

I think I'll read Deadline in Athens by Petros Markaris next for three reasons: I've never read a crime novel set in Greece, I just received a note from an old colleague in Athens, and I have a certain morbid curiosity about stories that deal with my profession.

Why in God's name, I wondered, would anyone want to write about the shriveling and desperate world of newspapers? Here in the U.S., at least, the industry is under assault from the Internet, semi-literacy, greed, complacency, self-importance, stupidity and mismanagement, with predictable results: Big papers shed staff and salaries and bring the law of supply and demand into ruthless play when they do hire. Content is dumbed down past the vanishing point and, possibly most tiresome of all, journalistic pundits hold forth on the state of the business, with the predictable rejoinders from anti-pundits eager to make a name for themselves with predictions that go against the grain.

I suppose someone could write an exciting story about contemporary American newspapers, difficult though it may be to find drama in a world where the word content is taken seriously. I mean, perhaps my memory fails me, but I don't recall the word cropping up in Jonathan Latimer's The Lady in the Morgue or in The Harder They Fall or in any of the versions of The Front Page. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, the situation is less dire elsewhere. Maybe newspapers still matter across the seas.

If they do, though, I probably won't find out from Deadline in Athens (God, the title sounds traditional, like the old Humphrey Bogart movie Deadline U.S.A.) or from another novel on my list, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem. It transpires that each has a considerable segment set in the world of news -- TV news. God, I hate television "journalists." They're ambitious, they dress better than I do, they speak and write considerably worse, and they steal my terminology. Headline News, my arse! No television newscast ever had a "headline." You superficial sons of bitches have stolen my relevance; the least you could do is leave me my language.

Reviews of the books at 11.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Petros Markaris
Batya Gur

Diamond Dove

I read so few mysteries that I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find myself in the middle of a good one. Oh, I read plenty of crime novels, all right, but most could be called mysteries only by force of musty Golden Age tradition. My favorite crime novels and stories may be urban portraits, morality plays, slices of life, colorful foreign tableaux, character studies, stories of divorced, self-pitying middle-aged men who drink too much, violent and funny romps. But mysteries? The very word has a quaint sound, like vicarage or locked room or village green.

With some novels, I nod indulgently at the mystery parts: the clues, the detective’s self-doubt, the obvious misdirection, and I marvel at the superstructure the author erects just so he or she can throw in a bit of mystery. Or at the handy availability of mystery as a plot engine, a framework on which to hang the author’s view of some exciting locale or pressing social or psychological problem.

And then there is something wonderful like Adrian Hyland’s Diamond Dove, an unabashed amateur-sleuth whodunit that works seamlessly as character study and as portrait of a setting that is probably unfamiliar to many Australians, much less to readers like me on the other side of the world.

The protagonist is Emily Tempest, a restless young woman of Aboriginal and white parentage who has come back to live among her “mob,” the shifting clan of Aborigines among whom she spent her youth in Australia’s Northern Territory. The group’s wise and revered leader is killed soon after Emily arrives, and circumstances force her from the group’s camp into the neighboring town of Bluebush, which Emily refers to, if I recall correctly, as a “shithole.”

Along the way, we and Emily meet miners, cattlemen, police, pub owners, aid workers and all manner of inhabitants that one might expect in a town near nowhere and a settlement outside the town. The characters are variously dirty, violent, kind, hilarious, empty-headed and of unexpected strength and talent. This applies equally to the novel’s white characters and its Aborigines, and a comment by Hyland in The Age newspaper seems pertinent here. Diamond Dove, he says,

“is based on people I know and love. Anyone who reads it will see that I hang shit on everyone – the miners, the meatworkers, the station owners and even the Lands Council types who are my friends. It's a comedy satire. I was joking about everybody I knew, and it was written in the spirit of affection about a dying world, a world no one's really written about. … A precious world that's fading. … I suspect one could do more for Aboriginal people by portraying them as a living, loveable people, rather than as a broken museum display which is going to have us all running for the confessional."

But Diamond Dove is also a mystery. At least four credible suspects present themselves, and Emily is a perfect vehicle for Hyland’s artful misdirection. As smart and as determined as she is, she’s a neophyte. Her doubts and misdirected certainties work because in her place, we might react the same way. She is a perfect amateur sleuth. Diamond Dove is Hyland’s first novel so, if we’re lucky, we’ll see more of his precious world.

==================================
Diamond Dove is published in Australia by Text Publishing of Melbourne, and I have read that Hyland has signed a two-book deal with Soho Press that includes Diamond Dove. This could mean more convenient availability for readers outside Australia. My advice, though, is not to wait. Order the book now, enjoy it, then lord it over your friends when the book hits the shops in your country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Adrian Hyland
Australian crime fiction

Back down under

I finished Paul Thomas’ Guerilla Season this afternoon, then hopped out of bed and went to fetch the mail, which included Diamond Dove in a sturdily wrapped package from Judith Eardley Books in Healesville, Victoria. So nobody should accuse me of parochialism in my Australasian crime reading; I’m breaking out of Melbourne and Tasmania and experiencing a bit of New Zealand and the Northern Territory.

Actually, I’m not sure how much I learned about New Zealand from Thomas’ book, other than a few wonderfully musical place names. A cover blurb on my edition, published in the United Kingdom, calls Thomas the “Down Under Carl Hiaasen,” and the comparison seems apt. The novel includes some of the features that can make Hiaasen so annoying. Everything is whacky and rapid-fire. The gruesome killings are farcical. Everybody is a quirky quipster, and the novel is peopled less with characters than with pasted-together sets of wry or blunt remarks, so much so that the occasional moments of drama or personal conflict seem contrived. The pacing is unrelieved rat-tat-tat, complete with sentence-fragment transitions to convey the frenzied zaniness of it all.

I’ve never been able to make it past the first chapter of any Hiaasen novel, and for a while there, I thought the same would be the case with Guerilla Season. Then the action began. Police chase down a shadowy group that claims responsibility for killings. Spies, blackmailers and shady businessmen materialize, and sex is hinted at. The scope grows from alleged Maori terrorism to international espionage, and slowly I began to realize that damn, this man knows how to tell a story. I’ll be reading more of this guy and, without knowing anything about his body of work, I’d bet Paul Thomas could write a first-rate, not necessarily comic thriller if he set his mind to it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Paul Thomas
New Zealand crime fiction

How do authors build up a series character over time?

I've just finished A Second Hand, David Owen's second of four novels about Franz Heineken, the entertaining, gruff and thorough Tasmania police inspector known to himself and one special colleague as "Pufferfish." (I'd read Books 3 and 4 before I read 1 and 2.)

Comments on the novel will likely follow, but for now, a remark on a small piece of character-assembly, and a question for readers of this blog. Heineken, the first-person narrator of the novels as well as their protagonist, tells us in Pig's Head, the first in the series, that he got his start as a constable in the Netherlands. Why, asks Heineken in that book, would a then-young police officer pull up stakes and make his way to distant Australia? "Not now, not now," he says in answer to his own rhetorical question.

In A Second Hand, he tells us why, and it's a dramatic story, to say the least. Did Owen have this harsh biographical detail in mind when he wrote the first novel? Or was the "Not now, not now" a challenge for the author, a way of forcing himself to come up in the second book with an explanation interesting enough to meet the tease in the first?

I have no idea, but I pose this question to you: Think of a character who plays a significant part in more than one novel you've read. What details did the author add in the later book or books to deepen the character, to make him or her more complex or just to keep the character from going stale? Is it a surprising biographical detail, as in A Second Hand? Perhaps it's something like the side-splittingly funny supporting roles Bill James gives to Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's daughters in the middle and later books of his Harpur and Iles series. Maybe it's a dramatic life event. It can be anything that answers this question:

How does the character grow or change in ways that keep him or her interesting and alive?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Pufferfish
Franz Heineken
David Owen
Australian crime fiction

Crime fiction up for prize

The Rap Sheet brings the good news that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize's long list for 2007 includes Steal You Away, by Niccolò Ammaniti, translated by Jonathan Hunt, and Havana Black, by Leonardo Padura, translated by Peter Bush. The award, sponsored by the Independent newspaper, honors translated fiction published in the United Kingdom.

It's nice to see crime novels contending for a big award, and it's nice to see an award that honors translators as well as authors. That makes the prize unique, according to one of the articles to which I link above. Once again, I refer all readers to this excellent article, in which translators of foreign crime fiction into English have fascinating things to say about their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime fiction in translation

So, you want new?

This is really new – Issue 2 of The Outpost, with six new short stories from Australia.

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Crime fiction, Australia

At home in Bombay and Shanghai

How much does a writer’s choice of words contribute to the setting he or she creates – ordinary, everyday words, I mean, not words designed to conjure up exotic scenes. Qiu Xiaolong could have written about Shanghai’s “crowded multifamily dwellings” in his novels about Inspector Cao Chen , just as Vikram Chandra could have placed the Bombay (Mumbai) residents of Sacred Games in “houses” or even in “small, crowded houses.”

But they didn't. Qiu’s characters crowd into subdivided stone shikumen, where they share communal kitchen facilities, mingle in courtyards, and sleep in rooms carved out of spaces on stairway landings. Some of Chandra’s live in kholis, where they may roll out sleep mats in the kitchen at night, or subdivide the one open living area with curtains. By no means is every kholi wretched. A police officer compliments a murder victim’s mother on the nice kholi his son built for the family. An especially proper or upscale dwelling may be referred to as a pucca kholi.

It does not take long before the very words shikumen and kholi conjure up universes of connotations, colors, smells and sounds – and, for readers like me, strangers to the cities where the novels are set, an entirely new kind of space.

It occurs to me, too, that Qiu and Chandra, natives of China and India, respectively, write in English. This, perhaps, makes them all the more eager to make Chinese and a range of Indian languages part of the fiber and substance of their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Qiu Xiaolong
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games
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Crime fiction, India

It's never too late

The always valuable Euro Crime news site links to the Independent's recent interview with Andrea Camilleri, author of seven novels to date about the Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano.

The interview opens with a discussion of a memorable Montalbano outburst in The Scent of the Night, the sixth of the seven books. Later, Camilleri reveals that Montalbano is based to a great extent on his own father. He discusses his attitudes toward the Sicialian language, and he shares some perhaps surprising ideas about the role of the Mafia in his novels.

But what really caught my eye is something that ought to encourage any crime-fiction readers who are also would-be crime-fiction writers: Montalbano was 70 years old when he published his first Montalbano book.

(Camilleri/Montalbano central in the blogosphere these days is Crime Scraps. Norm/Uriah, the curator of Crime Scraps, is a Montalbano nut.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Andrea Camilleri
Salvo Montalbano
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Amateurs' professions

Three months ago, I posted a comment about amateur sleuths. "What professions are naturals for future crime novels?" I asked. "What sorts of workers who have not yet been protagonists of crime stories would make good fictional sleuths?"

Since then, the roster of suggested or realized fictional sleuths I have come across includes dentists, political minders, real estate agents and strippers. I leave it to your imagination to figure out what, if anything, these professions have in common.

In the meantime, I'll expand on my earlier questions. What professions are natural for future crime-fiction protagonists -- and what weird or unexpected sleuth professions can you think of? Interpret profession as loosely as you'd like to. In fact, I'll start you off: Samuel L. Jackson's schizophrenic street person/concert-caliber pianist in The Caveman's Valentine. OK, the movie was pretty bad, but its protagonist had an unusual line of work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Kudos to Keating

I've mentioned H.R.F. Keating several times recently, both in a discussion of his novels (and one movie) about Bombay's Inspector Ganesh Ghote and in connection with Virkram Chandra's Sacred Games. The Paperback Mysteries blog brings news of a special honor for Keating of the kind not many writers receive.

Dialect-schmialect, or, more words, words, words

Two weeks ago, I noted the odd speech patterns H.R.F. Keating gives the characters in his stories about Bombay police inspector Ganesh Ghote. At the same time, I noted a comment from a blogger in India that "This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well."

I am now about 270 pages into Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and I note with interest that his characters use precisely the speech patterns by which Keating distinguishes his characters. Two of the most noticeable are a dismissive rhyming when a character is annoyed or impatient, and frequent use of the word only after the word it modifies.

Thus, a Bombay (Mumbai) constable, asked what he has found in a murder victim's purse, replies, "Lipstick-shipstick, that's all." Or a newly abstemious political candidate says: "No time now for drinking-shinking." A gangster explains his origins this: "I was born here in Mumbai, in GTB Nagar only, saab."

True, the British Keating used these linguistic devices far more frequently than the New Delhi-born, Mumbai- and Berkeley-residing Chandra. Therein, perhaps, lies the difference: For Chandra, speech patterns are one among a variety of ways to mark characters. For Keating, their frequent use can appear something like a mark of caricature. In fact, I don't think that was Keating's intention. But they do lend the stories a quaint, if not dated, touch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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India crime fiction
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games

Crime in the news

I think I've posted about this before, but it's worth posting about again. Euro Crime news is an interesting list of links to recent newspaper articles about crime fiction and its authors.

Words, words, (dirty) words

I am fortunate; my edition of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games lacks the glossary that American editions of the novel are said to include. That means I have the delicious pleasure of trying to figure out the meanings of its rich vocabulary of slang and swear words from context or by resemblance to words in other languages. You'll find discussions of two of those words here and here.

I'm swearing off the unusual volume of critical discussion generated by Sacred Games, a volume that perhaps reflects the novel's 900-page bulk or the size of Chandra's advance. Before I do, though, Jerome Weeks of book/daddy, in a comment here, cites a reviewer's comment that Sacred Games is limited by "genre thinking."

My vow of critical abstinence will prevent me from reading the review until I've finished the novel. For now, though, I will say that in the person of Police Inspector Sartaj Singh, Chandra seems to be creating a richer than usual version of that genre figure, the tired, divorced, middle-aged investigator.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime fiction, India
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Irish crime

Euro Crime posts a link to this list of Irish crime writers. Here's a clue: There are lots of them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Stealing from myself

A thoughtful posting at Yahoo's Oz Mystery Readers group on humor as a characteristic of modern crime fiction got me thinking about the rich variety of humor in Bill James' Harpur & Iles series. I'd always recognized the humor in these dark, violent, morally ambivalent novels, but I'd never stopped to enumerate the sheer variety in that humor.

So now Australian members of that group know about the manic antics of Iles, the incredible saucy humor of Harpur's daughters, the dialogue in which each character sometimes more to be delivering a soliloquy than engaging in conversation, the social satire of upwardly aspiring working-class villains, the weird, contrasting, funny takes on family life, to mention just a few that come to mind. You should know about them, too.

I'll repeat what I've said before: The middle books of this 23-novel series, say, from Astride a Grave to Eton Crop, are as rich and rewarding a body of crime fiction as any ever written in English.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Vikram Chandra

Today's mail brought my copy of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, and today's blogging brought a raft of news about book and author, thanks to Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I have only 898 pages to go before I finish this tale of Mumbai (Bombay) and its underworld, but I was a fan of the author before I read a word of the novel, based on his essay "The Cult of Authenticity", whose heading declares that "India’s cultural commissars worship `Indianness' instead of art."

Reviewers have noted the novel's use of slang and untranslated terms. I find that prospect highly attractive. Such use of language brings a novel alive for me, the vividness more than making up for an occasional term I might not understand. And context almost always makes the meaning clear, anyhow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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India crime fiction
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games

A bibliography of crime fiction

I've posted about the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction and T.S. Binyon's Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Here's a worthy companion to those two works on any crime-fiction reader's bookshelf, even though the revised edition does not yet exist in a form that can be shelved. Go to the Mystery File for information Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749-2000, including links to addenda in the revised edition.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A Temple-Khadra connection

I've just come across a December article from the Australian called What the writers read, in which authors as well as critics are asked to choose the best books they read in 2006. Peter Temple chose Kel Robertson's Dead Set, for example, and he also had this to say about Mike Davis's Planet of Slums: Davis' "brilliant synthesis of the works of dozens of scholars leads to a frightening prediction: a world of `feral, failed cities' in which the well-off live in fortified sanctuaries while helicopter gunships patrol the slums and extremist religions of all kinds are among the opiates of the wretched masses."

Recent headlines from Rio de Janeiro lend credence to that vision. But so does the work of a writer I've discussed here several times: Yasmina Khadra. Here's Algiers police Inspector Brahim Llob in Khadra's novel Morituri: "Once past a police barrier we cross a downtown neighborhood with the air of an Indian cemetery, bypass a part of Bab el Oued where the simple folk fornicate ardently to keep themselves warm, and climb the sinuous road which leads to the city heights. Without warning the hovels vanish and we burst upon a little Eden bedecked with opulent villas, Swiss chalets and hanging gardens ... `Hell! Just take a peek at those fortresses, Super.'"

Earlier in the novel, Llob "gaze(s) at the guru in the photo: twenty-eight years old. Never went to school. Never had work. Messianic peregrinations across Africa, preaching absolute virulence and an implacable hatred toward the entire world. And now here he was setting himself up as a righter of wrongs: thirty-four murders, two volumes of fatwa, a harem in every bush and a scepter in every finger."

One generally associates wretchedness of the kind Davis discusses with teeming Asian or sub-Saharan African cities, but it sounds as if Brahim Llob's Algiers is right up there. Or down there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Australian crime fiction
Peter Temple
Yasmina Khadra

Praise for Australia's Text Publishing

A number of Australian readers have lauded Text Publishing of Melbourne for its efforts to get Australian crime fiction into the hands of overseas readers. The company has published Peter Temple's first two Jack Irish novels in a single volume, for instance, as well as Dead Set by Kel Robertson. Its list also includes crime fiction, non-crime fiction and non-fiction from other countries, Saskia Noort's The Dinner Club, for one.

But what really attracted me on the company's Web site was its far-flung list of contacts for publishers interested in acquiring foreign distribution rights for the company's titles. The list runs alphabetically from the Baltic region to Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S. From the looks of the site, the company appears to take seriously the job of making Australian writing familiar overseas. Readers of this blog will know I think that's a good thing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Australian crime fiction

News and reviews

I don't think I've mentioned Mystery Ink before, but I should have. Its loooooong list of reviews, interviews and more includes Henning Mankell, Boris Akunin, Ake Edwardson, Gianrico Carofiglio and others who might interest you. The site is not all "international," either. It includes reviews of Lawrence Block and the great Donald Westlake, for example, and a reference section you might find useful and entertaining.

Over My Dead Body also reviews some books you may want to read now that you have your Christmas shopping out of the way and can start spending money on yourself again.

An interview with Peter Temple

The Yahoo Oz Mystery Readers group posts a link to this interview with Peter Temple, author of The Broken Shore and the Jack Irish novels, among other books.

Temple offers thoughts on how he works, how he started writing, and the work of writing crime novels. The interview packs lots of interesting information into a piece barely a page long. Here's Temple on Jack Irish: "I'm delighted to say that Jack has struck a chord in some readers. People talk to me about him in terms usually reserved for discussing close friends."

I've written about the first Jack Irish novel, Bad Debts, here, and I can well understand why readers may regard Irish as a close friend.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Happy New Year, and thanks

Everybody and his brother is offering lists of the best books he or she read in 2006, so I'll do something different. Here is some of the crime fiction I've read or am about to read based on recommendations from you these past three months, dear readers. Thanks for letting me know about these wonderful books and authors. These discoveries have been the chief joy of this first venture of mine into blogging.

Happy New Year!

The Big Ask, Shane Maloney
Stiff
Something Fishy
Of All the Bloody Cheek, Frank McAuliffe
Rather A Vicious Gentleman
For Murder I Charge More
The Devil Taker, David Owen
Pig's Head
X and Y
The Dying Trade, Peter Corris
Bad Debts, Peter Temple
Kickback, Garry Disher
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra
The Turkish Gambit, Boris Akunin

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Titillating titles

Do you have a hankering for a good, solid novel about a stripper turned private investigator? The indefatigable Karen of AustCrime reminds me that the Melbourne Age article I wrote about two days ago also mentions Cherry Pie, by Leigh Redhead, who I suspect was not born with that name.

Redhead's Simone Kirsch works in Melbourne, and Karen calls Cherry Pie "hilarious, with some very interesting sex scenes." Redhead is also the author of Rubdown and Peepshow. It may not surprise you to learn that the latter, Redhead's debut, "draws more than a little bit on her former life as a stripper and table dancer in Melbourne's strip clubs and peepshows," according to her Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Inspector Ghote's hard work and quaint words

I spent part of the long weekend with H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ganesh Ghote: Dead on Time, the sixteenth of twenty-four books about the hard-pressed Bombay (Mumbai) police inspector, then the Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of the first Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder. (Yeah, the movie has a director, too, and some stars, but Merchant-Ivory is the brand, and so it will be here.)

The novel and the movie are good comic-crime fun, mostly of a gentle variety, and Naseeruddin Shah does an excellent job as a harried Ghote in the latter. The movie stresses the competing demands on Ghote from his superiors, who pile case after case upon him, demanding that each be given top priority. In Dead on Time, the demands come from competing powerful individuals, each of whom puts pressure on Ghote to solve a murder in a manner that best suits his own interests. (It is one of the novel's little surprises that these powerful people, as willing as they are to throw their weight around, are not always wrong, on the one hand, and are sometimes as puzzled at Ghote, on the other.)

My exposure to Keating before this weekend consisted of a Ghote short story that is one of two works of crime fiction I've read in which, arguably, no crime is committed. The story is all Ghote: his frustrations, his patience, his relations with his family, his outward deference to social superiors even as he seethes at their overbearing stupidity. Dead on Time shares that emphasis; I can think of no other crime novel that depends so heavily on its protagonist and his interaction with his surroundings, human and physical. (There are beguiling passages of Ghote's frustration and then slow enchantment with the languid pace of life in a village where his investigation leads him.)

Readers will notice peculiarities in the dialogue that one Indian writer called Ghote's "broken-English patois." This "patois" consists principally of progressive verb forms where conventional English uses simple past or present ("I mean, a chap is not coming into a shop and finding one dead body on the floor without feelings of surprise, no?") and frequent use of only after the word it modifies ("That is perhaps nonsense only.") I can understand why such syntax might make an Indian reader wince. I wonder also if such speech patterns reflect the syntax of the Indian languages the characters would be speaking, the way a Russian speaking English might drop articles, or a Dutch speaker might use the perfect where a native English speaker would use the simple past. ("I wonder if he has done it," a detective asks in an early English version of one of Janwillem van de Wetering's novels -- jarring to English readers who would naturally expect the detective to ask instead "I wonder if he did it.")

To his credit, the writer, Ashok K. Banker, puts such linguistic manipulation in historical context: "This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well."

P.S. I quoted the above from a 2005 entry in Banker's blog, which in turn quotes a review Banker had written several years earlier of Keating's novel Breaking and Entering. Banker ended that earlier review with the commendable declaration that:

Bombay still awaits a truly worthy detective series - or several of them - to explore the city's unique beauty, charm and sleaze. Ghote was a worthy attempt, and certainly the only commercially successful one abroad. Now, what we need is a detective series that Indians will enjoy and buy in great numbers. Even if I damn well have to write it myself.

He does himself considerably less credit when he remarks in the newer blog entry that accompanies the review:

The only thing I don't stand by anymore is that last line. I have no intention of writing more crime fiction, regardless of how well it sells or gets reviewed. I simply don't have the kind of mind that can shape a story to fit genre formulas. What's more, shaping any story to fit any kind of structural expectation, in my honest opinion, is a crime in itself. Which is perhaps why I no longer read much crime fiction, or respect it very much.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Inspector Ghote
H.R.F. Keating
Indian crime fiction

New crime fiction from Australia

The Age newspaper of Melbourne offers this long list of books of all kinds scheduled for publication in 2007. It includes Shane Maloney's next Murray Whelan novel (Sucked In) and books from Garry Disher (Chain of Evidence) and Peter Temple.