An author's take on translation

Faithful followers of Detectives Beyond Borders will have read my thoughts on reading translations and translators' thoughts on translating. But what does an author feel like as his or her words are rendered into an unfamiliar tongue? Shane Maloney, author of the Murray Whelan crime novels, writes with zest on the matter in this article from 2004 that recently turned up on an idle evening's blog surfing.

Among my favorite nuggets:

According to Cervantes, translation is the other side of the tapestry. Presumably he said this in Spanish, so some of the subtlety may have been lost. His gist, however, seems pretty clear. A translation is a lot fuzzier than the original, many loose threads are left dangling and the unicorn now looks like a goat.

and

Could I please provide meanings and possible replacements for the following terms? Franger. Duco. Shoot through. Op shop. Furphy. Laminex. Ruckman. Fibro. A piece of piss. An unreconstructed Whitlamite.

Only after attending to this basic housekeeping did we finally get down to nuts and bolts, the cross-cultural crux of the matter. American usage required that "footpath" become "sidewalk".

Get stuffed, I declared, or words to that effect. We don't have sidewalks in Australia. We have footpaths.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Shane Maloney
Crime fiction in translation

A story that hit home

Have you ever read a novel or story whose details rang so true that you thought, "That's me!" or "I was there!"?

I've flipped through the opening pages of Liza Marklund's Paradise. I knew Marklund had worked for newspapers, but my god, did she work for mine?

She has my paper's management philosophy and general atmosphere of the last fifteen years down:

"The editor-in-chief, Torstensson, wanted to introduce a new managerial level ... All the signs of impending disaster were in place: the poor state of the finances; the falling circulation; the grim faces of the members of the board; the newsroom that swayed in a storm, poorly guided and with a run-down radar. ... Torstensson wanted to make a mark, and God knows he hadn't had any editorial achievements."

She captures the humiliation of veteran journalists forced to edit, oh, just to pick a hypothetical example, material almost as demeaning as high school poetry and theater reviews:

"The news editor held out a stack of scores from the lower sporting divisions.

"The question hit Annika like a punch in the gut. What the hell! They were going to have her do the kind of stuff she'd done at the local paper, Katrineholms-Kurien, as a fourteen-year-old ... Fill out your own tables, dickhead!"

And this:

"[I]t was Annika's job to organize and structure the articles. This meant rewriting every one so that they would harmonize with each other and fit the context. Yet her name wouldn't appear anywhere in the paper ... She was a sub-editor, one among the many anonymous, invisible journalists."

OK, Marklund is a little weak on sub-editors (copy editors in the U.S.) In fact, we get less credit than our fictional counterparts in Paradise.

All right, readers, what stories have hit home for you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Liza Marklund

Pet peeves, bêtes noires

One of this blog's readers recently surprised another with a critical comment about Peter Temple, which reminded me of that eternal question: What are your pet peeves when reading? What stylistic device or character trait makes you want to fling a book down in disgust?

Two of mine are obvious cliffhangers and excessive scene setting. The former, you can probably figure out. It's the trait shown by an author who has no confidence that he or she can hold a reader's attention and thus feels compelled to end every chapter on a note of contrived suspense. This exhausts the reader and detracts from the moments when real suspense is called for.

Excessive scene setting is too many chapters that begin: "Cicely ran a comb through her thick auburn locks, completely unaware of the events transpiring half a world away." Sure, every novel is a set-up. The author manipulates the characters and situations to create the effect that he or she wants. Excessive scene setting, unless it is intended for comic effect, makes the manipulation too obvious.

But now it's your turn. What drives you nuts?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

The Broken Shore, Part II

Here are a few more things I liked:

1) The denouement is more full of incident than those of most novels. The main action has resolved itself, and then one has the delicious feeling that the wrapping up will almost become a new story in itself. Come to think of it, that's a graceful way of dealing with a problem that some readers have seen in Temple's other books: that his plots can be too complicated. Here, the twists and turns are more elaborate than ever, but also more clearly defined as sub-plots.

2) Temple has so much fun drawing his story to an end, that who can begrudge him a bit of a melodramatic groaner? Here's how one of the final chapters ends: "A stone retaining wall was leaning, blocks loose. Soon it would collapse, the worms would be revealed." Over the top? Sure. Did it make me smile? Yup. It's a small example of the author's flair for humor even in grim situations. As grim as events in his books may get, I suspect Temple does not take himself excessively seriously. And that's good.

3) And here's that foodie crack I alluded to in my first post about The Broken Shore:

"Don't care for the victuals in Noosa," Cashin said. As he said the word, he saw the strange spelling. "Listen, an ordinary old toasted cheese and tomato?"

Leon raised his right arm in a theatrical way, drew fingers across his forehead as if wiping away sweat. "I take it you don't require sheep-milk fetta with semi-dried organic tomatoes on sourdough artisan bread?"

"No."

"I suppose I can find a gassed tomato, some rat-trap cheese and a couple of slices of tissue-paper white."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Peter Temple

Good (e)books cheap

The Oz Mystery Readers group on Yahoo has an interesting discussion going with Brian Kavanagh, a distinguished Australian film editor (His credits include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) turned mystery novelist. I mention this for two reasons: One of Kavanagh's novels under discussion features one of my favorite works of art, The Bayeux Tapestry, and the novels' publisher, BeWrite Books, sells ebooks not only cheaply but in printable format.

That last feature is especially welcome and also rare, as far as I know. I've hesitated to download ebooks because I don't want to be restricted to a computer while reading. This way, I can read at my computer, then print out a couple of chapters to read on the way home and a few more to read in a hot bath. Just try doing that with your computer or ebook reader.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

The Broken Shore

I'm not done with The Broken Shore yet, but I've read enough to:

1) Reinforce my opinion that Peter Temple can convey better than any other crime writer I know the sense of loss created when neighborhoods and rural areas gentrify.

2) Be reminded that no one pokes fun at pretentious foodies with as much zest as Temple does.

3) See that even more so than in his Jack Irish novels, Temple can write movingly, persuasively, with humor and without melodrama about a damaged protagonist, here Joe Cashin, a former city police officer now working in a small town. Temple gives us the details of Cashin's trauma gradually. A reader can live with him and sympathize with his pain, I think, whereas the same reader might find similar protagonists, whose pain is delivered in great heavy gobs of traumatizing angst, a bit much.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Peter Temple

How do you feel about cheating?

An excellent crime novel that I read recently contained what some mystery purists might call a cheat. A detective who has throughout the book shared his thoughts with the reader on clues, suspects and the progress of the investigation breaks that pattern late in the novel: He receives a critical document, decides that it identifies the culprit, but does not share the information with the reader. Instead, the author creates a cliffhanger, a "now he knew who had done it" moment, but he withholds from the reader what the detective knows. Did the author cheat by having the detective reverse course late in the game?

A novel I read a few years ago edges closer to a cheat. A victim is trapped with her kidnapper, who we later find out is a character known to the novel's protagonist and introduced earlier. The trouble is that the character has a highly distinctive physical trait that anyone would notice immediately -- as, indeed, the protagonist does when he encounters him earlier in the book, to the point where he dwells at some length on the trait. The author, it seems to me, cheats by deliberately not having the victim comment on this characteristic. If she did, of course, the reader would instantly recognize the kidnapper. Instead, the author withholds the information in what struck me, once the identity was revealed, as an unfair effort to create suspense.

These two instances may violate the first of S.S. Van Dine's Twenty rules for writing detective stories . (Of course, rules 3 and 9, to name just two, have been violated countless times in countless good and even great detective novels, and Ed McBain, not to mention Fergus Hume, would probably have had something to say about number 9. )

S.S. Van Dine may be a relic, but do you have your own rules that a crime author must not break? What makes you feel cheated in your crime reading?

Now, "that's" bleak ...

Well, not really, but Håkan Nesser's The Return is a bit bleaker than the same author's excellent Borkmann's Point, about which I posted here earlier this week.

Nesser has given the targets of the police investigation in this novel more desperate lives than their predecessors in Borkmann's Point, which he published a year earlier. (1994 for Borkmann's Point, 1995 for The Return. The English translations followed in 2006 and 2007, which makes one wonder why this splendid writer was not rendered into English earlier.) In addition, the lead investigator, Inspector Van Veeteren, struggles with a medical problem throughout The Return. (He survives.)

The tone here is harsher, the questioning of suspects and others more psychologically brutal than in the earlier novel. Yet there is precious little, if any, melodrama or self-pity in either book. It is characteristic also of Nesser's playfulness that even as Van Veeteren is laid up while the investigation progresses, he makes a sly reference to that other crime classic about a bedridden investigator, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time.

Nesser may have refined his technique as a mystery writer in the interval between the two books. Van Veeteren's solution of the killings in Borkmann's Point has a faint whiff of cheating to it, which I can obviously not detail here. But please do not let this deter you from reading either novel. Borkmann's Point and The Return are not just two of the finer crime novels I've ever read, but two of the most distinctive.

And now Nesser had better get translation deals for more of his novels, or I'll have to start learning Swedish.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

Only marginally connected to crime, or rather to crime fiction

An Australian fellow blogger once mentioned a speech in which the very funny crime novelist Shane Maloney shocked his audience at an elite private school by lambasting the entire system of private schools. Tonight I came across a newspaper article in which Maloney recalled the speech and quoted extensively from it. Here’s an excerpt:

"It is not your fault that your parents lacked sufficient confidence in your personal maturity and ability to respond to the opportunities offered by government school education — and Australia has one of the best systems in the world, by the way, despite the relentless propaganda to the contrary by the vested interest of the private-school lobby.

"Right now, you are the victims. Later, of course, society will be your victim, and will suffer from the attitudes with which you are indoctrinated here.

"But who knows? Just as prison does not always break the spirit of all who are incarcerated there, perhaps you will not turn out to be a burden to society.”

I suspect Maloney was not invited back the next year. Living as I do in the United States, I was surprised by Maloney’s straightforward embrace of the term government school education. In this country, such terms are most often invoked by ideologues and by opportunists angling for government contracts and subsidies.

It put me in mind of the recent news that MSNBC was pulling up stakes and leaving New Jersey ten years after it received tax forgiveness and other incentives worth many millions of dollars in return for promising to stay fifteen years. That's a crime! Or rather, that's a public-private partnership.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Shane Maloney

More on translated crime

I think this article has been around for a while, but a botched link prevented me from getting to it sooner. It's in Crime Time, and it offers more thoughts on translated crime fiction, this time from Natasha Cooper. She finds awkwardness in the English translation of Andrea Camilleri's dialogue, and she praises the English version of The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (She calls the author Antonio Perez Reverte -- an especially bad mistake, since Cooper in the same piece singles out a copy editor for criticism.)

Cooper is sensitive to the difficulties a translator faces in capturing a work's emotional tone, and she singles out the translation of Jose Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders for praise (though she calls him Juan Carlos Somoza. She must have a mental block against Spanish first names. Either that, or Crime Time's site is being hacked.) That translation, she says, "works particularly well because [the novel] is actually about translation."

I would suggest that Mike Mitchell is at least as good as the translators Cooper fails to name. His fine English versions of Friedrich Glauser's novels for Bitter Lemon Press come up with ingenious and relatively unobtrusive renderings of Glauser's subtle use of German dialects.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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translation
Mike Mitchell
Crime fiction in translation

Second-guessing my second thoughts

This Parker-Wyatt thing keeps getting weirder and weirder. I'd based my comments on the similarities between the two on my reading of all but one of the twenty-three Parker novels but just the first two Wyatt books. Seventeen pages into Port Vila Blues, Wyatt number four, though, I thought, "Aha! Now Disher has made the decisive break from his imitation/tribute to Parker."

Wyatt shows remorse for a partner shot and damaged during a holdup, vowing to support him for life. He visits the man and his sister in their rundown house to give them money. The man, who has uncertain control of his bodily functions since the injury, soils himself as he and Parker try to fence a stolen gold and diamond brooch. The opening pages, in short, are full of pathos miles removed from the thoroughly ruthless Parker.

Then, idly flipping through the novel, I came upon a description of a heist virtually identical to one in a Parker novel, Deadly Edge, if my memory serves me well. If I remember to do so, I'll post both passages here later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Garry Disher
Richard Stark
Donald Westlake

Håkan Nesser, the (thinly) smiling Swede

A correspondent refers in passing to Håkan Nesser's bleakness, but I find Nesser anything but bleak. Yes, Borkmann's Point is set, presumably, in northern Europe, land of clear, strong drink and pessimistic detectives. Yes, the novel's three murders (and the one so far in The Return) are especially horrific, but Nesser handles all, it seems to me, with his characteristic low-key wit. By comparison, Henning Mankell dispatches his victims with detail far more horrible. (I once attended a reading by Mankell where someone asked why he has his killers take care of their victims so graphically. His answer was simple: Because such things really happen.)

Nor do Nesser's characters seem especially gloomy by temperament. Yes, they may fret about their private lives, but they are not obsessed. I would regard Nesser's outlook primarily as one of amused wonder rather than bleakness.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

Wyatt and Parker

I've posted from time to time on the similarities between Garry Disher's Wyatt and Richard Stark's Parker, similarities that are too close and too numerous to be mere chance.

But has either Stark (a pen name of Donald E. Westlake) or Disher ever discussed the issue?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Garry Disher
Richard Stark
Donald Westlake

More reasons to like Borkmann's Point

1) The author, Håkan Nesser, has a sharp eye for the misdeeds of television reporters:

"Well, that was that," said the chief of police, flopping back onto the leather sofa. "I have to say I prefer the newspaper boys."

Van Veeteren agreed.

"Those well-oiled talking heads on TV make me vomit; they really do. Do you have a lot to do with that crowd?"

2) Nesser includes an amusing flip on the theme of detective with troubled family life. The officer involved has been called out of town, worked hard on a series of a murder cases, and come close to making a pass at (or being seduced by) an attractive female colleague. And then his wife and children take a house nearby so they can be with him:

"It was past eleven before the kids finally went to bed. They opened a bottle of wine and put on a Mostakis tape, and after several failed attempts, they finally managed to get a fire going. They spread the mattress out on the floor and undressed each other.

"`We'll wake them up,' said Münster .

"`No, we won't,' said Synn. She stroked his back and crept down under the blankets. `I put a bit of a sleeping pill into their hot chocolate.'

"`Sleeping pill?' he thundered, trying to sound outraged.

"`Only a little bit. Won't do them any lasting harm. Come here!'

"`OK,' said Münster, and restored relations with his wife."

That's the entire scene, and and it's fair representation of Nesser's technique: short scenes, laconic reactions, scenes that rely heavily on dialogue.

3) Nesser permeates the narrative with references to the doubts large and small that plague dedicated officers during an urgent investigation:

"Well?" said Münster, feeling as if he'd just missed the point of a long and complicated joke.

or

He kicked off his shoes and wiggled his toes rather cautiously, as if he ere uncertain whether or not they were still there.

These are trivial examples and deliberately so. Other characters question the reality of their observations or contemplate the meaning of death, but it is the tiny incidents, the little doubts, that create the novel's distinctive texture. Small doubts echo larger ones. Everyone, sharp and dull alike, moves in a kind of fog that clouds all certainties -- and somehow makes the characters all the more human.

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

A character makes passing reference to houses with Hanseatic gables. This adds northern Germany to the list of settings evoked but never named. Others include the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The lack of a named setting added to the delight for me, to the sense of fun. Perhaps it contributed as well to that enjoyable sense of doubt mentioned above.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

Håkan Nesser

The surprises haven't yet started in this Swedish author's Borkmann's Point, but the deadpan wit has, as have the pleasingly laconic style and some pleasant invocations of camaraderie between two wise and intelligent police officers.

The brevity and the wit work together. Many a fictional veteran officer has rolled his eyes at the antics of a too-eager, too-punctilious young colleague. Naser lets an impersonal narrator speak: "It is true that Kropke had not had time to prepare any overhead projector transparencies before he addressed his colleagues in the conference room that evening, but everything was neatly set out in his notebook with detachable pages and dark-blue leather covers."

Concision is a watchword. Nesser shifts point of view frequently, telling just enough about a character to add flavor, breaking off before veering into mawkishness and excessive psychologizing.

And he has fun with the setting. The names are close to Dutch, but spelled not quite the Dutch way. The setting is coastal, though perhaps a coast more varied than that of the Netherlands. Readers familiar with Denmark or Sweden are free to weigh in on this matter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

The Last Match's best lines

There's more to the book than the clever use of italics I wrote about yesterday. There are lots of funny lines, too, even the ones in plain old Roman type. Here are two of my favorites:

"Petruzzi was the kind of industrialist who let other people be industrious for him."

and this, an exchange between the swindler/protagonist and a Côte d'Azur casino owner:

"He said, `Well, once I bluffed four kings in a poker game. Is that a dramatic highlight?'

"`Yes, sir,' I said. `It certainly is. But I wouldn't call four kings exactly a bluffing hand.'

"`No, no. Four real kings, all at one of my tables. Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.'"

The Last Match is an episodic, globe-hopping novel, and some of the episodes are more compelling than others. The book's peripatetic narrative reflects the author's peripatetic life, about which you can read here, on one of the better author Web sites I've seen. (Dodge is also the author of the more focused Plunder of the Sun, published, like The Last Match, by Hard Case Crime, and To Catch a Thief, as well as numerous other novels and travel books.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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David Dodge

The Last Match by David Dodge

If there's an award for best use of italics in a thriller, I nominate this book, by the author of Plunder of the Sun and To Catch a Thief. Here's an example:

"M. l'Inspecteur would indeed, unhesitatingly and unequivocally. He would further personally guarantee, on his parole d'honneur, that M. le Marquis would receive not only a fifty percent return on his money but the Legion d'Honneur; not the mere ribbon of a lousy Chevalier, either, but the médaille of a full Officier. Perhaps, even -- through this, regrettably, M. l'Inspecteur could not personally guarantee -- perhaps even the baton of a Maréschal! With a public kiss of gratitude from M. le Président de la République! Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité and cost-plus patriotism, with the elegant chords of La Marseillaise thundering in the background.

"`The boob will be wetting his pants with eagerness before we finish,' Bernard said."

That's rather nice, I think, as is this, from the same narrator/con artist: "I was long gone when the pot aux roses was découvert, as the French newspapers had it."

Sure, italic type is a convention to indicate foreign words, but Dodge makes it a wink from narrator to reader, a reminder of his blithe American con artist's amusement at the scams he pulls among rich and greedy habitués of the French Riviera. (He also makes it as lively a lesson in French as non-French-speaking readers are likely to get from any novel in English.)

And there is subtlety to Dodge's use of the device. He employs it not at all in the narrator/protagonist's opening confrontation with a jealous husband, sparingly in scenes between the narrator and an older, rich woman to whom he is an oddly good-hearted gigolo, and just occasionally when our hero meets up with the novel's femme fatale -- or should that be femme fatale? It is only once the scams are in full swing that the vocabulary becomes peppered with French words and the pages with italic type.

I find myself smiling when I see the italics, because I know something is up.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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David Dodge

Non siamo più Roma!

Siamo Roma, that interesting English-language online magazine about the Eternal City, has changed its name for an interesting reason: Too many people thought it was called "Slamorama."

The new name is Rome File , and it's still an ideal guide for English-speaking travelers to Rome. I heard about the magazine through a posting on another blog about an interview with the Roman writer Massimo Mongai that turned into the blog post heard around the world. The interview is now to be found here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Massimo Mongai

A piece of prescience from Jean-Claude Izzo

Remember the French riots of 2005? Here's a passage from Chourmo, the second volume in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy:

"[Pertin] wasn't directly responsible for Serge's death. Or Pavie's. But he was the symbol of a police force I hated. A police force in which political ideas and personal ambitions were placed above the values of the Republic, like justice and equality. ... If the suburbs exploded one day, it would be down to them. Their contempt. Their xenophobia. Their hate. And their shabby little schemes to become, one day, `a great cop.'"

Izzo published those words in 1996.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jean-Claude Izzo

Crime families

Not to get too sociological or anything, but I noticed a couple of years ago that some of my favorite crime writers had as significant sub-themes in their books their protagonists' efforts to build alternative families. Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, for instance, struggles to bring up his daughter, Linda. (He must have done something right, because she went on to become a police officer and a colleague of her father's.)

That great social comedian Bill James takes the theme several steps further, weaving families throughout his Harpur & Iles series. He explores the idea in particular detail starting with the tenth novel, Roses, Roses, built around the murder of Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's wife. Even when spouses don't die, marriage, betrayal thereof and substitutes therefor are constants in almost all the books. Harpur becomes a loving, earnest single father to his wise, impudent and hilarious adolescent daughters -- and they love having Harpur's university-student girlfriend around, especially at breakfast time.

Several of the series' principal criminals have family issues of their own, and Harpur's occasionally insane superior, ACC Desmond Iles, is regularly reduced to frothing rage when remembering his own wife's affair with Harpur. Even the maniac Iles, uncertain as he may be about the paternity of his own daughter (Sarah Iles has had an affair with another officer in addition to Harpur), develops a fierce and protective tenderness toward the child.

Over in the Netherlands, Janwillem van de Wetering carefully delineated three distinct family situations for his three protagonists: Sgt. Rinus de Gier, Adjutant Henk Grijpsta, and their wise old superior, the unnamed commissaris. In France, there are Benjamin Malaussène and his incredible multinational, multigenerational Belleville crew in Daniel Pennac's novels.

OK, I'll stop here. This is crime fiction, after all, and not social science. I'll throw the question in your laps, readers. What interesting families and alternative families can you think of in crime fiction? And why are they interesting?

P.S. Maxine at the Petrona blog picks up this question and puts a slightly different spin on it. Post your comments in both places, and we can turn this into a world-spanning mega-discussion.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Henning Mankell
Kurt Wallander
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Daniel Pennac

Romance and violence

Where music, poetry, memories and the Mediterranean go, romance is sure to follow. That was true in Total Chaos, the first novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, and it's even more the case in Chourmo, the second book.

Just six short chapters in, the protagonist, Fabio Montale, has yearned for lost loves, lost friends, lost opportunities, even for the tolerable aspects of his lost job as a police officer. These chapters are melancholy and gorgeous and full also of Izzo's sharp and sometimes unexpected political observations. The melancholy is enhanced by the reader's knowledge that the lost cousin whom Montale searches for has already been killed.

If you read French or Italian, Ile noire, Jazz al Nero and Andrea Fannini offer interesting discussions of Izzo. That last entry, a discussion of a book of Izzo's short writing called Aglio, menta e basilico – Marsiglia, il noir e il Mediterraneo, offers insight on the social and political concerns of Fabio Montale and the man who created him. And culinary concerns, too. The first part of the book's title means "garlic, mint and basil." Fabio Montale may be more melancholy in outlook than Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano or Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Pepe Carvalho, but he eats just as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jean-Claude Izzo

Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian noir

An interesting afterword follows Juan de Recacoechea's American Visa, about which I posted a comment last week. The writer and teacher Ilan Stavans, one of whose students translated American Visa from Spanish into English, calls Recacoechea's style "picaresque noir." I won't be giving away too much if I say both terms of the description fit. The novel is a kind of travelogue, its protagonist's observations on La Paz in the 1990s perhaps reflecting the author's own impressions after he returned to Bolivia from two decades working in Europe.

Stavans calls American crime fiction Recacoechea's "prime stimulation," and he notes the author's references to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. The novel is also akin in temperament to David Goodis' work in a way that might surprise some readers familiar only by reputation with that prototypical noir writer.

I'm less certain of Stavans' assertion that the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II is probably Recacoechea's main regional model. Yes, both authors take harsh looks at large Latin American cities (Taibo's Hector Belascoaran Shayne is a private investigator in Mexico City.) Both offer stark depictions of societies that crush their poor, their dispossessed, and even their ordinary workers. Yet, unlike Taibo, Recacoechea and his first-person protagonist, Mario Alvarez, never speechify. And that made Recacoechea a bit easier to read for this son of the bourgeoisie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Juan de Recacoechea
Bolivian crime fiction
David Goodis

Friedrich the great

The Chinaman is the latest in Bitter Lemon Press's translations of the great Friedrich Glauser's Sergeant Studer novels. It equals the best of its predecessors, but it's warmer, more personal and touched with more wry humor than the books that came before: Thumbprint, In Matto's Realm and Fever.

The Chinaman has Studer (once a high police official, but kicked off the force years earlier and forced to start again from the bottom) investigating the death of a man who had calmly made preparations for the possibility of his own murder. As in the earlier books, the settings are small and tightly circumscribed: a village inn, a horticultural college, a poorhouse. The latter two are the occasions for some bitter observations on Studer's part, but sympathy is more characteristic of his approach, sympathy akin to that sometimes displayed by Georges Simenon's Maigret, to whom Studer has been compared.

There is enough traditional mystery to The Chinaman that I'll avoid saying any more about the plot, except that money and another death are involved. Sympathy even more intense than Maigret's (and, it seems to me, than Studer's own in the earlier novels), guides the sergeant in his investigation here, as does antipathy toward interfering, corrupt and viciously condescending know-it-alls.

As for the humor and fun, how about Studer's sly observation that "detective novels seemed popular in Pfründisberg" -- Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, and, yes, Simenon. Or how about the unconventional assistant Studer acquires, a heartbreakingly earnest young man whose snoring keeps Studer awake when they are compelled to share a room at the inn? And there is keen social comedy in a friend's assessment of Studer's career prospects:

"Studer, I told him, would probably never get beyond sergeant. In the first place he hadn't got any relatives ... and in the second place we like to keep competent people in subordinate positions and only use them when it's absolutely necessary. Then we can order them around, so everything's OK."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Friedrich Glauser
Swiss crime fiction

Bandes dessinées

That's what the French call comic books and strips, and it's a more accurate term than comic books and a less grating and pretentious one than graphic novels. The Ile noire blog discusses some recent bandes dessinées here and here, and even if your French is not up to par, you can enjoy the pictures.

On a related note, a reader of this blog suggested that I might post a comment comparing written with drawn crime. It was a fine idea, but I haven't read any crime "comic" books since my Batman and Superman days. That's probably because French readers and publishers take that particular art form more seriously than North Americans do, which means more offerings, more artists, more writers and more readers.

I think Belgians and perhaps the Dutch and the Finns as well may regard bandes dessinées as fit reading for adults. What about the U.K. and Australia? Any good crime bandes dessinées there?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Bandes dessinées

More gorgeous prose

This time it's from The Chinaman by Friedrich Glauser, newly out from Bitter Lemon Press in the U.K., with U.S. publication scheduled for November 2007:

"A flash of lightning slashed the dark in two, the violent clap of thunder that followed set off a crackling and rumbling that died away beyond the hills."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Friedrich Glauser

Gorgeous prose

If my posting seems more disjointed than usual, perhaps it will compensate by being more enthusiastic. I've had such a flood of superb books arriving in recent days, from Bill James, Friedrich Glauser, Peter Temple, Norbert Davis, and Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), among others, that I don't know what to read first. So I've decided to read all at the same time, or as close to it as possible.

First up is The Sixth Man and Other Stories, with its fine examples of Bill James' knack for dialogue whose meaning resides not just in what the characters say, but in how they say it. Here's an informant – a grass – in "For Information Only":

"What's known as sacrosanct, almost holy, is the relationship between a grass and his cop contact. This is totally private, one-on-one, what is sometimes also referred to as symbiotic, meaning they depend on each other."

And here are Mansel Shale and Ralph Ember conducting a joint meeting of their drug-pushing firms:

"Yes, Manse, Ralphy, you say that, but these people are – "

"We definitely got it in mind," Shale said. "Ralph and self, we note all factors, you can believe it."

"This goes without saying," Ralph told them.

"But Manse, Ralph, if we don't – "

"This is an area known in boardrooms and such as `executive action,' meaning leave it to Ralphy and me. You heard of executive action at all? A well known, corporation term you might of missed. The topics you mention are not for open talk at a meat and potatoes do."

Look at these criminals’ pride that they know the same words that educated people do: symbiotic, executive action. Look at their wonderfully comic self-consciousness: "What’s known as ... " "You heard of ... " These are pitch-prefect examples of upwardly mobile crooks who haven’t quite got the middle-class verbal mannerisms down. And that, in turn, is part of the delicious social comedy of the superlatively great Harpur and Iles series.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Bill James
Harpur and Iles