Crime in Scotland and New Zealand

If I have not linked to Crime Scene Scotland already, I should have. This e-zine offers "reviews, interviews and a celebration of the darker aspects of crime fiction." Recent subjects include Stuart MacBride's Broken Skin, John Rickards' The Darkness Inside and Allan Guthrie's Hard Man.

Over at Crime Down Under, Damien has added to my list of authors to look into with this post about new crime fiction from New Zealand. Discoveries like that are among the things that make blogging about international crime fiction fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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New Zealand crime fiction
Scottish crime fiction

A nay-sayer on neo-noir

Over at The Rap Sheet and the Thrilling Detective Blog, Kevin Burton Smith offers harsh thoughts on "neo-noir." Some highlights:

Many of these books have increasingly little to do with the classic noir films and novels their authors all claim to admire and adore so much (but may never have actually read.)

If the original noirs were usually about normal, or at least identifiable characters being drawn into the darkness, that’s an era that is long gone. So many of the recent noir novels I’ve read are populated by amoral sociopaths who are already plenty dark.

and

All the meanness and carnage of these soulless wallows comes off more like pornography than noir, at least to me.

The essay is full of passion and knowledge of its subject and very much worth reading. Smith names no titles or authors. You might want to read his essay and see who you think fits his descriptions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A sprawling multigenerational story of love, loss, violence, self-discovery and redemption!!! (The Wrong Kind of Blood)

All through my reading of Declan Hughes' violent, funny debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, a television mini-series kept breaking out, complete with family secrets, portentous symbols and dramatic revelations. Thing is, the storytelling is good enough that the weightiness rarely gets in the way, and when it does, Hughes has a knack like none other I've ever seen of blowing away the heaviness with a laugh-out-loud funny line. Here's an example I especially liked:

He told me that when his father was dying, he summoned George to his hospital bed in private and made him swear that if ever Barbara Dawson needed anything, George was to supply it, no questions asked. ... He didn't know whether she was his father's half sister. He didn't have an opinion one way or the other. Family was a pain in the bollocks.

In the same vein, a scene of two killers confessing their crime spices its Hammett-style end-of-the-novel revelation with this: "You threw up," XXXXXX said, not unaffectionately, to YYYYYY." The exchange recapitulates a killing Hughes had shown us earlier, in all its agony, violence, stink and fear. That the two scenes, so different in tone, are about the same event is the best touch in the novel, distilling in a few pages the ugliness, death, rivalry, nostalgia and humor that pervade the book. (Names removed to avoid plot spoilers.)

I posted earlier about the skeptical eyes Hughes casts on Ireland's newfound wealth. Hughes' protagonist, Ed Loy, is situated ideally to make such observations, having just returned from Ireland after many years in California. And he's returned for his mother's funeral, which plunges him right back into the old neighborhood, with its ghosts, disappointments and wounds never healed — and into the arms of the sexy Dubliner who asks Loy to find her husband. And that leads him into a world of drugs, family rivalries, crooked land deals and political corruption.

Families, of course, are the source for some of our oldest drama, and Hughes works that venerable territory on several levels. Three sets of parent-child rivalries from the novel leap immediately to mind, and other familial tensions are all over the place. Loy has lost his wife and his daughter — and his return to Ireland leads him to a search for his long-missing father. A small-time thug finds hope and help at the hands of his strong, determined girlfriend. And the rivalry between a new-breed gangster and his old-line, violent, thug of a brother threatens to explode.

But it never does, and in the end, while the novel's several minor and supporting characters receive the safety and salvation they deserve, justice is decidedly partial for the villains. And that, in the end, lends the novel a nice noir edge without, however, cheap and easy cynicism.

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

Read this January Magazine interview with Declan Hughes for Hughes' thoughts about his second book, his upbringing, his appreciation for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and more. Hat tip to Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction

Ian Rankin finds an outlet for his writing

The Times' online edition publishes Rankin's foreword to The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, in which he explores the appeal of crime writing. Among his thoughts:

I continue to find the crime novel the perfect vehicle for an unflinching discussion of contemporary issues. After all, the detective has an “all-areas pass” to every aspect of the contemporary urban scene, and this is a way for the crime writer to take the reader into forbidden territory.

That resonates here, where two recent posts discussed killings that may have changed the course of crime fiction in Ireland and Sweden.

Read the complete foreword/article, in which Rankin invokes Dostoevsky, Dickens and Ian Rankin, here. (Hat tip to The Rap Sheet.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Clichés come alive!!! (A domestic vignette that has nothing to do with crime)

The plumbers came to my house today. They fixed my pop-ups and flappers, and they put in a new toilet. One problem, however, will have to wait until they or I buy the necessary replacement part. And that is why they fixed everything but the kitchen sink.

This is the best thing that has happened to me since I arrived in New York by train for a concert and asked an Amtrak police officer at Pennsylvania Station: "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

What real-life events have inspired waves of crime fiction?

This blog is a "fine interweb yokeybus," or at least Crime Always Pays says so, for which, thanks. The real point of the yokeybus comment, though, was a reply to my post about the current wave of Swedish crime fiction and its roots in the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

The crux of C.A.P.'s comment is that a similar crisis may lie behind the current burst of Irish crime writing: the 1996 killing of the investigative reporter Veronica Guerin. That's a provocative thesis about a chilling case, and it leads me to throw the floor open to readers:

What real-life cases have sparked explosions of crime fiction, especially outside the traditional detective-story big three of the United States, Great Britain, and France? Back in February, I linked to a discussion of post-war violence and corruption in Japan that may have inspired Seicho Matsumoto. Can you think of any others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Irish crime fiction
Swedish crime fiction
Japanese crime fiction
Seicho Matsumoto
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

"Hombre," the movie

Yes, it's American, it's a Western, and it's a movie, but I have two excuses for writing about the 1967 Paul Newman film: One, I watched it last night, and two, Declan Burke's novel The Big O opens with an epigraph from Elmore Leonard, and Leonard, of course, went on to spectacular success as a crime writer after writing Westerns, including the novel Hombre.

Thus, the movie spurs some observations about crime fiction. It has been often remarked that the American private-investigator story, with its lone-wolf hero trying to rough out his own form of justice in a harsh world, has its roots in the Western. Hombre, at least in its film version, has an especially noirish overtone. On the one hand, the hero makes one gesture that sounds a false note, ably analyzed here. On the other, he winds up dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Elmore Leonard

A few words about "The Writing on the Wall" by Gunnar Staalesen

Time constraints preclude a full review, but a few comments are in order:

1) As one might expect from a novel that opens with an off-hand account of a seventy-year-old male judge found dead in a hotel room wearing lingerie, the novel contains a touch of humor here and there.

2) A prostitution ring involving teenage girls is at the heart of the novel. The girls' ages make them interesting characters — they are real characters, in other words: balky, headstrong and vulnerable, and not just passive victims.

3) Staalesen includes a few sex scenes for his protagonist, but the sex is immediately followed by bad news — a report of another death, for example.

4) The novel contains a funny, clever metaphor for oral sex that takes unique advantage of the story's Norwegian setting.

5) The title, a literal translation from the original Norwegian, is not overkill, despite its portentous tone. It refers to the warning of his empire's demise that King Belshazzar of Babylon saw during a banquet in the Book of Daniel. Here, a minor character delivers the ominous words to the protagonist, Varg Veum. I won't give anything away, but the warning resonates.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Gunnar Staalesen
Norwegian crime fiction
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Declan Hughes' technique

I posted recently about the slam-bang opening to Declan Hughes' novel The Wrong Kind of Blood. My reading and blogging have been a bit disjointed in recent days, but I've read enough of the Hughes to realize that the man has technique beyond that opening.

One can read the technique as the product of Hughes' efforts to liven up what in less skilled hands might seem shopworn. His protagonist, Ed Loy, is (a) a private investigator who has lost (b) his wife, (c) his job, (d) his child, and (e) his apartment. But we don't find all this out until page 46, during Loy's confrontation with an officious yacht-club steward. The confrontation stirs Loy from a lengthy funk and gets him excited about working again, which is occasion for him to recall the events that put him in the funk, enumerated in the handy list earlier in this paragraph.

Another writer may have given us all this biographical back story at the outset. Hughes gets us into the action and leaves himself the challenge of when and how to present the information later. His solution is not a bad one, and Loy begins to look like an honorable addition to the roster of troubled fictional private investigators, a group about which I've written here and here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction

A European crime-fiction Web site

It's called EuroPolar, and it offers articles, news, schedules of crime-fiction events, reviews and fiction in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish versions, so you might even be able to teach yourself that language you've been vowing for years to learn. (A hat tip to Crime Always Pays, which led me to EuroPolar.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Ken Bruen is coming to Philadelphia

From Murderati by way of The Rap Sheet comes news that Ken Bruen is to receive the first David L. Goodis Award at NoirCon in Philadelphia, April 3-6, 2008.

I'm excited for two reasons: Bruen's work is tremendous and unlike any other, and I live in Philadelphia. I'll see you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Ken Bruen
Irish crime fiction

One from Scotland, one from Ireland

There's an interesting similarity between two novels that I've just begun reading, beyond the blood in their titles: Both muse uneasily upon the new prosperity of their settings, Edinburgh in Gillian Galbraith's Blood on the Water, Dublin in Declan Hughes' The Wrong Kind of Blood.

In Galbraith's novel, Detective Sgt. Alice Rice investigates a series of murders "among Edinburgh's professional elite in the well-to-do New Town." In Hughes', the narrator observes of Dublin's upscale shopping district that "It had a sleek sheen to it now, a brash, unapologetic confidence about itself that had been thin on the ground in Ireland twenty years before. It also had a derelict in every doorway" and even more acidly on a financial complex that "made Dublin look like any other city. I guess that was the point: at one stage in our history, we tried to assert a unique Irish identity by isolating ourselves from the outside world. All that did was cause half the population to emigrate. Now we preferred to avoid distinctive national characteristics of any kind."

Beyond their attitudes about prosperity and globalization, each novel has distinctive characteristics in its early pages. Galbraith's dialogue may not be the sharpest, but she knows how to make a victim's death shocking by playing it down. And she paints vivid pictures of her overworked police officers not by creating new types, but by performing the perhaps more difficult feat of revitalizing old ones.

Rice, like many another hard-working police protagonist, feels estranged from her colleagues, but her alienation has a real edge. Her "gender, resolute middle-classness and graduate status all marked her off as alien within the force, and now even in the civilian world she often found herself adrift. ... The point of contact between her world and that of her friends seemed to be growing fewer as time passed." Even better is this: "DCI Bell looked pale, ivory white with blue-black rings bordering her eyes, unconcealable by any make-up. She was a workaholic, and her addiction, knowingly nurtured by her superiors, was destroying her health." (Italics mine.)

The Hughes looks as if it will be a convincing take on the private-eye noir, complete with a randy femme fatale, a missing relative, money, lawyers, and a wisecrack now and then. The wisecracks can be wryer and darker than the usual run of the species, though, as here, from the novel's short prologue: "Planning a murder in advance doesn't guarantee that you cut down on blood, although it can help."

And how's this for an opening, from Chapter One: "The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction
Gillian Galbraith
Scottish crime fiction

Declan Burke's funny and compassionate caper

Declan Burke's second novel comes with a testimonial from that indefatigable blurbster Ken Bruen, and the remarks are noteworthy both for their source and their content.

The pace of events in this kidnap caper may remind readers of Bust, that hilarious novel that Bruen wrote with Jason Starr. As in that book, a plot rapidly spins beyond the control of its plotters. But, in contrast to Bruen and Starr's book, which reads like a joyous, riotous, caffeine-, booze- and speed-fueled all-nighter, there is something sweet and gently introspective about most of this novel.

Burke divides the book into seven days and each day into a series of very short chapters, each bearing the name of one character and written from that character's point of view. Short, choppy chapters are a fine way to build suspense; one wonders what will happen when these personalities finally, inevitably, collide. But each character takes time for some humorous introspection, which makes the story a fast-moving caper built up of leisurely episodes. Perhaps Bruen had this in mind when he called Burke's writing "a joy, so seamless you nearly miss the sheer artistry of the style and the terrific, wry humour."

I have two quibbles with plot devices that crop up late in the book, and I suspect Burke felt more confident of his ability to sustain the story than to end it (no spoilers here; you'll have to read the novel yourself). The quibbles detracted from my enjoyment only briefly, though. The deliciously complicated plotting, the wry dialogue and the sympathy Burke engenders for his cast of characters made this one of the most fun and purely pleasurable reads I've had in a while. And what better way to convey some of that fun than with the novel's opening words:

In the bar, Karen drinking vodka-tonic, Ray on brandy to calm his nerves, she told him how people react to death and a stick-up in pretty much the same way: shock, disbelief, anger, acceptance.

"The trick being," Karen said, "to skip them past the anger straight into acceptance."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Burke
Irish crime fiction
comic crime fiction

How do authors change their series over time?

Five months ago, I asked how series characters change over time. This time I'll focus on their creators. Recently I've noted that Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have become more sympathetic and tender as they've grown older. Earlier, I discovered Colin Watson's delightful tendency to apply slightly spicier touches of naughty words as his Flaxborough Chronicles series progressed.

Those are two of the more creative ways I've seen of changing a series just enough to keep it interesting while retaining the features that made it distinctive in the first place. How do your favorite crime-fiction authors do it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Salvo Montalbano
Colin Watson

A postscript to "Synergy and Swedes"

An April article in the Toronto Star, one of three(!) competing daily newspapers in that civilized city, offered thoughts on current Swedish crime fiction and its position in Europe and the wider world.

"We're riding the waves of Henning Mankell," says Håkan Nesser, whose name readers of this blog will know well.

"Germany is the door-opener to the rest of Europe," says Nesser, citing Mankell's earlier penetration of the German market as a key event in the ensuing proliferation of Swedish crime writing. "Between Germany, Switzerland and Austria, you have potentially 100 million readers in German. And, also, if you want to get published in Spain, the first thing they ask is, `Is he out in German?' That's when things can start rolling."

The article also traces the current wave of Swedish crime writing to a traumatic national event: the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot dead in Stockholm while walking home from a movie with his wife. Anyone who dismissed crime fiction as trifling might be intersted in this passage about the Palme assassination:

"In a way, Sweden has never recovered," says Swedish author and critic Marie Peterson. "Sweden changed, brutally, on almost every level, but this change was nowhere to be found in literature. No one explored it, analyzed it or wrote stories about it. Except the crime writers, starting with Mankell."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Swedish Crime Fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Andrea Camilleri's latest

My fondness for Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano grows as the elderly Camilleri lends his middle-aged protagonist an ever more tender and sympathetic view of the world.

In The Patience of the Spider, the eighth Montalbano novel translated into English, Montalbano delves into the disappearance of a young woman and its effect on the political hopes of the man apparently responsible for her kidnapping.

Montalbano is moved to tears — he conceals them — by the presence of his lover, Livia, and stricken with pangs of tenderness and an odd sense of loneliness and relief when she leaves at the end of her stay. He is shocked by the news that a friend — a man his own age! — has become a grandfather. He is frightened to panic in the presence of a dying woman, yet cheered by the sharp mind of the missing young woman's boyfriend, who declares that he wants to be a police officer and, thinks Montalbano, would make a good one. And at all times, he reflects on his own reactions.

Camilleri's sympathy abounds for minor characters in difficult situations and even for the wife of the apparent kidnapper, after she is accosted and assaulted by a gang of respectable women angry at her husband's conduct.

The apparent kidnapper is a slick and ambitious engineer who benefits both from Italy's traditional political corruption and from the new varieties enabled by Silvio Berlusconi. (The explanatory notes by the translator, Stephen Sartarelli, are especially helpful here.) But corruption is not the devil. Think love, both thwarted and realized, revenge, and yearning hope for redemption, and you'll be closer to the tone of this moving novel.
===========

I could be imagining this, but this translation seems to retain more Sicilian dialect and sayings than do previous volumes in the series. One example: "`Cu al sangu sò fa mali / mori mangiatu da li maiali,' or `He who harms his own flesh and blood / shall be eaten by pigs and die."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Andrea Camilleri
Italian crime fiction

Synergy and Swedes

Proof that print and blogging can co-exist, my article about four Swedish crime novelists appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Swedish Crime Fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Colin Watson knew his shit ...

... which is why he never wrote a sentence like this one. As in his fourth Flaxborough novel, Lonelyheart 4122, so in his twelfth and last, Whatever's Been Going on at Mumblesby? In both, Watson uses curse and coarse words sparingly but to great effect.

His curse words were not meaningless interjections, all-purpose intensifiers or serve-all synonyms, the way such words often are today. Rather, set as they are against something very much like the traditional English mystery-story village, they regain their old ability to shock (and I'll update this post with examples later).

To be sure, the curses are more intense in the later book, published in 1982, fifteen years after the earlier one. Curse words were for Watson indicators of changing times, another indicator of the skill with which he wielded them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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More Thailand

I just found this link to an article about more crime fiction set in Thailand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

More Moore

I recently read a reference to Christopher G. Moore's books as "a chronicle of Bangkok nightlife." It's an apt reference, if Moore's ninth book about expatriate investigator Vincent Calvino is an indication, but it's more than that. Leering descriptions of forbidden sexual pleasures are a dime a dozen, after all, and, as one appreciative interview with Moore wrote, most are "brain-numbingly badly written."

Among this novel's non-voyeuristic charms is the ingenious way Moore gets Calvino into that state of financial want that been a hallmark of American fictional P.I.s since Chandler and Hammett (never mind that Moore is a Canadian living in Thailand.) A lawyer client of Calvino's is killed before he can come through with the money he owes Calvino as well as the recommendation he had promised that could land Calvino a new job, including a ticket out of his office above a massage parlor.

The need for money becomes critical when one of the massage-parlor yings is murdered. Already depressed by the office's sleazy location, Calvino's invaluable assistant says she's quitting. Desperate for money that will let him buy out the lease, Calvino hooks up with a group of expatriate wives whose solace is a cooking class conducted by a bogus Italian. The women, apprehensive about the sexual temptations on offer in Bangkok, hire Calvino to track their husbands. Bangkok, after all, is ranked first on the Risk of Infidelity Index for the danger it poses to marital fidelity. And one of the women was married to the dead lawyer.

If you're reading this in North America or Europe, you may not know Moore. His name is far more familiar to readers in Asia, where his books have been translated into Thai, Chinese and Japanese. Read more about Moore and Vincent Calvino in this article from the Thrilling Detective Web site.

P.S. At least one fact about Moore's life might be of interest, especially to anyone in the legal profession. He was a law-school lecturer, according to several online sources, who chucked it all so he could move to Thailand and become a writer. Things seem to have worked out well for him, and I suspect that more than one member of the bar would out there is fantasizing about taking a similar step.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Christopher G. Moore

Carlo Lucarelli, "The Damned Season"

This is the second of Carlo Lucarelli's three novels about Commissario De Luca, a police officer by talent, inclination and temperament, if not always by title, in post-World War II Italy. The story is inextricably tied to its setting, and the book's most fascinating feature may be the preface, in which Lucarelli explains its genesis.

Lucarelli was working on a thesis whose title sounds like a mid-1960s Bob Dylan song, "The Vision of the Police in the Memories of Anti-Fascists," when he "ran across a strange character who in a certain sense changed my life."

The strange character had spent forty years in the Italian police, a tenure that brought him from the fascist political police, who tailed first anti-fascists, then those who were fascists but happened not to like Mussolini. During the war, he spied on and arrested anti-fascist saboteurs again before switching sides when part of Italy fell under the control of partisans who fought alongside the Allies (and the Allies have a huge presence in The Damned Season). This meant arresting fascists, at least until Italy formed a regular government, and he became a part of the republic's police, spying on partisans who had been his colleagues and were now considered subversives.

"There is, above all," Lucarelli writes, "enormous moral and political confusion that mixes together the desperation of those who know they are losing, the opportunism of those ready to change sides, the guilelessness of those who haven't understood anything, and even the desire for revenge in those are about to arrive." There were all these plus, in Milan, at least sixteen police forces, from the regular Questura to the Gestapo, "each doing as they pleased and sometimes arresting one another."

Into this confusion steps De Luca, sitting by a land mine as The Damned Season opens, deprived seemingly of his job, and soon thereafter of his false identity papers by a rough-edged officer with partisan sympathies and almost no police experience. On his way to God knows what fate with the officer, De Luca is dragged into helping the officer investigate a murder, motive robbery — or is it that simple?

The solution to the crime is slight, even off-hand, as one reviewer aptly wrote. But the tangled motives, sympathies, animosities and, above, all, relations of power seem an embryonic version of an Italy that will seem familiar from the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia or Michael Dibdin — or from real life.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Carlo Lucarelli
Italian crime fiction
historical mysteries

Something new to me, if not to you.

The Bastulli Mystery Library offers the potential for interesting browsing and the chance to build up your to-read list. Its indexes crime books by author and category and also includes interviews and lists of awards.

I like the site because it introduced me to two Italian writers whose work I had not known: Santo Piazzese and Giorgio Scerbanenco, "one of the fathers of the Italian mystery."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Italian crime fiction

Criminal minds at the Wall Street Journal

That newspaper offers another in its interesting occasional items about crime fiction here, in a piece titled "Behind the Plots: A former prison doctor's favorite books on the criminal mind." (A tip of the hat to Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. for pointing the way.)

The paper's Opinion Journal has in the past pointed readers toward guides to and anthologies of crime fiction and has paid a high compliment to Qiu Xiaolong's superb novel Death of a Heroine.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Female Australian P.I.s

Damien at Crime Down Under offers a splendid chance for readers to expand their crime-fiction horizons. His post on female Australian private investigators is full of information about and links to nine authors, their protagonists and their books. From the descriptions, the books range in tone from humorous to hard-boiled, in setting from Sydney to Melbourne to Bangkok to Los Angeles, and in title from the straightforward but intriguing (The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender) to the absolutely delicious (The Quokka Question).

(Quokkas, in case you are wondering, are small marsupials found mainly on Rottnest Island off Perth in Western Australia, with smaller populations in the mainland. And they’re cute, even if this shy example appears to be missing half its head.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A kicker and a tease

Coffin Scarcely Used, published in 1958, was the first of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles novels, and in spots the plot is extravagant (codes; secret passages of a kind; a man found electrocuted, his mouth stuffed with marshmallows; and a final one that would constitute a spoiler if I revealed it).

One or two descriptions are flat, as well, but never mind; the book has one of the great kickers ever, which, for obvious reasons, I also cannot reveal. Suffice it to say that the kicker is funny, but it's no mere throwaway to end the book on a light note. It has resonance and just might make you think back on the characters about whom you will have just read.

Click here for more about Colin Watson and the Flaxborough Chronicles.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Colin Watson

Finnish crime online

Words Without Borders, an online magazine for international literature, has been commendably open to crime fiction, devoting issues to noir fiction in May and August 2006. The current issue, which features literature from the Nordic countries, gets criminous again, with a story by Finland's Matti Joensuu. (Hat tip to Karen at Euro Crime.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack" is up for a Dagger

I'd always considered Yasmina Khadra's crime novels about Inspector Brahim Llob of the Algiers police as something apart from his other novels — The Sirens of Baghdad, The Swallows of Kabul, Wolf Dreams, The Attack — which constitute a voyage through the Islamic world examining the corrosive effects of fear and extremism on everyday life.

Khadra apparently felt the same way, once telling an interviewer that in the Llob novels, “I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. … I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” If his crime books were not quite the same as his other books, I reasoned, then his other books must not be crime books.

Perhaps, then, Khadra shared my pleasant surprise when the Crime Writers Association in the United Kingdom short-listed The Attack for this year's Duncan Lawrie International Dagger award, alongside novels by Karin Alvtegen, Christian Jungersen, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Fred Vargas.

The Attack is a curious kind of crime story. Its protagonist and first-person narrator, Amin Jaafari, is an Arab surgeon living comfortably and successfully in Tel Aviv who is shocked when a suicide bomb rips through a crowded restaurant, and his wife disappears at the same time. Though the novel has police as characters, the investigator is Jaafari himself, driven to find out what compelled his wife into an association with terrorists. Perhaps this is why the CWA judges called The Attack "A harrowing psychological novel which explores the motivations of a suicide bomber, and lifts the conventions of the whydunnit."

And Jaafari is a curious protagonist. The novel's first eighty or so pages contain numerous references to the effects of his wife's disappearance: "The tornado that knocked down all my supports" or "when I resolve to guard against losing control." At least in the novel's first half, though, Jaafari never seems in danger of losing his moorings. He's too vital an observer, too interested in reporting on the seething world around him to be convincing as a man in danger of falling part. And that makes him a lively investigator.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra

The little world of Mayhem Parva

That's the celebrated title of Colin Watson's celebrated chapter on the classic era of detection ushered in by Agatha Christie. It is here and in succeeding chapters in the final third of Snobbery With Violence that the arguments become more convincing, in large part because the authors Watson discusses are more familiar.

Earlier chapters deal with Sax Rohmer, Sydney Horler, `Sapper' and Edgar Wallace. In the book's later chapters, Watson wrestles with Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Leslie Charteris ("The Saint"), wrapping up with a discussion of that sadistic, retrograde, socially insecure faux snob (Watson's verdict, my words), Ian Fleming. The older writers are easy to lampoon because of their outlandish plots, their cartoonish characters, their racism, and their pandering. But a current reader of Watson's entertaining survey may find the earlier chapters harder to engage with because, I suspect, the authors are little read today (although Edgar Wallace did make it into the blogophere in this discussion of When the Gangs Came to London last year).

The later chapters also make better reading because the authors under discussion were, for the most part, better, subtler and more sophisticated writers. It's easy to mock E. Phillips Oppenheim's contempt for the working classes, Sydney Horler's weird prudery and anti-Semitism, Sapper's embodiment of ideals akin to those that flowered later in British fascism, and Wallace's inconsistent and wild plots. Authors such as Christie and Sayers, however, leavened their embrace of current attitudes with just enough self-mockery to leave the matter in doubt, according to Watson, and that doubt, he says, could benefit them commercially. Here's a selection from Christie's Cards on the Table followed by Watson's assessment:

"He was tall and thin, his face was long and melancholy, his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black, he wore a moustache with stiff waxed ends and a tiny black imperial. His clothes were works of art — of exquisite cut — but with a suggestion of bizarre. Every healthy Englishman who saw him longed earnestly and fervently to kick him. They said, with a singular lack of originality: `There's that damned Dago, Shaitana!'

"The passage shows Mrs. Christie's awareness of how widespread in the England of 1936 was xenophobia, her own disapproval of which she implied in the phrase `with a singular lack of originality.' But it would have taken someone with a little more substance than that of the average reader to notice that here was not just another sneer at the foreigner."

Watson offers a number of acute judgments on how post-war crime and thriller writing changed in style while remaining as unrealistic as ever in substance. Fleming and the thriller writers who followed, writes Watson, pulled off the high sleight of hand of making espionage seem realistically exciting: "Into what was still the old-style hokum — the gunplay, kidnapping, chases, escapes and so forth — was elaborately insinuated the proposition that not only were these things happening in very truth, but they were unavoidable ... "

Watson has a lively eye for absurd statements, and his book contains more witticisms than do most works of social and literary history. Here, he takes Kingsley Amis to task for Amis' defense of Fleming against allegations of gratuitous, vicious violence: "More ingenuous was Amis's attempt to counter the sadism charge by quoting two extracts from `the real thing' — the works of Mr Mickey Spillane. This is rather like retorting to a diner who complains of having found slugs on his cabbage that he is lucky not to have gone to the establishment next door, where slugs are served as the main course."

And what, by the way, is Mayhem Parva? Let Watson explain:

The setting for the crime stories by what we might call the Mayhem Parva school would be a cross between a village and commuters' dormitory in the South of England, self-contained and largely self-sufficient. It would have a well-attended church, an inn with reasonable accommodation for itinerant detective-inspectors, a village institute, library and shop — including a chemist's where weed killer and hair dye might conveniently be bought. The district would be rural, but not uncompromisingly so — there would be a good bus service for the keeping of suspicious appointments in the nearby town, for instance — but its general character would be sufficiently picturesque to chime with the English suburb dweller's sadly uninformed hankering after retirement to `the country.'

N.B. I complained that Watson's early chapters cited but failed to name any of the rare authors of quality whose books he says suffered because of reviewers' facetious attitudes toward crime stories. Later in the book, he offers highly interesting comments about Anthony Berkely Cox, who "had written in 1930 that the detective story was in the process of developing into the novel with a crime theme, `holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.'" That seems an astonishingly prescient statement, and Watson says the change did not make itself felt for several years. In the interim, a popular magazine rejected a version of one of Cox's books. "'Life,' commented Cox patiently, `is very, very difficult,' and he went on to write more crime novels that bore a disconcerting resemblance to literature."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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More Snobbery With Violence

Colin Watson's 1971 book Snobbery With Violence is not, a cover blurb and my previous post to the contrary, a work of literary and social history, at least not in its first half. Rather, it is an entertaining, informative and occasionally illuminating essay and chronicle of the shortcomings, prejudices and popular reception of English crime fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. If it comes close to a traditional academic field, that field is sociology rather than history.

It's not history because Watson avoids examples that might create difficulties for his thesis. As English crime fiction grew unavoidably popular in its Golden Age between 1920 and 1939, Watson writes, "Book reviewers settled into an attitude of good-natured, if slightly supercilious tolerance." Such reviewers' "slightly facetious style," he says, "revealed singularly little about the books and although in most cases this was a blessing for their authors, the rare novel of quality was likely to suffer the injustice of exactly similar treatment simply because it happened to treat of crime. Librarians unwittingly performed a like disservice to the few writers in the field who believed that if a book of any kind was worth writing it was worth writing well."

You can guess what's coming, can't you? Watson fails to name any such "rare novel of quality" or any of the few writers who wrote them. He does cite Raymond Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," but for his observations about crime writing and English writers (Chandler, though American, was educated at Dulwich College) rather than as an author in his own right.

Without counterexamples of such rare crime novels by rare good writers, Watson can come off as a bit of a scold, albeit an entertaining one. But the funniest and most telling line, at least in the book's first half, is probably Chandler's, from "The Simple Art of Murder": "The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Colin Watson

Snobbery With Violence

That's the title of Colin Watson's highly opinionated social history of English crime fiction, published in 1971 and reissued by Mysterious Press in 1988.

His thesis, at least a mildly provocative one, is that detective stories were expressions of conventional attitudes and prejudices on sex, foreigners and other dicey matters. "It would be difficult to point to any other single branch of popular entertainment that conformed more strictly to current notions of decency," he writes.

Watson presents the detective story against a background of the rise in literacy among the English and the flourishing of commercial libraries. Among other things, his opening chapters are a reminder that commerical expansion can mean restriction rather than expansion of avenues for unconventional expression.

And you may be surprised by what he has to say about George Orwell.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime Always Pays — the blog

You might want to take a look at Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays, a lively blog of news, interviews and opinions, mostly about Irish crime fiction, but also non-fiction and non-Irish.

Recent subjects include James Ellroy, Brian McGilloway and John Banville, wearing his Benjamin Black crime-fiction hat.

I also like the headlines on Declan's posts. The man can do my job while I take a few months off any time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Ken Bruen at home

Mystery Readers International, publishers of articles and reviews by figures in the crime-fiction world including yours truly, offers this question and answer session with Ken Bruen. The interviewer is Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the multiple-award winning The James Deans.

Among the subjects are Bruen's college studies in metaphysics. (Bruen is the second person I have heard of who pursued that branch of inquiry as a formal area of study. The first was that figure in the Woody Allen joke who studied metaphysics in college and got kicked out for cheating because "I got caught looking within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.")

Coleman also asks Bruen what he things of blogging, to which Bruen replies:

"I blog on Murderati twice a month purely to stop the evil vile shite the blogs are currently pushing, and I took the gig to put it back to writing, books and all of that.

"What the rest do......... way I see it bro, you need to thrash somebody and you think doing it publicly on a blog is the way, God freakin help you."

Anyone have any idea what "evil vile shite" he's talking about?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Intro- and outrospection

I've just finished Karin Fossum's When the Devil Holds the Candle and started Seven Slayers by Paul Cain. The former is introspective even by the introspective standards of Nordic crime fiction. The latter is a collection of stories by a writer from the Black Mask era of the 1930s whose writing is "void of introspection, conjunctions and all but the most necessary exposition," according to the book's introduction.

I'll use the contrast as occasion for some stray remarks between more substantive posts. The first is that some of Cain's work has a streak of humor surprising in an author Bill Pronzini called the hardest boiled of the Black Mask writers. In "One, Two, Three," a trio of men wake up from unconsciousness, ruefully amused by how they wound up where they did:

"I was thinking about what suckers we had been. I'd popped Raines and Gard had popped me and Mrs. Healey had popped Gard — all of us. One, two, three. Tinker to Evers to Chance — only more so. ... The whole Healey play, what with one thing and another, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a grand. I got a lame skull and about two bits' worth of fun out of it.

"I pass."

========

Back to Fossum. Her crime books are often referred to as the Sejer novels, after her lead investigator, the police Inspector Konrad Sejer, but Sejer appears less frequently than does the protagonist in any other crime fiction I can think of. (At least such is the case in He Who Fears the Wolf and When the Devil Holds the Candle, two of the six Sejer novels translated into English from Norwegian.)
In fact, protagonist is probably the wrong word to describe the tall, serious, compassionate and, yes, introspective Sejer. In the two from the series I've read, the readers learns more about the criminals, victims and suspects than about the people who investigate them. They are the real protagonists.

And here, readers, is your challenge: Can anyone think of crime fiction that features police or other investigators, but whose investigators are explored and portrayed less thoroughly than those they investigate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Karin Fossum, When the Devil Holds the Candle

After three novels by Colin Watson, I was ready for something harrowing. When the Devil Holds the Candle, by Norway's Karin Fossum, looks as if it will be more wrenching that the previous novel of hers that I read, the excellent He Who Fears the Wolf.

The lighter moments are fewer and the opening chapters more graphic and heart-rending than in the earlier book. The thoughtful, thorough Inspector Konrad Sejer and his young colleague Skarre are back in a story that unfolds slowly, painting a psychological landscape peopled by three intensely troubled characters and a cast of others who have smaller troubles of their own. As in He Who Fears the Wolf, Sejer makes his initial appearance relatively late (around page 55 here). By the time he appears, Fossum has created a thicket of psyches waiting to be investigated.

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This is the third Scandinavian crime I've read in the last few months in which the devil figures in the title, after The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø and Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil. In those novels, Satan comes with an -ism attached; the killings have trappings of devil worship. In Fossum's book, I suspect, the devil will be a more serious topic, a vehicle for the investigators to probe the problem of evil. Or at least it seems that way, from the lighthearted after-dinner chat of Sejer, his girlfriend Sara, and Skarre.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A last word (for now) about Colin Watson

Though I could not name a novel or a movie off hand in which such a figure appears, I seem to recall the abortionist as a powerful symbol in crime fiction of the mid-twentieth century. This was the figure whose medical practice dare not speak its name, whose specialty was only hinted at.

Colin Watson has good fun with such a figure in Just What the Doctor Ordered, also known as The Flaxborough Crab, published in 1969 — good, coy fun, as perhaps was necessary for the time:

"Have you ever heard of a drug called `Juniform'?"

"I have."

"Is it well known?"

"Not in my field, no. But then it's hardly likely to become part of the armoury of the obstetrician."

"Oh, Bernard! You are sweet. Obstetrician ... So you are!"

"Now look, Lucy — do you want me to help or don't you?"

At once Miss Teatime quelled her trill of amusement.

and, lest there be any doubt:

"I'll see what I can do."

"Which I know will be a great deal, my dear. You are a man of resource. My confidence will not miscarry ... "

"Lucy! For God's sake! Not over the phone ... "

"Sorry," she said sweetly.

But the line was already dead.

Incidentally, abortion figures not at all in the plot. Watson apparently just saw a chance to have a good time, and perhaps to press up against some boundaries that were about to come down.

The novel does concern another area of medicine more directly, though, or, more precisely, an area of medicine and commerce. A pharmaceutical salesman figures in the story, and the pressure that such salesmen put on doctors to buy their products is a prominent theme. Such a theme is fresh today, never mind in a novel of the 1960s. And that makes the book another instance of Watson's beguiling combination of Golden Age style with contemporary subject.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Temple time

Crime Down Under posts a link to this interview with that excellent Australian crime writer, Peter Temple. Among the especially interesting comments from the South African-born Temple is this: "If you come to a new society in midlife, your perceptions are sharper. Everything in Australia was strange to me. It’s an English-speaking country but it’s quite unlike England or America. It’s a very interesting and complex society, with lots of problems, and also a very egalitarian one. I identified with all of those things, and I also loved the vernacular. But it’s enormously irritating to read writers who are putting it on a little thicker than it should be."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Australian crime fiction