Block on Westlake and his (non) jokes (or, the comedy is finished)

Lawrence Block remembers his friend
Donald Weslake during a celebration
at Mysterious Bookshop. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper.

In addition to enjoying Donald Westlake's novels, I always found his remarks on movies, popular culture, and other subjects stimulating. So I was pleased when I learned that the University of Chicago Press, the same folks who are rereleasing all the Parker novels Westlake wrote as Richard Stark, has put together a collection of Westlake's nonfiction.

Now I'm pleased to find that some key people behind the book, titles The Getaway Car, think similarly about what made Westlake so good. "Don didn't write jokes," his longtime friend Lawrence Block said Monday at a celebration of the book. "He found amusing ways to say things."  Levi Stahl, the volume's editor, emphasized the point with a little game in which he had members of the audience read the opening lines of several of the Parker novels (and one featuring Alan Grofield).

Here are a few I liked and remembered fondly:

"When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away."

and

"When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed."

and

"Grofield opened his right eye, and there was a girl climbing in the window. He closed that eye, opened the left, and she was still there."

Do you see the fun Westlake has with a common speech pattern in that last example?  Lawrence Block was right. Westlake didn't just say funny things, he said things funny.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Ferdowsi is a bit like Max Allan Collins, too

Rostam rescues Bizhan from the pit,
from a 17th-century manuscript of
the Shahnameh, London, British Library

I've been reading Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels in preparation for a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in November. I've also been reading the Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, a book in connection with which I invoked Raymond Chandler yesterday.

One of those books includes a sequence in which the hero falls for the wrong dame and winds up getting drugged, kidnapped, and imprisoned despite the following precaution:

"He always carried in his boot / A blue-steel dagger."

Can you guess where in my recent reading that's from? (Hint: The book was written in the 10th and 11th centuries.)

While you're doing that, join once again in a favorite Detectives Beyond Borders game, and name some great literature that shares elements with crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Persia's 10th- and 11th-century Raymond Chandler

If Hakim Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi  (or Firdausi) had lived about 970 years later, and if he'd worked in Los Angeles rather than in a Turko-Persian Muslim dynasty, he might have rivaled Raymond Chandler for atmospheric beginnings:

'"The night was like jet dipped in pitch. there lent /
No planet lustre to the firmament /
The moon, appearing in her new array /
...
Through rust and dust she journeyed through the sky /
Night's retinue had spread out everywhere /
A carpet black as raven's plumes ... "

That's the beginning of "The Story of Bizhan and Manizha" from Iran/Persia's national epic the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), and it's a hell of a way of saying, "It was dark out." Think of it as a medieval Near Eastern counterpart to:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

And now, readers, what are your favorite depictions of night, or your favorite pieces of atmosphere in general, in crime fiction or otherwise?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Three authors in a dark and friendly place

(Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper)

Once again, Dietrich Kalteis and Martin Frankson discuss aspects of crime writing at Kalteis' Off the Cuff site, this time with fellow author  Robin Spano as a guest. Once again, Kalteis illustrates the discussion with one of my noir photos (above).

This discussion  touches on a number of issues that have come up here at Detectives Beyond Borders, noticeably that off setting a crime story in a historical period other than one's own. So head on over, have a seat at the Friendly Lounge, and join the discussion.

And here are a few more photos.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: The Wrong Quarry, Max Allan Collins' '60s-style original

Max Allan Collins will be on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in November.  He'll discuss writers from the past, so I thought I take a look at his own writing to see what it owes to those authors and how it differs from their work.

For one thing, Collins has written about as much as some of the old-timers did, a list prolifically long, especially by today's more polished standards. And The Wrong Quarry (2014), most recent in Collins' long-running series about a U.S. Marine sniper turned hit man, stays faithful to terse, tough-guy narrative, a la Richard Stark or Ennis Willie, while seasoning things with more contemporary touches and topical references (Ronald Reagan, Deep Purple) that keep the story from sliding into nostalgia or pastiche.

The sex is just a little more explicit than that of early 1960s sleaze paperbacks without, however, getting as graphic as the more graphic of today's crime fiction.  I especially like the novel's handling of a gay character, flamboyant and safely exotic, in the approved 1940s-1960s manner, yet thoroughly aware that such flamboyance is a front and a shield. Collins' Web site says his rock and roll band plays an "engaging mix of classic rock and their own '60s-style originals." That's The Wrong Quarry: A fast-paced, entertaining '60s-style original.

While I read the novel's second half, I'll ask readers to ponder these questions: How do books or a movies preserve the feeling of a previous time or style without turning into nostalgia?  What are your favorite examples?

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

Max Allan Collins will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday, Nov. 14, 3 p.m. at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchecon panels: "The third time he pulled the trigger she disappeared"

This post's title is the end of Ennis Willie's story "Con's Wife." The story's first line is "He had three eyes."  For all the talk about Willie's tough-guy persona and his raw, first-draft prose style, and his roots in sleaze magazines and paperbacks of the 1960s, the man could write.

He's Richard S. Prather without the jokes, Mickey Spillane without the political frothing to which Spillane could descend at his worst.  His protagonist, Sand, is what Carroll John Daly's Race Williams would have been if Daly had been a better writer.

Willie is also a bit of a mystery man, at various times thought to be a) African American, b) Mickey Spillane, or c) dead, though the truth turns out to be simpler and, hence, more mysterious than the speculation.  You can read him in two collections available from Ramble House: Sand's Game and Sand's War, which include novels, stories, and appreciations from leading hard-boiled writers and commentators, including Bill Crider, Max Allan Collins, and Bill Pronzini.

So get your Willie. He's tough, fast, satisfying and, thanks to Ramble House, cheap. (Read the first chapter of Death in a Dead Place, included in Sand's Game, on the Ramble House Web site.)

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

Max Allan Collins will offer some comments on Ennis Willie as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: "I met Gloria at a fly-by-night school in Long Beach"

This post's title is taken from The Double Take, by Roy Huggins, a great creator and co-creator of television series (Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files) who, according to Max Allan Collins, might have become one of the giants of crime writing had he not gone Hollywood.

Collins knows his Huggins, and he'll talk about Huggins as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in the very same Long Beach where Norma Shannon met "Gloria" in The Double Take.

Roy Huggins

The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

In the meantime, read the Thrilling Detective Web Site on Huggins,  Stephen J. Cannell's memories of Huggins and a summing up of Huggins' television career from the Museum of Broadcast Communications, complete with an impressive list of credits.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Belfast Noir

It's tough writing about a volume of short stories, since, even more than with novels, one wants to avoid giving away spoilers and narrative twists.

Suffice it to say that Belfast Noir, out in November from Akashic Books, looks like one of the strongest, possibly the best entry in Akashic's "City Noir" series, and I don't say that just because the book's two editors plus one of its contributors will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in November.

The pieces are well-chosen and the volume intelligently planned. Its four sections recognize not just Belfast's violent recent past, but the realities of its quotidian present. Most of the stories depict no violence directly, but violence, and the possibility or memory thereof, loom always. That's a lot more effective than whipping out a kneecapping or rolling down the balaclavas whenever the action lags.

I especially like Brian McGilloway's "The Undertaking," which opens the collection with hair-raising humor and suspense.  Akashic's Dublin Noir also opens with a comic story (by Eoin Colfer), and that story was the highlight of the volume for me. I don't know if it's an Irish thing, but  comedy is a wonderful against-type way to open a collection of crime stories. Oh, and I'll also want to read more by Lucy Caldwell.

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

Belfast Noir's editors, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m.  So will Gerard Brennan, who contributed a story to the collection. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

James Ellroy, historical novelist

(Me and James Ellroy. Photo by a friendly bystander, photo
cropping and color desaturation by your humble blog keeper.)

James Ellroy says he "started out as a mystery writer, a crime writer. I became something else."

I've known that for a while, other readers of his recent novels have to have known it as well, and Ellroy has long said he doesn't write crime anymore. But what is that something else that he became?

A historical novelist, he said Wednesday at Mysterious Bookshop and, with his new Perfidia, a writer of historical romance. "In the course of going from mystery writer, from crime novelist, to historical novelist," he said, "I crafted the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz)."

Perfidia is the first novel of a second L.A. Quartet. More than in the first quartet and more even than in the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood's a Rover), the book's action is rooted in the moment of history that provides its setting.

That moment is December 1941 (The book's action begins on Dec. 6), and the centerpiece is the roundup of Japanese and Japanese Americans in and around Los Angeles, what Ellroy calls "the great injustice of the Japanese internment."

Virtually everything else in the book--the killings, the sex, the breakdown of social boundaries, the shady land deals--flows from the fact of the internment, planning for which is underway through most of the course of the novel.

The book is populated largely by characters from Ellroy's previous books, portrayed this time as their considerably younger selves. The four protagonists are Hideo Ashida, a police chemist; William Parker, a police captain in 1941 and later the real-life Los Angeles police chief; the demonic police sergeant Dudley Smith, a fixture in previous books; and Kay Lake, a young woman from Sioux Falls, S.D., whom Ellroy called his greatest fictional creation.  The revisiting of characters from previous books will be great fun for readers of those books.  It also provides at least one shocking surprise.

The novel may lack the stylistic daring of The Cold Six Thousand and naughty shtick and grotesque comic high-jinks of Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy, and the Las Vegas mob bosses from previous books.  What is does offer is increased emphasis on tortured redemption, of the kind Wayne Tedrow Jr., Ward Littell, and Robert F. Kennedy exemplified in the Underworld U.S.A. books.

That, and more thinking about 20th-century American history. "The whole book is a riff on democracy," Ellroy said Wednesday evening. "1941 in America was a time of utterly outlandish belief," he said, and he called it a sign of American goodness and greatness that the United States did not fall to its own currents of lunatic populism, nativism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the way other countries did.

*

Ellroy also offered thoughts on movie adaptations of his work. Three of the leads in L.A. Confidential (Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, Kim Basinger as Lynn Bracken, and Russell Crowe as Bud White),  he said, were not believable as their characters.  He didn't say they were bad, just not believable. But--and this is why I would love to grill Ellroy further on movies--the movie is "not an outright dog, as I believe the overpraised Chinatown to be."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: The Bloomsday Dead's best paragraph

Adrian McKinty suggested in a comment on this blog that the great Northern Ireland crime novel will be written by a woman. Declan Burke called David Park's The Truth Commissioner "a very brave stab at writing ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’," whereupon I immediately added it to my to-read list.

Both those gents, being Irish and having grown up there, one in the North, one in the South, are obviously far more qualified than I am to speculate on this matter. But the notion of "the" great anything is dangerous, at least in the hands of an outsider such as your humble blogkeeper. It carries with it the whiff of a suggestion that once one has read "the" great novel, one can move on to other subjects. I hope that the great Troubles or post-Troubles Northern Irish novel will mark a beginning for discussion and examination, not an ending. After all, life will go on in Northern Ireland even after the great novel appears.

In the meantime, McKinty has written a worthy contender for best post-Troubles Northern Irish paragraph, in The Bloomsday Dead, after the protagonist, Michael Forsythe, has returned to Belfast:

"They say the air over Jerusalem is thick with prayers, and Dublin might have its fair share of storytellers, but this is where the real bullshit artists live. The air over this town is thick with lies. Thousands of prisoners have been released under the cease-fire agreements — thousands of gunmen walking these streets, making up a past, a false narrative of peace and tranquility."

I have my own ideas about why that paragraph works, but I'd like to hear yours. Let us discuss! While you're at it, let me know what you think about the whole notion of The Great Novel.

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

Adrian McKinty will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Irelandpanel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2014
 
Technorati tags:
Adrian McKinty
Irish crime fiction
Northern Ireland crime fiction

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: The magnificent, mysterious Dan J. Marlowe

I read older books as artifacts, particularly those from periods that have labels slapped on their foreheads such as the 1950s and early 1960s. You probably do the same, and we can't help it, especially in a genre as saturated with archetypes and prototypes as hard-boiled crime fiction.

That's why I like Dan. J. Marlowe so much. He was no path breaker, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The novels of his that I've read are recognizably products of their time (the late 1950s and early 1960s) unlike, say, Hammett's The Glass Key, parts of which could have been written yesterday rather than in 1931. But Marlowe wrote and told stories and worked the conventions so well that even when he writes a happy ending to a hard-boiled story, it seems fresh.

I've just read Marlowe's Strongarm after previously having read The Name of the Game is Death, One Endless Hour, Vengeance Man, and Four for the Money. Marlowe could write tough, and he could write funny, and by all rights, he ought to be at least as celebrated as Donald Westlake. I'll leave you with a selection from Strongarm before letting you know where you might begin exploring the mystery of why he was not:

“`You’ll dance to a different tune now, buster,' Foley announced with vicious satisfaction. `This is even better than we’d —' his voice died away. He had expected me to run. His popping eyes didn’t believe it when I went after him. `No! No! No!' he screamed, wrapping his arms around his head. I wrenched them away. He started to dive out of the chair, and I smashed him right in the mouth. I hit him twice more. I felt bone go. I didn’t know whether it was his or mine. I don’t think he felt the third one. I looked at him slumped in the chair with blood streaming down his shirt front. It was only a down payment on what I owed him, but for now it would have to do.”

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

Charles Kelly's Gunshots in Another Room bears the subtitle "The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe," so I'll pick it up with the expectation of learning why that strange and interesting life has been forgotten. In the meantime, Kelly tells a short version of Marlowe's story over at Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.
==============
Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013, 2014

Three early comments on James Ellroy's Pefidia

Three early comments on James Ellroy's Pefidia:

1. A pointed stick used to find water is a dowsing rod, not dousing. (pg. 137) 
2. One who objects to doing something is averse to it, not adverse. (pg. 385) 
3. I enjoy the novel's jabs at the 1940s Hollywood Left, through the pen of Kay Lake, one of the novel's four central figures and, in her way, a thematic carryover from Ellroy's previous novel, Blood's A Rover:
   
   "The tall Negro with the huge basso. The Broadway showstopper-cum-slaves' lament. The dilettante leftists. The wayward girl from Sioux Falls. The unhinged police captain.
   
   "I giggled.
   
   "...A Princeton-educated Negro extolled class revolt; a frail woman with runs in her stockings strummed an oversize lute. I laughed and covered my mouth. The dowager whispered, Be still, child.'"
   
   Come to think of it, that's less a jab at the Left than a snapshot of an all-around insane period in American history (December 1941).

And here's a fine version of the song that gave the novel its title.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels

I'll moderate two panels at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, and I am excited about both.

On Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m., it's

Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland, with Gerard Brennan,  Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville.

Then I'm back at 3 p.m. for

Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras,  Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, and Sarah Weinman. Each will discuss one of his or her favorite authors, a list that includes Dan J. Marlowe, Joseph Nazel, Dolores Hitchens, and to be announced.

So, one panel with some of my favorite writers from the planet's most dynamic crime fiction scene, and another with some of crime fiction's sharpest minds shining their intellectual searchlights into out-of-the-way corners of the crime fiction world. This is going to be fun

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

DBB makes a guest appearance at Jungle Red Writers

I'm today's guest at the Jungle Red Writers blog, courtesy of Susan Elia MacNeal. Susan was a member of my wartime crime fiction panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, and a question she asked before the panel sparked some thoughts about crime stories set in wartime and its aftermath. I also fling a big-up or two toward some Detectives Beyond Borders favorites.

Join the discussion at http://www.jungleredwriters.com/2014/09/detectives-beyond-borders-peter.html.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More on Beaux-Arts, books, and bouncers (Ellroy, Paul Charles, Joseph Nazel)

Here's a bit on what I bought in the land of Beaux-Arts buildings and of bouncers who are not so much stupid as they are the very idea of stupidity given human form, thick in body, thicker in mind, the kind who would be rejected for the role of a bouncer in a movie because they go a little over the top. (About the only thing to be said in favor of last night's specimen is that he did not wear a pony tail.)

1. James Ellroy has said he no longer writes crime novels, yet I bought his new book at a crime fiction bookstore, Mysterious Bookshop, where, furthermore, Ellroy will appear next week. The novel's jacket copy makes the story sound an awful lot like a murder mystery, albeit with the grand historical sweep of Ellroy's recent books.
2. 
   Paul Charles' The Beautiful Sounds of Silence, my first novel in this Northern Ireland crime writer's Christy Kennedy series, looks set to take up a gruesome case with a degree of amused detachment. The opening chapter avoids the extremes of trivializing the crime with humor on the one hand and wallowing in its horror on the other. Charles says his inspiration for writing crime fiction was Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse. That's not a bad model.
3. 
   Joseph Nazel's Death For Hire arrived earlier in the week. A hard-hitting tale of black ghetto life in 1970s Los Angeles from an author and editor who also wrote biographies of respected African American historical figures, the novel has its good guys and bad guys, glorifying none, but with a measure of understanding for all. Los Angeles author Gary Phillips discusses Nazel and other Holloway House authors in an article on black pulp fiction at criminal element.com.

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

Paul Charles will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California, at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

*

Gary Phillips will discuss Joseph Nazel as part of my panel on Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, on Friday at 3.p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

New York, New Jerk

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Good fun at Mysterious Bookshop (right/above) in New York this evening for the launch of Syndicate Books' reissue of Ted Lewis' Get Carter.  I bought a nice pile of books, including titles by Paul Charles, Gary Phillips, Bert and Dolores Hitchens, and James Ellroy, who will read from his new Perfidia next week at the shop before an audience that will include me.

Luminaries and near-luminaries of New York's crime fiction scene celebrated the launch of Lewis' dark, moving crime novel, and, more so than usual, the talk was about books. It's good to hear writers talk about their favorite writers (Ed Lin on Paul  Cain) and to talk up some favorites of my own.

Before and after the launch, I wandered around the Lower East Side and Tribeca with my camera. On the way, I spotted some attractive neon over a bar's entrance. "Excuse me," I said, indicating my camera and directing my question to the bouncer,  "mind if I shoot your sign?" My one multisyllabic word was apparently too much for him, because he just raised his eyebrows and kept masticating his cigarette. The only point in the moron's favor is that he did not wear his hair in a ponytail.

"I'll take that as a yes (you do mind)," said I, and continued on my way.  Good thing I'd taken a picture of the sign before I asked.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter: Who needs an accent if you can act?

I've rolled my eyes here at Detectives Beyond Borders at movie stars whose hardest work seems to consist in showing us how hard they work. My targets have included Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling in The Usual Suspects,  Ed Norton's meta-mugging in The Score, and the unspeakably awful accents in The Drowning Pool.

Then there's Michael Caine in Get Carter, playing a gangster who returns home to investigate his brother's death. Caine's character is from the north of England, but to my uneducated ears, he might never have ventured out of earshot of Bow Bells. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because Caine does not see it as his job to mumble, lurch, limp, or gain 60 pounds to play a role. All he does is act, and if you can do that, you don't need an accent or any other Method crap.  Watch Caine in Get Carter, and you'll see a great actor in a great movie based on a great crime novel.

Ted Lewis

And that brings me to the international crime fiction event of the year. This week I'll attend a launch for Syndicate Books, a new imprint that is releasing not only Get Carter (original title: Jack's Return Home) in the U.S. for the first time in decades, but a good chunk of rest of author Ted Lewis' oeuvre, including two more of the Jack Carter novels, some for the first time ever in the U.S.

This new edition of Get Carter includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the film adaptation that starred Caine.The novel earns a spot as one of Allan Guthrie's 200 Noirs (as does Lewis' Billy Rags, due as an e-book from Syndicate)  Eight more novels to look forward to from an author whose admirers include David Peace and Derek Raymond? I'm excited, and you should be, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Off the Cuff and on the road: Words and a picture

("We Drive By Night," Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Photo by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky)

Dietrich Kalteis discusses setting in his current Off the Cuff discussion, including some comments pertinent to his own novel Ride the Lightning, and once again, he illustrates the discussion with one of my noir photos.You can see the photo above; here's Dietrich:

"For me, Vancouver creates an interesting backdrop, partially because it hasn’t been overused. It’s also a busy seaport and tucked up against the US border, just begging for some crime fiction. Using where you live as a story’s setting makes it both easier for the writer and more convincing to the reader. When I wrote Ride the Lightning I also chose Vancouver because of the unusually high number of grow-ops here which served the story."

That tallied nicely with my remark when I wrote about the book that

"This novel, appropriately for a book under consideration at Detectives Beyond Borders, crosses the U.S.-Canada border, from Seattle to Vancouver, where most of the action happens. So Karl, the bounty hunter who loses his job and has to shift from the U.S. to Canada, muses that he expects less violence as compensation for his reduced income. (Karl states this in a more entertaining fashion, but this was an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed.)"

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bob and Ray meet Jim Thompson in Gerard Brennan's The Point

Lots of Northern Ireland crime writers take the Troubles and their aftermath as a subject. Here's Gerard Brennan's take in his delightful comic (and dark) novel. The Point (The scene is two young hoods surprised by a young woman as they burgle her apartment):

"`The IRA knows a lot about you, wee girl,' Paul said. `You better stop what you're doing.'

"`What are you talking about?' she asked.

...

"Brian shoved him ... `What the fuck was that for?' Paul asked.

"`You know what it was for.'

"`Ach, fuck off. Maybe if she thought the IRA was really watching her she'd make an effort to do a dish or two. You saw the state of the place.'"

At the risk of wallowing in identity politics, Brennan is a few years younger than, say, his compatriot crime writers Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville. I wonder if that renders him more able to joke about the Troubles because he's farther removed from them. I'll have to ask Brennan about this the next time I see him. In any case, The Point is Bob and Ray meets Jim Thompson, Give it a look.

============== 

Gerard Brennan will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Stuart Neville's Ratlines: Out of a different past

Several of Northern Ireland's brilliant cohort of crime writers write not just about their land's sectarian Troubles, but also about the conflict's afterlife (or persistence, if one prefers). Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey, and Anthony Quinn are just three who demonstrate that the Troubles continue to reverberate after the Good Friday Agreement.

Stuart Neville became an instant leader of the group with The Ghosts of Belfast, whose very title proves the continuing sensitivity of the subject. (The 2009 novel was released in the U.K. under the powerful but less politically charged title The Twelve.)

Neville crossed over the border and further into the past for his 2013 novel Ratlines.  The time is 1963, the occasion the murder of a Nazi given shelter in Ireland after World War II, and the novel's title a reference to the networks by which Nazis were helped to safety and, in some cases, to prosperity after the war.

Neville does a nice job imagining and investigating the sorts of corruption attendant on such arrangements, and not just the moral corruption that offers succor to evil men, either.  This novel's world has plenty of room for theft, dishonesty, and violence among the criminals themselves, and among the people who pursue them as well.  The book also contains flashes of just the sort of agony that haunted Fegan, the ex-IRA killer of The Ghosts of Belfast.   And, though I have never talked politics with Neville, I suspect after reading Ratlines that he is no fan of nationalism of whatever kind.

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

Stuart Neville will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Adrian McKinty's Cold Cold Ground: Life during sort-of wartime

I've just reread The Cold Cold Ground, by longtime DBB favorite Adrian McKinty, and, by god, that back-cover blurb from Detectives Beyond Borders holds up:

"The Cold Cold Ground is very possibly the best crime novel published in English in 2012."

The book's U.S. edition contains an author's note that goes a long way to explaining the book's richness:

"I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere, attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal."

Your job, readers, is to name novels or stories similarly rich in telling, surprising detail, particularly those set during wartime or other turbulent circumstances.

*

The Cold Cold Ground is Book One in McKinty's Troubles trilogy, featuring Sean Duffy of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Read the first five chapters of Book Four at McKinty's blog.

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

Adrian McKinty will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Irelandpanel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

An off-kilter noir photo at Off the Cuff

(Photograph by Peter Rozovsky,
your humble blogkeeper)

Once again Dietrich Kalteis and friends sit for a chat among authors at Kalteis'  Off the Cuff site, this time to talk about character, dialogue, and dialect. Here's a sample of the discussion:

"Back to the accent/dialect question: you can do more with it - with perhaps more reader interest - than simply using a typical vocabulary or syntax of a place. You can use dialect-like giveaways and ‘verbal tics’ to reveal many aspects of character, while also making your characters separate and distinct from one another."

Read the complete discussion at Dietrich's place under the heading Off the Cuff 5.

*

Kalteis demonstrates once again that the right side of his brain works as well as the left. He's a novelist, he also has an eye for photography, and he again illustrates Off the Cuff with one of my noir photo (left).  Here are the first two noir shots of mine that he used (click the link, then scroll down)  and, if you're on Facebook, here are all my noir shots.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014