Detectives Beyond Borders

The Gat in the Hat

2012-01-28T00:02:00.004-05:00

Someone with too much time on his or her hands and access to Twitter asks folks to think up Dr. Seuss crime fiction titles. One Twitterer came up with "I Can Shoot With My Eyes Shut!", for example, and another offered "Horton Heard A Who But Won't Tell The Police Unless He's Put In Witness Protection," while crime writer Wallace Stroby submitted "Son of Sam I Am."

I have a special fondness for two of my own entries. One is "The Gat in the Hat," the other a story about grifts, cons, and inexperienced safe crackers: "Green Yeggs and Scams."

If you're already on Twitter and not worried about Twitter agreeing to comply with government censorship. go to #SeussCrimeFiction

In sight or out of sight: What's the best way to be a fictional detective?

2012-01-27T18:14:00.001-05:00

"You have to be able to walk around in plain sight. What I’m talking about is being invisible in front of everyone’s eyes. You have to learn to be a ghost, and not like Casper. I mean fucking gone. ... Only your words will make you invisible. You got to make people uncomfortable, make them want to look somewhere else. And I’m not talking about the ‘Fuck you’ shit you tried. When you want to stay invisible, you have to use remarks that put people on the defence. Put something mean and uncomfortable out there, then fade back. People will be glad to ignore you then."

— Mike Knowles, In Plain Sight

"Yes, and your office should be in a Georgian or very modernistic building in the Sunset Eighties. Suite Something-or-other. And your clothes should be jazzy, very jazzy indeed, Steve. To be inconspicuous in this town is to be a busted flush."

— Raymond Chandler, "The King in Yellow"

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More on Mike Knowles' literary caffeine jolts

2012-01-26T20:58:00.003-05:00

I'm making my way through Mike Knowles' Wilson novels at a good clip. I read Darwin's Nightmare and Grinder earlier this week, and I thought I'd post a few thoughts before going back and finishing In Plain Sight, the third in the series (A fourth book, Never Play Another Man's Game, is due in the spring.)

Readers who like Richard Stark's Parker might like these books. Same with readers of Andrew Vachss' Burke novels or Mickey Spillane. The books might also appeal to fans of The Fugitive or Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

The books demonstrate that the tried-and-true hardboiled gambit of describing urban change and decay has life left in it. Knowles' descriptions -- of Hamilton, Ontario -- work better than many because Wilson, a tough, free-lance fixer and investigator who works for criminals, gets behind the faded doors and shabby facades and meets the people urban exodus has left behind.

Wilson inhabits a violent world, but Knowles can write cold, cruel, heart-rending scenes without having his characters resort to physical violence.

Knowles is good on the psychological and temperamental flaws and strengths of his characters. Igor, a violent, unhinged, impotent Russian gangster, is not nearly as funny as that description makes him sound.

A final thought: the three books have Wilson on the run from a series of nemeses, sticking to the outsider's role that appeals both to him and to the criminals (or cops) who put him to work. He plays off one set of dangerous characters against another. He reflects on the harsh but vital lessons he learned from his criminal uncle. The books so far are like caffeine jolts, but how long will Knowles be able to keep up the energy? What will he do to keep the series fresh?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Proofread your favorite songs!

2012-01-25T14:58:00.003-05:00

While listening to "Just One of Those Things" this week ("It was just one of those things ... One of those bells that now and then rings"; the last word should be ring; the subject, those bells, is plural), I thought, "What other songs commit sins that would earn the lyricist or singer a slap on the wrist from a fastidious editor?

The two I always notice are "Bitch," in which Mick Jagger sings that his heart is beating louder than "a big bass drum," pronouncing bass as if he meant the fish rather than the deep musical tone, and "Jet," in which Paul McCartney thought the major was a lady suffragette, pronouncing the last syllable with great emphasis and with a hard g. (I presume the mispronunciation is by way of establishing emphatic contrast with the j sound of Jet at the beginning of the line and is therefore deliberate. I mean, the man's a knight of the British Empire. He has to be able to speak proper English, doesn't he?)

What such transgressions do your favorite songs commit in the name of poetic, melodic, or lyrical license?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Darker than Parker

2012-01-24T15:53:00.005-05:00

Mike Knowles, author of four novels about a criminal mercenary and off-the-books investigator named Wilson, told an interviewer a few years ago that

"For a while, I had been noticing that most popular crime fiction was starting to narrow its focus. There were a lot of do gooder reporters, police procedurals, and smart talking private eyes. What there weren’t enough of were the mean, pulpy, hard-boiled crime novels I read as a kid. I set out to write the kind of book it was getting harder to find."

I've just found his books, and I can tell you that the action never stops. Wilson is always in motion: on the job, evading pursuers, recovering from injuries, planning his next move. He's a bit like Mike Hammer but without the hyperventilating political rants. He's darker than Richard Stark's Parker, as if Parker had descended a circle or two into the world where Andrew Vachss' Burke lives. And he and his creator are Canadian! I'm proud that my polite, self-effacing native land has given the world such dark, action-filled crime writing.

I've read Darwin's Nightmare and a good piece of Grinder. In Plain Sight is up next, and Never Play Another Man's Game is out this spring. If you can wait until May, Knowles's publisher, ECW, will release an omnibus edition containing the first three books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Our decaying changing language

2012-01-23T16:38:00.003-05:00

Why say "the number of murders is up" when "the murder rate is up" has the zingy cachet of science, rate conveying an aura of precision because of its association with statistics and physics?

Because a word's meaning has a way of haunting those who are ignorant of it. I recently came across the following:

“When adjusting for population, City X’s homicide rate was three times higher than City Y’s.”

That’s redundant, and it indicates that the writer does not know what rate means. Rate in this context adjusts for population by definition, 8 per 100,000 or whatever. The most useful of several definitions of rate is this, from Merriam-Webster:

a : a quantity, amount, or degree of something measured per unit of something else

Use rate as if it meant simply quantity or number, and you may be taking part in the evolution of English. But for now, at least, you'll be using the word incorrectly — and driving me nuts.

Read an October DBB post for another example of the kind of redundancy that results when writers remember a word but forget what it means.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

James McClure on television

2012-01-22T15:09:00.004-05:00

A skeptical commenter yesterday asked for a few more excerpts to justify my enthusiasm for James McClure. I'll suggest an entire category: McClure's descriptions of South African landscapes. Here's one, from The Sunday Hangman:

"Apart from some thorn scrubs, there were no trees except those gathered together for a definite purpose: to shade a tin-roofed homestead, or to provide a trading store with its windbreak. The sort of God's own country where every farmer began his day with a very deep sigh."

The same commenter mentioned that television came to South Africa only in 1976 and presumed that McClure's novels reflected this. I had noticed no such reflection, I replied. But when I picked up The Sunday Hangman to resume my reading, I came across a series of comic set pieces involving television — no surprise in a novel published in 1977 and possibly written in the crucial television year:

"`Tomorrow night the TV's in Afrikaans,' she said, keeping hold of his hand, and they went automatically through to the kitchen for their coffee. `They've invited us again, so can you come over?'

"`What's on?'

"`An Australian baritone singing translations form real Italian opera. I'm going.'

"That, thought Strydom, was exactly what the old Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had warned against when describing television as the Devil's instrument. Not once that week had they sat down together as man and wife and talked over his more interesting cases."

Elsewhere we get scenes of Strydom haggling over the price and features of a television set and amazing onlookers with the weird results of his fiddling with the color dials. But that one excerpt will suggest that McClure has an eye for social history and gentle comedy as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More James McClure on the way

2012-01-21T00:28:00.002-05:00

I'd already known that Alan Glynn's Bloodland and Donald Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished were due in February. I now have in my hands Soho Crime's upcoming reissue of James McClure's The Sunday Hangman (1977), fifth of the late, great South African crime writer's eight Kramer and Zondi mysteries, and it's due on the 7th. February is the coolest month.

I've read four of Kramer and Zondi novels, and I know of nothing else like them in crime fiction. The writing sparkles with the wit and concision of the best traditional mysteries even though the subject matter is sometimes as dark as that of the darkest hard-boileds. The social criticism is of a deftness that Stieg Larsson could never have managed if he'd written a thousand books, and the sympathetic eye for character is something like Andrea Camilleri's.

It helps that McClure had a dramatic background against which to set his stories: apartheid-era South Africa. They pair a white Afrikaner police lieutenant (Kramer) and his Zulu assistant (Zondi), and McClure does not spare the reader the harsh words that swirl around, about, and sometimes between the two.

"Perhaps the most surprising aspect of McClure's apartheid-era novels to readers almost forty years later," I wrote after reading The Steam Pig, "is the blend of breezy banter in the English style with acute portraits of the period's ugliness. The result may shock today's more sensitive readers, at least American ones, but I call it an impressive achievement."

So I'm excited about The Sunday Hangman. Here are two few samples that ought to give a fair idea why:

"The veld all around them was as parched as an old tennis ball and much the same color."

and

"Tollie Erasmus looked at the room in which he was about to die, and saw there the story of his life. Nothing had ever turned out quite the way he'd imagined it."

Good stuff, ja?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Lawyers and ***holes: Carofiglio and Higgins

2012-01-20T00:23:00.008-05:00

A typical passage in George V. Higgins' Cogan's Trade runs thus:

"I swore when I got out I was gonna make every minute count, the rest of my life. ... And am I doing it? No. Of course I’m not. I’m just as big an asshole now as I was before.”

That's one character, Amato. But assholes run through the novel like the motto theme through a Romantic symphony:

"`Some time, I hope,' Russell said, “you got over being an asshole.”

“`I’m not sure,' Frankie said."

And that sort of self-doubt and introspection, though expressed in earthy terms, is what readers must mean when they praise Higgins for making even violent lowlife characters human.

I remarked in yesterday's post that Higgins has a surprisingly large bibliography for an author so strongly associated with a single novel (The Friends of Eddie Coyle.) An alert commenter pointed out that a movie version of Cogan's Trade is due out this year, starring Brad Pitt.

Here's a quick rundown of Higgins' novels that may prove useful to readers unfamiliar with his work beyond The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

***

Higgins is not the only lawyer-turned-crime writer whose work I'm reading these days. Gianrico Carofiglio's Temporary Perfections offers a typical Carofiglio observation that may help explain why he no longer practices law.

Carofiglio's protagonist, Guido Guerrieri, is called on to defend a young man who tries to kill himself by turning on a gas oven in a sealed room, is rescued by carabinieri (Italy's military/civil police), and unexpectedly finds himself in legal trouble:

"They found the young man unconscious on the floor but, miraculously, still in and of this world. In other words, they saved his life. But, after checking with the magistrate on duty at the time, they also arrested him. On charges of mass murder."

The gentle dissection of the absurdity of the Italian law in question that follows is, in its mix of bemusement, matter-of-fact analysis, and quiet crusading, typical of the Guerrieri books. I once asked if Guerrieri might be the world's sanest crime fiction protagonist. That was just another way of saying he might be the most likable and endearingly human.
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Cogan's Trade by George V.Higgins

2012-01-19T01:57:00.001-05:00

Here's another American book, but one I'm reading thanks to a pair of European authors.

Cogan's Trade is George V. Higgins' third novel, following The Friends of Eddie Coyle by four years. Like that venerated classic, Cogan's Trade is almost all dialogue as it begins, punctuated by brief descriptions to establish a scene. I realized a few chapters into this book what a brave move this was on Higgins' part. Write chapters and chapters of dialogue, with little or no intervening description, and you'd better be damned sure that dialogue can hold the reader's attention. How much of the dialogue you come across in your reading is that good?

So far, it works. So, who are those European authors? Garbhan Downey and Bill James. Downey offered some thoughtful replies to critical comments I posted about The Friends of Eddie Coyle a few years ago. Among other things, he expanded my awareness of Higgins' work beyond that one book, which is all I had known of Higgins before.

The other is Bill James. My post this week about James' new novel, Vacuum, took me back to my 2009 interview with James, which included his declaration that

"I’ve said it boringly often, but the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation."

***

Here's a list of Higgins' novels -- more than twenty, a surprisingly long bibliography for an author who died youngish and is so widely known for his just one book, and that his first.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Christa Faust NSFW* update

2012-01-17T23:17:00.007-05:00

Double-D Double Cross is the book Raymond Chandler would have written had his protagonist been a high-libido lesbian who kept a sex toy rather than a bottle of whiskey handy in the office.

Actually, the opening chapters of this raunchy slice of hardboiled, over-the-lop lesbian erotica by DBB friend Christa Faust deserve the Chandler invocation more than some books do. Faust cops a line from Farewell, My Lovely but, more than that, the book is filled with touches of the sympathy that characterized Chandler and bits of righteous anger, too.

And parts of those opening chapters are just plain funny:

"She was the type who got all juicy over the idea of slumming with a rough and tumble blue-collar butch like me, but couldn’t stop lecturing me about how I was internalizing oppression because I cut my hair like Tony Curtis."

========

* Not Safe for Work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

New Bill James novel arrives!!!

2012-01-16T01:32:00.014-05:00

Bill James' twenty-eighth Harpur and Iles novel is in hand, and all is right with the world.

Vacuum has drug dealer Mansel Shale finding religion and stepping back from (though not abandoning) his trade in his grief over the shooting deaths of his wife and son. Manic ACC Desmond Iles and scheming DCS Colin Harpur worry about solving the crime. More than that, they wonder whether Shale's retreat will shatter the fragile peace with rival dealer Ralph Ember and bring chaos to the streets.

That's the story through the first three-plus chapters. As usual with James, though, the real pleasure is the dark, rich, sometimes very funny prose. Here's a sample:

"This pair had to deliver peace on the streets and preserve it: no turf fights, no drive-by salvoes to hail the New Year and/or mark the Queen's official birthday, no domestic torchings, no body-part severances or desocketed eyes. Desocketed eyes really riled Iles. `Desocketed eyes get up my nose,' he'd told Harpur a while ago."

The opening chapters have a bit more of a contemporary edge than other recent books in the series; James' half-mocking portrayal of the rival drug gangs in terms straight off the business page is more acidic than usual, and the author has not neglected the times in which he writes:

"People had less money, yes. As a result, many prioritized their spending more ruthlessly than before, went with absolute, steely dedication for the essentials. That is, they lashed out generously on stuff which would for a while blur the crisis pain and complement their Jobseeker's Allowance, although, of course, it ate into their Jobseeker's Allowance, because prices of the commodities stayed high on account of this increased demand."

So my early verdict is that Vacuum may turn out to be one of the stronger recent entries in the series.

***

I've long been in awe of the Harpur and Iles novels. If you don't want to take my word for it, listen to Ken Bruen, who

"abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent."

or Tim Hallinan, who wrote that

"If I were told I could only read five writers for the remainder of my life, and I had to name them at that moment, both Bill James and Anthony Powell would be on the list."

Here's a checklist of the Harpur and Iles novels. While deciding which ones to look for, read my 2009 interview with Bill James, Part I and Part II.

***

Vacuum is published by the Creme de la Crime imprint, now a branch of Severn House, about which Martin Edwards had some nice things to say last year. Join me in thanking them for having the good taste to publish Bill James.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

McKinty in America

2012-01-15T00:52:00.008-05:00

Like a wide-eyed immigrant clutching his flat cap and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his Aran jumper as he gazes upon Manhattan's skyline for the first time, Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has landed in America, at least electronically.

This hard-hitting and very human crime novel, published by the wise and discerning folks at Serpent's Tail, is now available in the U.S. for your Kindle (or free downloadable Kindle application). That's good news; the book made my best-of-2011 list because I read an advance copy just before the New Year. It will surely be one of this year's best as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

History, humor and violence

2012-01-14T00:06:00.004-05:00

How does an author of historical fiction evoke momentous events and famous names without growing turgidly self-important?

James R. Benn' s most recent Billy Boyle mystery, A Mortal Terror, opens with a giant wink to the reader that promises a fair bit of fun along with the human drama and military history: "Kim Philby owed me one."

That's a wonderfully disarming invocation of one of the twentieth century's most notorious celebrity spies.

***

Back in the American West, I've read a few more of Edward A. Grainger's Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories, and I can add pulp appeal to the reasons crime readers might like these Westerns:

"Cash cleared leather first and opened a dark hole in the rapscallion's forehead. A third blast came through the shattered door and then a stream of small fire joined in the dance."

"Miles rolled sideways, ignoring the pain, and popped the third man in the right eye, sending chunks of brain out the back of the man's head."

If you like Mickey Spillane's action but are leery of his politics, try some Cash Laramie!
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

DBB reads a Western!

2012-01-12T16:08:00.002-05:00

Edward A. Grainger's Cash Laramie stories are full of mysterious origins, lawmen both upright and crooked, cowboys and Indians, and saloons with bat-wing doors.

But they're also hard-boiled crime stories, and why not? What is Sam Spade but a lone wolf riding into town wearing a trench coat and a fedora?

The stories portray a West more fraught with racial conflict than I expected from Westerns, and they treat sex more frankly. At the same time, there is nothing jokingly or preciously revisionist or politically correct about them; they feel like old-time Westerns.

But they feel like crime stories, too. So, while Grainger pays tribute to such Western classics as The Searchers, "Maggie's Promise" gives chilling new meaning to the line "It was a wandering daughter job."

I'll read the first collection of Laramie/Miles stories next, and I'll be thinking about Westerns that might appeal to crime-fiction readers. Any suggestions?
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Allan Guthrie's black shorts

2012-01-11T15:32:00.003-05:00

Allan Guthrie, that sharp noir author, scholar, editor, agent, and impresario, is back with a collection of cheap shorts.

Hilda's Big Day Out offers four gut- and heart-wrenching slabs of noir, including the title story, which is atypical in at least two ways: It has an arguably happy ending, and its narrator is a dog.

Of the remaining tales, "Bye Bye Baby," which gave rise to Guthrie's novella of the same name, may wring tears of pity from even the hardest-hearted reader. Like David Goodis' novel Cassidy's Girl, its noirness inheres not in a tragic ending, but rather in an inconclusive sort of non-ending. Not every tragedy has the easy out of catharsis or death. Sometimes the nightmare just goes on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nipples and Spinoza

2012-01-09T17:19:00.005-05:00

Donald E. Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished put me in a Hard Case frame of mind. I'm reading Lester Dent's Honey in His Mouth now, with Westlake's Memory on deck.

Dent wrote Honey in His Mouth in 1956, toward the end of a career spent largely writing Doc Savage, and the book is full of South American dictators, tight dresses that stay on, and frank one-word delineations of what lies beneath. It also shows an intellectual streak reminiscent of Woody Allen's essays and hard to imagine in popular culture today:

"Harsh listened with a black expression. Jesus, he thought, who had ever heard of such stuff being sprung on a man. However, Miss Muirz had a reading voice that was low and cultured and musical, and her dress had an interesting way of snuggling up when she took a deep breath so that her nipples stuck out at him. But he did not care greatly for Spinoza."

The book is obviously a product of its time, in other words, but without seeming dated. How does Dent manage this? With a light touch, a wild plot, and a grifter protagonist, Walter Harsh, refreshingly upfront about his life's goal: money.

More, perhaps, later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

David Goodis on drinking

2012-01-08T15:14:00.003-05:00

Its plot wanders, and some of its dialogue is wooden, but these two bits of high melodrama from David Goodis' 1951 novel Cassidy's Girl are worth the price of admission:

"She sat there with an empty glass in front of her. She was looking at the glass as though it were the page of a book and she were reading a story."

and

"`You're young and you're little and it's a shame.'

“`What's a shame?'

“`Drinking. You shouldn't drink like that.” He raised his hand slowly and tried to form it into a fist so he could hit it on the table. His hand fell limply against the table and he said, `You want a drink?'”

Heartbeaking, and good evidence for the proposition that compassion is an essential ingredient of noir.
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

In the beginning, there was Hammett

2012-01-06T19:09:00.004-05:00

"And I praise the dead who have already died, more than the living who are still alive."

— Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) 4:2

In these troubled times, when uncertainty walks to and fro in the land and up and down in it (and when outside commitments again cut into my reading and blogging time), I seek consolation in scripture, and I open those books from which everything that followed derives.

Take the beginning of "The Big Knock-Over":

"I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy's dive.

"Paddy — an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain — showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:

"`Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send 'em over for life in the end.'"

What does that passage give us? Lean, smart, tough-guy prose, of course, the best that anyone has written in crime fiction, but also deadpan, almost surreal humor: What is someone named Paddy doing with a nickname like "the Mex," and vice versa? I'd also argue that Hammett's granting Paddy a personality and a prominent role in the scene, and thereby contributing to the illusion of a coherent, believable world and not just a cops-and-robbers story, is a dim, distant forerunner of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's similar accomplishment. Far-fetched? It's not the most outrageous claim ever made on behalf of a foundational text.

Then there's the nickname itself. Strip "The Big Knock-Over" of everything but its monikers, and it's still better than most crime fiction that went before and came after: Itchy Maker. Bluepoint Vance. The Dis-and-Dat Kid. Spider Girrucci. Alphabet Shorty McCoy. Bull McGonickle, "still pale from fifteen years in Joliet." Toby the Lugs, "Bull's running mate." L.A. Slim, "from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand-dollar bill sewed in the each shoulder of his coat." Big Flora. The Motsa Kid.

That's at least as good as all the begats and lists of warriors in those other foundation texts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Politics and crime

2012-01-05T03:37:00.010-05:00

In honor of this week's first vote in the long American presidential election season, some quick remarks about two crime novels shot through with American politics.

It's a bit scary to think that Bill Clinton loved Ross Thomas' writing, as Tony Hiss reports in his introduction to The Fools in Town are on Our Side, Thomas' 1970 novel of political manipulation. The book's central plot line is the deliberate corruption of an American city in order to facilitate its political takeover. Allies are surrendered up for humiliation and ruin in order to lull the opposition in complacency

Why is this scary? Because Clinton, whatever one thinks of his policies, was widely admired and detested for being such a superb politician. How much did he learn from Thomas? How much of a kindred spirit did he recognize in Thomas' fixers and PR men?

The Comedy is Finished, due out next month from Hard Case Crime, is Donald Westlake's last novel. The story is that Westlake wrote the book decades ago but decided against publishing it in the 1980s for fear that readers would think it too similar to Martin Scorcese's 1983 movie The King of Comedy. Westlake apparently gave Max Allan Collins a manuscript of the book, and Collins passed it on to Hard Case, so the world gets one more novel from the prolific Westlake, who died Dec. 31, 2008.

Westlake's comedian is Koo Davis, a star of radio, television, and stage shows who made his name on USO tours during the Korean War and continues into the Vietnam era, filled all the while with questions about the world and how it's changing around him.

The format allows Westlake much room for amused observations about American entertainment of the 1950s from the perspective of the late 1970s. Unsurprisingly for a book set in the '70s, a kidnapping figures prominently. Davis' question-and-answer sessions with his kidnappers yield some unexpectedly moving introspection on his part and, I suspect, on Westlake's as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Alexander Cockburn visits the projects

2012-01-04T02:44:00.001-05:00

Alexander Cockburn's post-mortem attack on Christopher Hitchens appears in a column that includes a reference to "The EU `project,' a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with `iconic,' `meme,' `parse' and `narrative' ..."

Maj Sjöwall might disagree, because the Project is what she called the crime novels (The Laughing Policeman, Roseanna, et al.) she wrote with her husband, Per Wahlöö. The Project, she says in a BBC documentary about Nordic crime fiction (go to the 25:30 mark), "was our way of creating a realistic crime novel that would look at society from a left-wing perspective."

The Project sought to expose the lies and hypocrisies of Sweden's post-war utopia: "The fact of the matter is that the so-called `welfare state' abounds with sick, poor and lonely people living at best on dog food who are left uncared for until they waste away and die in their rat-hole tenements."

I'd have thought Cockburn would like that sort of thing. I guess one's feeling about project depends on who's doing the projecting.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

“Tell him he can have my title, but I want it back in the morning”

2012-01-03T05:48:00.010-05:00

That Jack Dempsey-attributed quotation marks today's release of Affairs of Steak, fifth of Julie Hyzy's White House Chef mysteries. I claim a kind of sous-chef's role in bringing this confection to the literary table, having suggested to Hyzy a title that, in a modified version, made it into print.

Naturally I liked my original suggestion (Secretary of Steak), though the final version is pretty good, too. But I like the title of the first in the series even better: State of the Onion.

The titles work like miniature deadpan jokes, with serious openings that get you thinking of grave political matters, then hit you with a comic punch line. What are your favorite funny titles? What makes them funny?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nordic not-really Noir: The BBC documentary

2012-01-02T06:41:00.014-05:00

(Cheerful blogger with non-
gloomy Icelandic crime writer
Arnaldur Indriðason)

Hat tip to Adrian McKinty, who posted a link to the BBC documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction. A few comments:

First, the title. Alliteration to the contrary, none of the authors interviewed or discussed really writes noir, not Stieg Larsson, not Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, not in the books of hers that I've read, Karin Fossum. The central characters are not losers. The books are about anger, compassion, isolation, or resignation. They don't encompass the essentially noir emotion of depair. Gloom, yes. Doom, no.

Val McDermid noted the cold, gloomy landscape in Nordic crime writing and suggested this makes a wonderful stage for crime. She gets no quarrel from me. Here's some of what I wrote about Arnaldur Indriðason in the book Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction:

"People disappear in Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but the soil has a way of yielding them up again. An earthquake cracks the land, drains a lake, and uncovers a body; a victim turns up on a construction-site excavation; in spring, corpses come to light in a lake, where winter ice had concealed all signs of their disappearance. ... The landscape swallows up victims, whether of murder, accident or natural disaster; geological disruption lays them bare again."

Iceland, says one expert interviewed for the BBC piece, is "a place where people can disappear." Rozovsky said it first.

I was glad to hear McDermid note that Arnaldur's books are shot through with "these dark and awful bits of humor." And I loved a remark from Håkan Nesser, always amusing in a way not normally associated with Scandinavians, that "We're not supposed to talk like I do, we're supposed to just sit there and stare blankly out into the, whatever, darkness."

The program offered lots of Larsson but also a bit of Ibsen, intriguingly citing the nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright as a prototype for Scandinavian crime fiction's tendency to explore the outward, social manifestations of inner trauma. Jo Nesbø, among the program's featured authors, numbered Ibsen among his influences when he spoke with Detectives Beyond Borders last year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Detectives beyond the stars

2012-01-01T06:53:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year to all. For the year’s first post, I’ll cross borders I’ve rarely crossed here at DBB: those to science fiction.

For all the usual sci-fi hater's reasons, I’ve never been attracted to the genre: It’s silly. It’s far-fetched. It takes itself way too seriously. But I’d read good things about Alfred Bester, who wrote some classics in the field in the 1950s. I figured that if William Gibson thought he was cool, the man might be worth a look.

Neil Gaiman’s introduction to Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination (also published as Tiger! Tiger!) says Bester “was one of the only—perhaps the only—SF writers to be revered by the old timers (`First SF’), by the radical `New Wave’ of the 1960s and early 1970s, and, in the 1980s, by the `cyberpunks.’”

That’s good. So is this:

“When he died in 1987, three years into the flowering of cyberpunk, it was apparent that the 1980s genre owed an enormous debt to Bester—and to this book in particular. ... But what makes The Stars My Destination more interesting—and ten years on, less dated—than most cyberpunk, is watching Gully Foyle become a moral creature.”

So, how does the novel look so far? It's got a hell of a lot more humor than I expected, and that counts for much:

"A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for help with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher, seventy feet removed from his lab bench."

He exercises that humor in paragraphs full of absurd situations, comically open-ended tales, and words that tumble over themselves in the verbal equivalent of a long, cackling tenor saxophone solo:

"Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space, although many experts and fools had tried. Helmut Grant, for one, who spent a month memorizing the co-ordinates of a jaunte stage on the moon and visualized every mile of the two hundred and forty thousand-mile trajectory from Times Square to Kepler City. Grant jaunted and disappeared. They never found him. They never found Enzio Dandridge, a Los Angeles revivalist looking for Heaven; Jacob Maria Freundlich, a paraphysicist who should have known better than to jaunte into deep space searching for metadimensions; Shipwreck Cogan, a professional seeker after notoriety; and hundreds of others, lunatic-fringers, neurotics, escapists, and suicides."

I don't know if I'll finish the novel; the above is just from the prologue, after all. But I love that paragraph.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A late addition to the year's-best list

2011-12-31T01:17:00.010-05:00

I was premature a few weeks ago when I listed the best crime fiction I'd read this year.

Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year is more historical fiction than crime fiction, if one must squeeze it into a genre, but it's mainly a fine, penetrating, and moving piece of fiction, no need for labels, and it may be the best novel I've read since I started this crime-fiction thing five years ago. Its hero is a coroner investigating a murder, so crime is as good a label as any other.

It's also a serious and frightening meditation on the dangers of faction, fanaticism, and hypocrisy (it's set as religious war moves ever closer in seventeenth-century England), on the blessings of true charity, on the elevating powers of love religious and sexual.

Finally, it's beautifully written, not a word wasted, description reinforcing narrative, plots reinforcing one another, character, plot and setting of a dense, immensely affecting piece. And how can even such a hero as Atticus Finch be as admirable and noble a character as Bennett's loving, strong, vulnerable, wise, compassionate, truth-seeking John Brigge?

I once wrote that The Coffee Trader, David Liss' novel of love, religious prejudice and commodities trading in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, offered the most thorough, convincing fictional world I had ever entered. Bennett's book stands besides it, it not outright elbowing it to one side.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Rat without a pack

2011-12-30T01:05:00.006-05:00

Adrian McKinty invokes Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in his current post (the better to bash Paul Hewson over his close-to-the-ground little head with).

But Sinatra didn’t need that gang of finger-snapping nuchschleppers. Look what he could do when he got together with a real talent.

Ronan Bennett's historical crime novel earns coveted DBB rating

2011-12-29T15:09:00.003-05:00

I may have found the perfect historical novel.

Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year (2004) answers every qualm I've had about the genre. It's saturated with history without hitting the reader over the head with names and dates. Its plots and subplots are inextricably bound up with the historical issues at hand (religious and political strife in seventeenth-century England), so there is no tension between history and mystery.

The dialogue has the barest hint of archaism to it, light enough not to be obtrusive, but just enough to remind readers that the story's time is not their own. The protagonist, a discreetly Catholic coroner and civic official named John Brigge, is one of the most admirable characters in all of fiction, at least through the book's first two-thirds or so. There's even a murder mixed in.

I do much of my reading late at night, so I could well rate books by how late they keep me up. Havoc, in Its Third Year receives the first-ever, surely soon to be coveted 6+ rating, for keeping me up past 6 a.m.

***

Bennett is from Northern Ireland and, as he did in his novel Zugzwang, set in Russia in 1914, he works in references to Ireland. Here's my favorite so far:

“Indeed, sir. Many have it that the air of the fens is notorious and unclean, and the life there so uncivil that people say, to describe a fall in the world, that a man goes from the farm to the fen and from the fen to Ireland.”

What's my line?

2011-12-27T23:25:00.010-05:00

The following line of dialogue is part of a crime novel I have read recently:

“`God knows how many they've killed. It's Bloody Sunday all over again.’"

Name the countries of a) the author’s birth and b) the story’s setting along with the historical event to which the line refers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Brian McGilloway, family man, plus a question for readers

2011-12-26T14:54:00.000-05:00

Brian McGilloway is turning into a master of family melodrama.

McGilloway, author of four books about Irish Police Inspector Benedict Devlin and of one standalone novel, has always given Devlin more of a domestic life than most detective protagonists have. That life is on the whole happy, but not at all sentimentally and unrelievedly so.

In The Rising, the latest Devlin book, especially, McGilloway brilliantly captures the fragile texture of tense domestic interaction, the well-prepared argument that vanishes when the recipient does not react the way the arguer planned. It's exasperating when it happens in real life but thrilling to read when an author captures it well.

Who else does this? What other crime writers give their protagonists convincing family lives and make those lives integral parts of the story?

***

The Rising is no mere soap opera, though, and I'll have more in a future post. For now, though, I liked this not so veiled allusion to Northern Ireland's paralmilitaries and their current aims, tactics, and activities now that the Troubles are over:

"‘They’ve started an anti-drugs organization called The Rising. Small fry really, but they’ve learned one good lesson from their previous allegiances: you want political clout in a community, you give the people what they want. They reckon if the local communities see them ‘dealing’ with the drugs problem, they’ll gain some electoral support.’"

Andrea Camilleri in my newspaper

2011-12-25T06:43:00.005-05:00

My review of The Potter's Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian crime novels about Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the first in which Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Typically for a Montalbano novel,” I write, “the investigation becomes one of mob connections, heated emotions, and family secrets. But crime, investigation, and solution are the least of the Montalbano novels. Every word is a commentary, sometimes wry, sometimes righteously angry, sometimes touching, on the protagonist’s political, social, professional, and personal worlds. To choose just one typical example, `Ingrid’s husband was a known ne’er-do-well, so it was only logical that he should turn to politics.'”

Read the full review, and learn how to impress your server the next time you visit an Italian restaurant.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What does history mean to you?

2011-12-24T01:07:00.003-05:00

The Charlie Stella interview to which I linked on Thursday is full of references to history.

"I prefer reading history-based novels (crime or otherwise), which is why Craig McDonald’s Lassister series strikes such a terrific chord with me," for example, or this:

" I’ll read pretty much anything that presents a past I see slipping away, but the new stuff that seems to top the bestseller lists I find mostly boring horseshit.

"That’s not to say the writing is bad. I’m sure some of it is wonderful, but if there is no or little basis in reality or some sense of history (i.e., the first three George V. Higgins novels – The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Digger’s Game and Cogan’s Trade – and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid)."

The comments hit home, not least because the books he names are not generally considered historical fiction, and because Higgins set his books, at least The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in his own time. So, what does history mean? A sense of time and a sense of place and a wide streak of romance as an optional extra.

Stella's comments neatly take in the attractions of one crime novel that I've read recently, one I'm reading now, and another I expect to read soon. Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground plunked me right into the middle of Belfast and environs at the time of the hunger strikes. Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang is doing something similar for St. Petersburg in 1914, and I have every hope that Donald Westlake's The Comedy is Finished will do the same for the late 1970s in the U.S.

What do those books have in common, other than gifted authors? Turbulent historical periods. Narration that enhances the personal aspects of the story (first-person in the McKinty and the Bennett, free indirect speech that's as personal as first-person in the Westlake.) An eye for what's particular to the period that never degenerates into mere sightseeing or detail mongering.

What does history mean to you when it comes to fiction? Stella talks about "history-based novels;" What do you think he means by that? Are "history-based novels" different from historical fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A bit of reading while you wait

2011-12-22T23:39:00.017-05:00

That outside commitment is cutting into my blogging again. In the meantime, here's an interview with Charlie Stella, who offers blunt assessments of American society, current crime writing, and himself.

And here's a link you might like if you've wondered where to start with Scandinavian crime fiction.

Finally, one of this blog's favorite commenters finds herself in some exciting company.

(Just opened my copy, and it appears she's not the only friend of DBB who had a share in this project. Patti Abbott, Loren Eaton, BV Lawson, Sean Patrick Reardon and Sandra Seamans, who has posted a kind word or two at Detectives Beyond Borders, contributed stories as well. Congratulations, gang! I look forward to reading your work.)

And, since this site is about writing by DBB commenters, Dana King's Wild Bill is now available.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

DBB meets Charlie Williams, or how to quit smoking

2011-12-21T22:07:00.007-05:00

(One book, two titles)

A fag is a cigarette in England, and cigarettes are a big part of Royston Blake's life. Blake is a nightclub doorman and the center of Charlie Williams' series set in the unidyllic small English town of Mangel.

But, as Williams' 2005 novel Fags and Lager (rereleased this year as Booze and Burn) opens, Blake is thinking of kicking the habit:

"I tapped me finger on the table for a bit, wondering whether to have a smoke or no. I’d been thinking about giving up of late. Fags just wasn’t same as they used to be. The baccy was all dry and manky and the filters seemed to hold onto half the goodness no matter how hard you sucked on em. Aye, I were wondering if it weren’t time to pack em in and move up to cigars full-time."

That's good stuff, but what hooked me was the first chapter's heading, a mock newspaper story in deadpan journalese that veers off into paranoid speculation humorous to the reader but presumably not to the person doing the speculating.

I've just started the book, but this looks like a good week for crime writers named Charlie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Charlie Stella: Good guys, bad guys, and bus drivers

2011-12-20T02:25:00.006-05:00

I'm back on my Charlie Stella kick, this time with Cheapskates, after having read Eddie's World, Jimmy Bench-Press and Charlie Opera what seems like ages ago but was really only last month. A few quick thoughts before I hop a bus home:

Stella's protagonists are men on the fringe of mob life, but they really are good guys. They're generally not killers, they're not especially vicious, and they have a touchingly old-fashioned yearning to do the right thing.

This is especially true of Reese Waters in Cheapskates, a convict who served time for stealing a car and who deeply wants to see that his cellmate is done right by. There's something to be said about a story with a good, old-fashioned good guy even if the good guy is a bad guy.

(Cheapskates is the fourth of Stella's novels, and Reese's mix of goodness and naivete reminds me of the title character in Charlie Opera, Stella's third book. So maybe the good-guy bad guy thing is characteristic of mid-period Stella.

(OK, enough with the theories. Back to the books.)

More to come, perhaps, on dialogue, humor, and violence, and how they can co-exist happily.

***

I hopped that bus home, took my seat, opened Cheapskates, and read:

“`There’s a brother with us upstate now was driving a bus,’ Mufasa said. `Killed his old lady when he found her cheating.’

“`Some handle it the wrong way, that kind of thing.’

"Mufasa sipped his coffee. `He used to tell us how people sometimes spit at him when he was driving.`”

“`Sometimes they do. That’s when the job becomes a test. Cops can find a reason to smack a guy spits at them. Bus drivers don’t have the same option.’”

I have never seen anyone spit at a bus driver, but I have seen drivers given the kind of crap no one should have to put up with. Next time I chat with one of these drivers, I'm recommending Charlie Stella.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Wee Rockets

2011-12-18T20:49:00.009-05:00

When Gerard Brennan published a fragment of Wee Rockets under a different title a few years ago, I threatened to call him, stick my arm through the phone, and grab him by his Carlsberg-swilling gullet until he revealed the fate of the story's scared, aimless, violent, barely teenage protagonists.

I'm pleased to report that the full book is available now, without violence and at a more than reasonable price, from Allan Guthrie's Blasted Heath. Visit the company's Web site to hear Brennan read from Wee Rockets and to accompany him on a stroll through the story's West Belfast millieu.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Best use of cold mutton fat in a crime novel?

2011-12-17T16:46:00.003-05:00

An outside commitment is cutting into my blogging time, so I trolled Detectives Beyond Borders archives for an old post with which to regale readers. I've just reread The Big Sleep, so the time seemed right to revive this post about Raymond Chandler's similes and metaphors. Extravagant similies are probably a close second to the trench coat and hat pulled down low as signifiers by which people think they know Chandler. But read the books, and you'll find that, wild though they may be, the similies amd metaphors are no mere jokes.

Here's one example from The Big Sleep:

"I got back to the living room Ohls had the boy up on his feet. The boy stood glaring at him with sharp black eyes in a face as hard and white as cold mutton fat."

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

I was pleased today to find an article about metaphors and grotesque characters in Farewell, My Lovely. (I am tearing through the novel now like a vote counter in the Minnesota Senate race. I'd be reading faster, but work interrupts.)

The article's author, William Marling, writes: "Perhaps the most literate hard-boiled novel ever written, Farewell explodes with metaphors and allusions. Their density is manifest on the first page." One nice touch: Marling sees in the tarantula/cake image I cited earlier this week an allusion to Great Expectations.

Farewell, My Lovely is home to one of the most celebrated Chandlerisms: "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window," but I like this, from the novel's second page:

Off-the-wall descriptions are easy; "white explosions on the toes" is poetic, surprising, and a nice mood-setter for the violence that must follow in a hard-boiled novel.

The description moves from head to toe, reaching a rhythmic climax in the bit about the white explosions. How many shaggy borsalino hats have you seen? How many shoe ornaments have you seen described as explosions and how many explosions by their color? Is surprise the key to vivid description and successful metaphor?

"He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes."

What would Philip Marlowe do?

2011-12-16T01:58:00.002-05:00

I wrote a few weeks ago that I'd chosen classic American crime fiction for my European trip. Here are three bits from The Big Sleep that reveal an interesting side to Philip Marlowe's nobility of spirit:

“Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can’t hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you’re black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you’re going to breathe right now, but that you’re sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you’re fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won’t be air you’ll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that’s what they call humane execution in our state now.”
*
“`That kind of thinking is police business, Marlowe. If Geiger’s death had been reported last night, the books could never have been moved from the store to Brody’s apartment. The kid wouldn’t have been led to Brody and wouldn’t have killed him. Say Brody was living on borrowed time. His kind usually are. But a life is a life.'

“`Right,' I said. `Tell that to your coppers next time they shoot down some scared petty larceny crook running away up an alley with a stolen spare.'”
*
“Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary, was out of circulation for a long, long time, even if they didn’t strap him in a chair over a bucket of acid. They wouldn’t, because he would take a plea and save the county money. They all do when they don’t have the price of a big lawyer.”

I wonder what law-and-order conservatives thought of Chandler then, and what they'd think of him now.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Cleverly does it

2011-12-15T01:44:00.003-05:00

Here's another crime novel I think I might like though it's a bit outside my normal range.

Barbara Cleverly's The Blood Royal is the ninth in her series about Joe Sandilands, a detective on London's Metropolitan Police who becomes involved in cases in Europe and in Great Britain's colonial possessions.

Cleverly sets the series in the 1920s, which gives her rich territory for international intrigue, what with Russian exiles, the fraying of the British Raj, and strife in Ireland. At least two of the three will apparently figure in this novel, set in 1922.

A chapter plus into the book, I like the rich though unobtrusive detail. I was especially pleased that the prologue, while obviously setting the stage for the story to come, did not batter me about the head with teasers and cliff-hangers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Paranoia strikes deep

2011-12-13T18:16:00.003-05:00

Eoin McNamee does not quite embrace paranoia as a subject the way Alan Glynn does, but everything in his 2004 novel The Ultras is, as the narrator remarks of a photograph, "rife with ambiguity."

Glynn handles the issue a bit more deftly than McNamee does, if only because he shows where McNamee often tells. The tells are a few key phrases, most obviously "You have a sense that ... " No one knows in this novel, they only sense.

Both authors recognize the chilling, alienating, mind-deadening effect of buzz words, regime change, brand, take it to the next level, change the conversation for Glynn; high-tech military jargon in McNamee's tale of a disgraced cop's obsession with a mysterious intelligence operative in 1970s Northern Ireland.

What are you favorite novels of paranoia? Come on; tell us. You know we'll find out anyway.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Best crime fiction I've read this year?

2011-12-11T23:44:00.005-05:00

Best crime fiction I read in 2011? Regular DBB readers won't be shocked to see Irish and South African novels on the list, namely, Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke, Bloodland by Alan Glynn, The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, and Dust Devils by Roger Smith. (Pure coincidence that those titles begin, respectively, with A, B, C, and D.) ed. note: OK, I'll break the sequence by adding McKinty's Falling Glass.

But I also read Derek Raymond for the first time in 2011, and I now understand why noir lovers love Raymond. In the Classics Division, I read four more books in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck series, and I'm awed at how apparently effortlessly they pulled off the sort of crime-cum-social criticism that many of their successors strive so laboriously for.

I liked Harri Nykanen's Raid and the Blackest Sheep for the deadpan humorous narration of its odd on-the-road story. And once I've strayed close to Scandinavian territory, Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis's The Boy in the Suitcase is moving, suspenseful, and well worth a read. The Dagger-winning Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, is a thriller with a conscience, yes, but mainly a pretty damn good thriller.

In America, I was pleased to enter Charlie Stella's rough, funny fictional world for the first time, but it's back abroad and to the alphabet theme for perhaps the year's most delightful crime fiction surprise, Anne Zouroudi.

I might not have read Zouroudi's Messenger of Athens had she not been on one of my panels at Bouchercon 2011, but boy, am I glad I did. Zouroudi is a master of slow, languid pace, of lives stoically lived, and of wrongs righted without sentimentality. What a sense of phsyical and human place.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Conditional surrender

2011-12-10T17:45:00.006-05:00

Here's a simple test of a theory of mine about grammar and language change. How simple? Just answer this question: What does the following sentence mean? Thanks.

Under a pending law, trash dumps will be permitted in every zoning district — even residential ones — statewide.

Eoin McNamee and Theodor Mommsen

2011-12-09T19:32:00.009-05:00

I can't tell you how good it is to be back in Philadelphia. But I can tell you that the arrival of a package of four novels by Eoin McNamee that I'd ordered helped mitigate the despondence.

The four books are Resurrection Man, The Blue Tango, The Ultras, and Orchid Blue, and the only trouble I had was deciding which to read first. Each looks to be beautifully written, putting me right into the heads of characters living through tense circumstances. At least one blurber called McNamee's writing dreamlike, and the adjective makes sense. His descriptions are somehow immediate and detached at the same time.

I'm just a few pages into The Ultras, my first McNamee novel, and I have a feeling he may be about the best of the highly talented group that has made Northern Ireland home of some of the world's best crime writing.

***

On the non-crime side, having just returned from Portugal and long having been awed by impressive Roman remains from Israel to Iberia and from Tunisia to Fishbourne, I dug out The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian (1885) by Theodor Mommsen (right) and read the chapter on Spain and Portugal.

Mommsen's outlook is surprisingly fresh for a nineteenth-century author, giving due credit to the outskirts of the Roman Empire for cultural, political, and social achievements without, however, slipping into cultural relativism or sentimental boosting of the periphery over the center.

Here's a bit from the book's introduction:

"It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers of the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be found."

In the meat of the book, Mommsen forswears rhetorical sweep and gets down to the impressive work of explaining the whats and, in detail, the hows of one of history's most awesome achievements.
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More old stuff from Portugal

2011-12-08T19:29:00.012-05:00

Roman mosaics under Banco Comercial Portuguesa in Lisbon. This video offers a tour, with some glimpses of the city above.

Retired monks, Igreja de São João Evangelista, Évora.

And finally, just because I liked seeing orange trees in December:

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

How the new imperils the ancient in Portugal

2011-12-07T14:29:00.024-05:00

(Almendres cromlech; photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Stonehenge is the Xerox of Neolithic monuments; guides to and promoters of every other such monument compare theirs to Stonehenge, usually to note that theirs is thousands of years older.

The Almendres cromlech, a group of ninety-five standing stones outside Évora, is about 7,000 years old, predating Stonehenge by 2,000 years, our guide told us this morning, and he's no Portuguese chauvinist. In fact, he said, Portugal does a bad job of protecting the ancient monuments in which the country's southwest is so rich and of educating the public about the monuments.

The three we saw today [the cromlech, its accompanying menhir (left), and the Great Dolmen of Zambujeiro] lack the most basic facilities. There are no visitors' centers, no explanatory plaques, no trash cans or bathrooms. No postcard sellers, no bookstores, nothing to let visitors know they are in the company of anything but what locals, ignorant of the monuments' origins, traditionally called "castles of the Moors."

The dolmen (right), in fact, a high-end burial chamber from late in the Neolithic age, about 2,000 years younger than the cromlech, has been stripped of the earth that covered it, subjected to a series of half-arsed recovery efforts, and left in such danger of collapse that it looks like a row of dominoes about to tumble, or like a mouth full of horribly misfit teeth.

Back to Stonehenge. The British, our guide said, are the models for archaeological preservation and education. In Portugal, he said, appeals to history fall on deaf ears that hang off the head of mercenary politicians, and some of the most important monuments are in private hands, which bars UNESCO from stepping in and declaring the area a World Heritage Site.

Portugal's rich landowners are greedy and uneducated, he said, and the local people, loath to give up their traditional ways of life, resist the idea of rebuilding their local economies around tourism. So, in the end, I'd say I learned at least as much about contemporary Portugal as I did about its Neolithic predecessors.

The guide was an eloquent spokesman for public archaeology, and that's the cause to which he and the group of which he is part devote themselves. The group is called Ebora Megalithica, and I hope you'll join me in reading up on the group and, above all, on the wonderful landscape and history it seeks to protect.

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' thoughts on some Bronze Age monuments.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Good news on some good books out of Ireland

2011-12-06T17:51:00.001-05:00

Some good news in recent days from a pair of Irish crime writers whose names you have read here from time to time.

Adrian McKinty's Falling Glass has been named mystery or thriller of the year by Audible.com, and Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool is now available in North America, which instantly becomes a better continent on which to live and read.

Each (and McKinty's Cold Cold Ground) is liable to expand your idea of what this thing called the crime novel is capable of. They're also a hell of a lot of fun.
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Saudades do America

2011-12-06T00:01:00.012-05:00

(Landscape with aqueduct and
laundry; Évora, Portugal)

I chose classic American crime fiction to read on this European trip, and:

After reading Double Indemnity, Fast One, and, on this trip, Seven Slayers for the second time, I still maintain that the best American crime writer named Cain was Paul.

The 1945/46 movie version of The Big Sleep may have brought together the most impressive collection of talent ever assembled for a movie. Possibly Hollywood's greatest director (Howard Hawks) giving orders to possibly Hollywood's greatest star (Humphrey Bogart) and a perfect supporting cast. A Nobel Prize winner (William Faulkner) and a talented novelist/screenwriter (Leigh Brackett) sharing writing credit, It's a hell of a movie. And Raymond Chandler's novel is still better.

Don't get me started on the radio script of The Thin Man.

Adventures in the alphabet

2011-12-05T08:59:00.005-05:00

(Roman temple in Évora, Portugal)

A guide to Roman excavations in Lisbon pointed out the 'ood supports that underlie many of the city's buildings. A hotel keeper in Porto told me 'i-fi was available in the room, and she wasn't talking about stereo.

Then it occurred to me what an odd sound the consonantal W is. It's so common in English, but what other languages have it? Arabic, maybe, though a guide on my trip to Tunisia was sparked to tell a story about the habits of his countrymen by an 'ooman he saw crossing the street in front of our tour bus.

***

If the letter W is a closed book to speakers of Portuguese, X may puzzle visitors to Portugal. It's pronounced sh in Portuguese, so the bar Maria Caxuxa in Lisbon is pronounced, delightfully, "Maria Ca-SHOO-sha."

Got that? X=sh. With that in mind, what do you think puxe means?

Wrong. It means pull.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Mercado do Bolhão, or Two Stages in the Life Cycle of a Chicken

2011-12-03T12:39:00.003-05:00

But first some color. (Photos by your humble blogkeeper from Mercado do Bolhão, Porto, Portugal):

As you are now, so once was I; As I am now, so you shall be.

A storm for all ports

2011-12-02T18:55:00.006-05:00

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

The skies opened last night while I was having a late nectar and water at a local restaurant and watching soccer with the locals, the first bad weather I'd had since I arrived in Portugal. Too bad; I'd been enjoying this business of eating outdoors in late November.

Since I'm in the city that gave port wine its name, this evening I visited the Vinologia wine bar for a port tasting: €10 for a glass each of three varieties, plus a morsel of dried fruit with each and the best chocolate I have ever tasted.

At the first sip of aged tawny, fruit trees spouted in the middle of my hard palate, and by the second, the trees had snaked their way around my tongue, and cheerful farmers were harvesting the fruit on a hot summer day. By the evening's fourth glass, a warmth that started below my sternum had spread to my shoulders, for some reason, and all was right with the world.

Read more about port and its history here. And, just so you don't think everything in Portugal is old, here's Rem Koolhaas's Casa de Musica.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Big art in Portugal

2011-12-01T19:13:00.016-05:00

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

I like art that looks like richly drawn cartoons, whether it's from the late Roman period, the twentieth century, or so fresh that the paint looks barely dry. I like it whether it turns up in a train station, in a museum, or on the street.

Here are an azulejo in Porto's São Bento station (left) of a Portuguese king about to kick some butt, and a third- or fourth-century mosaic (above right) of Hercules in a domestic spat in Lisbon (Painters have it easy. Sculptors and mosaicists deserve extra props for portraying facial expressions in stone and glass.)

In Porto, someone put some empty wall space to good use in the old Ribeira section (yet another UNESCO World Heritage site).

What's good about this art? It's narrative and decorate at the same time. It's colorful, it's easy to read (Look at the postures and facial expressions), and it will make you smile even if the figures in the artwork don't share your amusement.

Long live big art!
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Nuts about nata

2011-11-30T17:52:00.014-05:00

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Ever wonder what happened to all those riches explorers brought back from the New World?

Some of it went to build the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, or Hieronymite Monastery, in Lisbon's Belém parish, put up by Manuel I with a kick-start from gold Vasco da Gama brought back from his first voyage. The vast complex is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a landmark in the Manueline, or Late Gothic Ongapotchket, style.

Belém is also famous for pastéis (singular, pastel) de nata, warm custard tarts sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. If these tarts had been around in Vasco da Gama's time, he might never have left home.

***

(The most famous ruler
born in Libya before
Moammar Ghadaffi)

The ex-monastery's ex-church is also home to Portugal's National Archaeology Museum, a treasure house of finds from the Paleolithic period right up through the Roman period. Northern Portugal is especially rich in the former (as are Spain and southwestern France.)

Finally, since I can't let a day pass without your daily dose of hand-painted tiles, here's a bit of commuter azuleijo from Lisbon's Rossio metro station.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Azulejo, or tiles to go before I sleep

2011-11-29T22:18:00.008-05:00

These are all azulejo, or hand-painted, tin-glazed tilework, and the Portuguese have been making the stuff for five hundred years.

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Today it's everywhere: on the exteriors of the humblest houses and the grandest pubic and private buildings, in museums and metro stations and souvenir shops. Azulejos are applied art, they're decorative art, and contemporary artists have turned them into fine art. There's even a National Museum of Azulejo in Lisbon, and it's very much worth a visit. No need to look for azulejos if you visit Portugal; they'll find you.

Azul is the Portuguese word for blue, and when I first heard of azulejos, I thought of Delft blue tiles, and I figured the Portuguese must have learned the art from the Dutch.

Nope. it transpires that azulejo is from the Arabic al-zuleijah, which means tilework. The Portuguese learned the art from the Moors, though they eventually did produce examples in the Dutch style.

And now, goodnight.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A visit to the world's oldest bookstore

2011-11-28T14:15:00.013-05:00

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

It's called Livraria Bertrand, it's on the Rua Garrett in Lisbon, and it was founded in 1732.

It's now the flagship store of a chain, and the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed its original home, but Bertrand has been operating at its current location in the Chiado neighborhood since 1773.

The staff is helpful, the selection looked good, and books in translation are available at more affordable prices than I've seen in other cities. I bought an English translation of O Crime do Padre Amaro by the nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós, but Bertrand has not stayed in business for 279 years by shunning the latest trends (above right).

The shop came in especially handy because I've discovered that taking a Kindle on vacation sucks. The difficulty of flipping back and forth in a Kindleized guidebook is a nuisance, but the real drawback is the alienating experience. You're sipping a coffee at a miradoura on a gorgeous November day, surrounded by locals, visitors, attractive, scholarly middle-aged women (OK, there was only one), and you're pecking away at a goddamn machine? A Kindle is better than a book on paper the same way a waterfront warehouse is better than the Parthenon: It holds more stuff.

On my way from Bertrand, I saw a bookbinder at work in a storefront shop and, with his kind permission, I took a picture of him. A scene like this makes me want to reenact the first verse of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," throwing my Kindle from a rooftop instead of a watch to cast my vote for eternity outside of time. Except, as happened to the best minds of Ginsberg's generation, Kindles would probably rain on my head for the next decade.

Finally, here's an example of an architectural style I'll call Stripped-Down Gothic thanks to the 1755 earthquake.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Visigoths: Breaking the silence

2011-11-27T16:48:00.006-05:00

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Completed a triple play this evening of getting lost in the medieval quarters of Seville, Tunis and now Lisbon. Lisbon's was the least worrying because of the city's physical situation: Just head downhill til the water laps gently around your ankles, then turn right.

And now, just because I have maintained this blog for more than five years without ever mentioning the Visigoths, here's Lisbon's old city wall, part of which they built.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Airline maps beyond borders

2011-11-26T02:44:00.003-05:00

The first leg of my trip to Portugal was on Jet Airlines, a newish carrier based in India. That meant announcements and placards in English and what I presume was Hindi.

It also meant knee-length tunic-jackets as part of the female flight attendants' uniforms. But the real difference was a discreet note at the bottom of the screen that traced the flight's progress as a curving line across a map of the world. Superimposed on the lower left-hand corner was a note I had never seen on such a map: "Physical Features Map Only. No Political Borders Depicted."

Obvious? Redundant? Unnecessary? Maybe -- until one reflects that India has in recent years been involved in border disputes with China, Nepal, and, most notably, Pakistan. Perhaps Jet's caution is inevitable. In today's tight airline market, it may be more important than ever to keep the skies friendly.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

They knew I was coming

2011-11-25T14:29:00.002-05:00

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

That's from Terminal B at Newark International Airport, and this is not that airport's first mention in connection with international crime fiction.

Stuart Neville's novel Collusion brings Gerry Fegan to Newark Airport after a hair-raising escape from Manhattan. After dodging and dealing death, Fegan stops at an airport restaurant, orders a sandwich, and wonders why the hell Americans put cheese on everything. That's just one more reason to like Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Grifters, or Mother Knows Best and other crime-fiction family matters

2011-11-24T16:21:00.003-05:00

I wrote a few years ago about some of the ways crime writers portray families. The writers I cited were Swedish, Welsh, Dutch, and French, and their characters struggle to build or hold together families or family substitutes not always nuclear.

How do American crime writers take up the theme? In the Father Knows Best/My Three Sons/Leave It to Beaver era of American popular culture, noir writers said nope!, there are scarier things in life than crotchety but lovable old Uncle Charlie.

I'm reading Jim Thompson's The Grifters (1963) now, and the last American noir novel I read from about the same era was David Goodis' 1954 Black Friday (which means I should be putting up this post tomorrow instead of today, American Thanksgiving). Mid-century American noir is not my main area of reading, so I don't know how typical each book is of its author's work or of its period. But each thrusts its lone-wolf protagonist into an odd, criminal echo of a traditional family (more like a clan in the Goodis and Mother Knows Best in the Thompson), and that has to mean something.

It would be easy to read such books as protests against or twisted echoes of the cheerful picture of suburban family life presented elsewhere in popular culture of the time, but they're more than that. The Goodis especially betrays a longing for family.

So, what did family mean in post-war American noir writing, and why?

***

Happy Thanksgiving, whether or not you're spending it with your family.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Olha, que coisas mais lindas!: Gorgeous Portuguese crime-fiction covers

2011-11-23T15:59:00.011-05:00

(Courtesy of
Luís Miguel Queirós)

I head for Portugal on vacation this week and, as usual when I travel, I'll try to find out a bit about the local crime-fiction scene.

My first search turned up a colorful blog post from Cullen Gallagher, a fellow Noircon attendee who is not from Portugal but who did post some eye-catching covers of American, English, and other European crime novels translated into Portuguese. The covers are courtesy of an acquaintance of Cullen's who also supplies background about their creator and publication history.

One of the covers illustrates this post. See the rest over at Cullen's Pulp Serenade.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Lean, green Irish crime-writing machines

2011-11-22T04:33:00.005-05:00

In other news, Alan Glynn's Bloodland won top crime-fiction prize at the Irish Book Awards last week, topping a shortlist that included Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke and Benjamin Black's A Death in Summer.

The Burke and the Glynn are high-water marks of this or any other crime-fiction year. The only reason I hesitate to call each an uneasy monument of our uneasy time is that they're so much fun — sometimes angry or chilling fun, but fun nonetheless.

***

And to the reader hungry for more scraps of Adrian McKinty's forthcoming Cold Cold Ground, here's one:

"`School's off. I just heard it on the radio!' I yelled across to them.

"`Piss off ya pervert!' a seventeen-year-old slapper yelled back, flipping me the bird as she did so.

"I'm the bloody peelers, ya wee shite!' I thought about replying but when you're in an insult contest with a bunch of weans at 7:58 in the morning your day really is heading for the crapper."

All crime writing should be this much fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Gianrico Carofiglio's new eye for an old crime-fiction convention

2011-11-20T21:11:00.002-05:00

This "new eyes" stuff is old hat for Gianrico Carofiglio.

Carofiglio, asked at the Bouchercon 2011 crime-fiction convention why he, a former prosecutor, had made his protagonist a defense lawyer, replied with Proust's statement about the only real journey being to view the world through others' eyes. He inscribed a version of the quotation on a book I had him sign for a friend after our Bouchercon panel.

And in Temporary Perfections, his most recent novel to appear in English, he applies the dictum to one of crime fiction's old chestnuts, that of the detective who can tell without fail, via some subtle clue, that a suspect is lying:

"Ask him if he can tell when someone's lying. The ones who say they can tell, who think it's impossible to trick them with a lie, are the biggest fools around. They're the ones a skilled liar can wrap around his little finger with the greatest ease and enjoyment."

What other crime novels and stories explicitly confront conventions of the genre this way?

***

Gianrico Carofiglio was a member of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Pitch

2011-11-19T17:02:00.003-05:00

The Pitch by John McFetridge is one of the odder crime-fiction items floating around the market: four stories based on scripts McFetridge wrote as pitches for three potential television shows.

The stories are about an ex-con and a crime writer who team up to write the ex-con's memoirs, each slipping gradually into the other's old role; a "police procedural about narcotics cops on the Maine-New Brunswick border"; and a Montreal-based story set in 1968 with a KGB agent as the hero.

The genesis and the possible future of the projects are at least as interesting as the stories. Here's some of what McFetridge has to say at his own site:

"I've had this idea for a while to write e-books as if they're TV series -- a `season-long' story arc playing out over 6 or 13 `episodes' but each one also having a self-contained story. Maybe publishing the `episodes' once a month and then also making them available as single collection, like a TV series box set of DVDs."

If that sounds like a television writer talking, it could be because McFetridge has written for TV in addition to his own novels and, according to this collection's interesting and surprisingly upbeat introduction, enjoyed the experience. The Pitch is also a thoughtful consideration of the possibilities e-books offer authors and readers. In this case, the future sounds like a return to the old days of short crime fiction.

The Pitch is available as a Kindle e-book for 99 cents. You can't afford not to buy it.

***

McFetridge was the first person to stage an out-of-town Noir at the Bar crime-fiction reading after I started Noir at the Bar. (The gentlemanly McFetridge even invited me up from Philadelphia to host the event.) That's why I liked it when the noir-writer co-protagonist of The Pitch's "Pulp Life" stories puts the moves on a writer of cozy mysteries by inviting her to a Noir at the Bar.

And here's how McFetridge describes her:

"Danny looked at her, realized she was taller than he’d thought and then wondered if he’d been thinking of her as a little old lady. She didn’t look little or old, really, she looked the wife in one of those Viagra commercials, smiling a little to herself."

Crime candy

2011-11-18T02:52:00.007-05:00

(Photo by your humble
blogkeeper)

I bought the chocoloate bar at right this afternoon, an appropriate offering for a cafe/restaurant next door to Lower Manhattan's Mysterious Bookshop.

After the pre-opera meal where I bought that rich, enticing, sweet, yet ultimately bitter candy, I repaired to the bookstore and, for the first time in my several visits, saw owner Otto Penzler on the premises. I bought novels by Hans Werner Kettenbach and Thomas Pynchon as well as The Best American Noir Stories of the Century, edited by Penzler and James Ellroy.

But my three favorite bits of reading today are all from Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh (also the author of Night and the City):

"A Greek barber called Pappas cut up his girl friend in the barf, and put the pieces in a crate. Didn't have the common savvy to gag her first. Nobody paid any attention. Little tiff, they thought. 'Come Up and Saw Me Sometime' they called 'im later. That's the class of people they are, rahnd Fowlers End."

and

"Fowlers End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora and fauna. Plant a cabbage here in this soured, embittered, dyspeptic, ulcerated soil, and up comes a kind of bleached shillelagh with spikes on its knob. Plant a family, a respectable working-class family, and in two generations it will turn out wolves."

and

"He was a quick, hideously ugly little man, cold and viscous about the hands, with a gecko's knack of sticking to plane surfaces."

I'll be quoting that last line for years.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Great Baals of fire!

2011-11-16T22:59:00.003-05:00

This evening's reading involves love, violence, and insanity in preparation for a full performance tomorrow. Here's an excerpt from the opening.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Adrian McKinty, Belfast tour guide

2011-11-15T19:47:00.018-05:00

I'm honor-bound not to quote yet from Adrian McKinty's new Cold Cold Ground because I'm reading an uncorrected proof. Still, a few remarks are in order:

The hardest-hitting passages in this novel, set in the violent days of Northern Ireland's hunger strikes in 1981, denounce not the violence but rather the bravado and hypocrisy that attended the Troubles and the culture in which they unfolded. And make no mistake: there are bits in this novel to tick off fierce partisans of any of the conflict's sides.
The sense of what it might have been like to live in those times is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the book's homely details and the off-hand observations by McKinty's Sean Duffy, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Among other things, McKinty, a longtime friend of Detectives Beyond Borders, would make a hell of a tour guide to Belfast.
Duffy is an educated man, a Catholic living and working among Protestants beset by more than the usual crime-fiction protagonist's self-doubts but such a vital observer of the human and social landscape that he never becomes a bore.
Ken Bruen is no longer the master of popular-music references in contemporary crime writing. And McKinty's are a lot funnier.

***

With an OK from the source, here's how the book opens: "The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas ... "

Aestheticizing violence? Yes, but ...

"But that was a week ago and Frankie Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, had none of Bobby [Sands]'s advantages. No one thought Frankie was Jesus. Frankie enjoyed killing and was very good at it. Frankie shed no tears over dead children. Not even for the cameras.

"And the riots for his death felt somewhat ... orchestrated."

The Detectives Beyond Borders magical mystery bookstore tour ...

2011-11-13T17:46:00.007-05:00

I have some vacation time coming up, and I thought I might spend it visiting mystery/crime-fiction bookstores, looking up from my books occasionally to see the country between stops.

Where should I go? What are North America's can't-miss mystery and crime-fiction bookshops?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Morality and crime fiction, America and abroad

2011-11-13T16:04:00.019-05:00

Eddie's World, Charlie Stella's first novel, has as a preface this angry denunciation of the American federal witness protection program:

"The federal witness protection program is a moral assault on our society. Deals with the Devil are evil by their nature. When people can trade up to nineteen lives for the opportunity to relocate from one coast to an Arizona desert (to ultimately establish a drug business), the government, whatever its original intent, has made fools of us all. Perhaps a more novel approach might be to rethink a Society Protection Program ... where someone who admits to killing nineteen people* might rot away in a cell before they burn in hell."

That reminds me of the ringing, righteously didactic voiceovers you'd get in some 1950s crime movies. But it also reminds me of Three Seconds, the Dagger-winning crime thriller by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, which meditates on the ethical hazards of using police informants — cheap ways of outsourcing intelligence-gathering, as one character says.

Another one of Stella's books has a similarly ringing preface, this time denouncing Enron and Arthur Anderson and wishing upon the perpetrators of that scandal a look at real prisons where real people go. So you don't need to join an Occupy protest or the tea party. Just read Charlie Stella instead.

=====

* Stella presumably refers to "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, whose testimony helped bring down John Gotti.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Hardy Boys beyond borders

2011-11-12T16:43:00.013-05:00

Though they lived in the fictional town of Bayport. the Hardy Boys occasionally were called out of the country to solve mysteries.

Language was never a barrier. Even though the boys rarely if ever appeared to attend their language classes (or any other classes) at Bayport High School, all it took was a few words and phrases, and they could sleuth unobtrusively among the natives. (I always wondered if they simply muttered rhubarb* over and over.)

The books never revealed what those magical words and phrases were, but by God, I believed in the Hardy Boys! Now I'm asking you to do the same: Pick a country, and tell me what words and phrases you would learn if you wanted to pass as a resident.

***

Wikipedia's article is full of good stuff about the Hardy Boys. I'd long known that the books were revised to remove odious racial stereotypes, but I was chagrined to learn that beginning in 1959, they were written more simply, to compete with television, that "Difficult vocabulary words such as `ostensible' and `presaged' were eliminated."

This was news to me; I once startled my third-grade teacher by knowing what a taxidermist was; I'd learned the word from a Hardy Boys book, and if taxidermist isn't a difficult vocabulary word, I don't know my difficult vocabulary words.

***

This is the second post this week whose idea came to me in the shower. If I worked from home, could I move my desk into the shower and claim my bathroom as a business expense?

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

* The word rhubarb was used by radio actors to imitate the sounds of raucous crowd. The actors would murmur “rhubarb, rhubarb” in the background to simulate crowd noise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Charlie Stella's Charlie Opera

2011-11-11T15:05:00.003-05:00

I'm a new Charlie Stella fan because the mobsters, cops, waitresses, and other Las Vegas and New York hangers-on in his 2003 novel Charlie Opera can be funny without making light of the violent circumstances in which they find themselves.

Here's the title character after his wife throws a hairbrush at him for singing opera in their hotel room:

“`What the fuck?'

“`I’ve been calling to you for five minutes!' Lisa Pellecchia yelled. `From the shower. In the bathroom. Five minutes!'

“`I was listening to something,' Charlie said. He was still trying to reach the painful spot on his back. `That hurt, damn it.'
...
“He flexed both his biceps in the mirror and quickly dropped his arms when he heard his wife in the bathroom. When he thought he was safe again, he looked into the mirror and whispered, `Figaro, Figaro... Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Fi-ga-ro.'”

That's marvelous, but Stella turns down the jokes when Charlie gets into deep trouble later in the book, and he paces the storytelling so nicely that I was barely conscious of the change in tone as it was happening.

Stella has characters say outlandish things without ever seeming to be aware of their own outlandishness, which adds to the fun. He also manages to tell a story of operatic complexity without ever losing the thread, alternating points of view in short chapters, the shifting viewpoints something like, I don't know, a series of arias.

Charlie surveys the Strip's tall buildings with respectful professional interest (he had previously run a window-washing company), and he acts heroically at unexpected times and calmly when many another protagonist might have gone nuts, thrown punches, or pulled guns. Charlie is one of the most endearing regular-guy protagonists who ever socked a mobster and wandered into the middle of gang strife and law-enforcement rivalries.

But he's Charlie Opera, after all, so the people who wind up dead in this book generally deserve it, a woman is rescued, and true love is rewarded, in the best opera buffa fashion.

(I'm not a brand-new Stella fan. His story "The Decider" is one of the highlights of Crime Factory: The First Shift, discussed in this space last week. But I'm telling you: In a couple of weeks I'll be talking about Charlie Stella as if I'd been reading him my whole life.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Set pieces in crime fiction

2011-11-10T16:55:00.001-05:00

It occurred to me as I relaxed under the shower today that countless crime-fiction protagonists had done the same before me, usually with the water turned as hot as they could stand to wash away emotional or physical scars, or else just to sober up.

The laceratingly restorative shower is a set piece of hard-boiled crime fiction, right up there with the protagonist who looks in the mirror and doesn't like (or else comments wryly on) what he sees or that classic, the dame who walks into the PI's office.

What are some other stock scenes in crime fiction past and present? What is their purpose? How do you react to such scenes?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Boy in the Suitcase is released

2011-11-09T10:34:00.007-05:00

There is much to like about The Boy in the Suitcase by Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, out this week from Soho Press. In addition to what I wrote here, here, here and here about the book, it avoids what I've come to regard as a wearying trademark of Scandinavian crime writing: the prologue that ends with the victim dead (or with everything going black, the smell of the damp earth then ... nothing, the rope tightening, the blade approaching, etc.)

Yes, this book has a prologue, too, but it's gripping without graphic violence, and it involves no death. It's more akin, in a way, to a thriller than to its Scandinavian crime-fiction brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

Like many a Scandinavian crime novel, this book has a social/political agenda (which its authors readily admit). But its occasional explicit "message" passages, about missing children or the treatment of immigrants, are so neatly slipped in among shifting points of view that one never minds them. [Declan Burke takes another Scandinavian crime novel to task for message-mongering over at his Crime Always Pays.]

The book's ending is heart-rending and empathetic in a way you might not expect, and the novel even has a few jokes.

***

How could I have forgotten this when listing reasons to like The Boy in the Suitcase? A late chapter refers to a pimp especially brutal toward women as "the man with the serpent tattoo."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What does noir mean to you?

2011-11-08T13:28:00.003-05:00

I've been reading some harder-boiled crime fiction recently and I have no new post for today, so I'm bringing back this old discussion on the timeless — and, to some, exasperating — question of what noir means.

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

Centrifugal force generated by my recent discussion with Megan Abbott and some of the replies thereto spun off a few questions about noir.

Is noir about attitude? Atmosphere? Doom? Destiny? The term is French; the first and most prominent practitioners have been American. Who else exemplifies noir?

I can define noir no more precisely than that American Supreme Court justice defined obscenity when he wrote:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

Without claiming to be an expert, and with little hope that my words will live as long as Potter Stewart's, I know noir when I feel it. It hits like a punch in the stomach when I see the protagonist going down, and down is the only direction in noir.

The protagonist may face his destiny (or hers) with resignation or with unnerving detachment. He may knowingly initiate his descent, and those stories may be the most chilling of all. The descent need not culminate in death. In fact, death may be too easy an end. The noir protagonist may not even recognize his own hopelessness (here my definition may part ways from those of other readers), but the reader does.
OK, that's a bit of what noir means to me.

What does noir mean to you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Cops at the circus

2011-11-07T01:16:00.006-05:00

Two out-of-town visitors found their way to the Pen & Pencil Club this evening, where one of the regulars warned them about the rough treatment fans of the Philadelphia Eagles football team sometimes hand out to supporters of visiting clubs.

"But I wouldn't worry about these two," the regular said, turning to us while indicating the visitors. "They're Chicago law enforcement."

Imagine my delight, then, when I read the following in the last chapter of Jim Tully's Circus Parade:

"Gorilla Haley's skull was fractured. He became insane. He later became a member of the Chicago police."

Jim Tully, a father of hard-boiled

2011-11-05T23:29:00.006-04:00

Brian Lindenmuth recommended Jim Tully, and when Brian speaks, I listen.

Tully, who lived from 1886 to 1947, was a "vagabond, pugilist, and American writer" who achieved commercial success and critical favor in the 1920s and '30s with a series of novels and hard-boiled memoirs.

He was not a crime writer, but Harvey Pekar's foreword to Tully's Circus Parade (1927) says Tully's legacy is perhaps "most clearly seen in detective stories beginning about 1930. His work often had a rough quality, but it is genuine, not affected, like Ernest Hemingway's."

Circus Parade's first sentence is suitably Hammettian in its matter-of-factness and brevity ("It was my second hobo journey through Mississippi") and the ending of its third story/vignette is wryly humorous ("Cameron's loss was several thousand dollars. Finnerty had gained eighty cents"), a bit like Hammett's story "Slippery Fingers."

So if you like Hammett (and I know that you do), you just might like Jim Tully.

Thanks, Brian.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Blasted Heath: Cool name, exciting new e-book "imprint"

2011-11-04T15:22:00.006-04:00

Allan Guthrie, author, agent, editor, noir scholar, and e-book evangelist, has now turned publisher, with Blasted Heath, promising about thirty e-book titles a year.

The initial offerings include Anthony Neil Smith's All the Young Warriors, which humanizes international conflicts in a way that not even Twitter and Facebook can. Two Somali students kill a pair of Minnesota police officers, then flee to their native land to join the fight to liberate it, even though there seems little to liberate the terrified, anarchic country from. Disillusionment, love, and adventure ensue both in Somalia and back home, where an angry cop and the gang-leader father of one of the students team up.

Smith offers chilling descriptions of what religious fundamentalism does to both its targets and its believers, and even more chilling descriptions of Minnesota's winter winds, just what we need as we bid fall goodbye here in the Northeast. Thanks, A.N.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Crime Factory: The First Shift rules!

2011-11-03T02:21:00.007-04:00

Crime Factory: The First Shift (New Pulp Press) is fat with fiction, thirty-some noir stories from:

Dennis Tafoya, Andrew Nette, Jedidiah Ayres, Roger Smith, Josh Converse, Charlie Stella, Greg Bardsley, Hilary Davidson, Kieran Shea, Nate Flexer, Cameron Ashley, Patti Abbot, Chad Eagleton, Ken Bruen, Jimmy Callaway, Dave Zeltserman, Steve Weddle, Craig McDonald, Keith Rawson, Leigh Redhead, Anonymous-9, Jonathan Woods, Liam Jose, Dave White, Chris F. Holm, Frank Bill, Adrian McKinty, and Scott Wolven.

I've read Tafoya's, Smith's, and Stella's contributions so far. Tafoya and Smith are established Detectives Beyond Borders favorites, and Stella became a new one with his story "The Decider," an act of workplace wish fulfillment that management might want to keep out of workers' hands.

Smith's "Half-Jack" is marked by this memorable phrase that isn't even part of the main action: "...the carefully coded conversation of the sex-addicted." And Tafoya's story, "Stinger," opens the collection thus: "They met in Arraignment, and she knew he was the one."

And I still have twenty-five stories left to read. This is going to be fun.
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Tony Hiss on Ross Thomas

2011-11-02T02:02:00.003-04:00

I bought this 2003 edition of Ross Thomas' 1971 novel The Fools in Town Are on Our Side because of Tony Hiss' introduction.

I already had an older edition of the book lying around, but Hiss shed light on some of what I liked so much about Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw. Take it away, Tony:

"(S)o many new bad things have happened since 1995 that the Cold War years Thomas chronicled so brilliantly and mockingly have started to seem far tamer than they were. As `orphans of the Cold War'—Thomas’s own phrase, in an interview he gave during the last year of his life—his books have been slipping out of print, even though, as Thomas was quick to point out, `fraud and double-dealing for political or personal advantage are age-old themes that will not become extinct.'

"... a biting, bracing wind blow(s) through Thomas’s books, sometimes at gale force, sometimes only stirring at the curtains, a kind of healing bleakness. ... The underlying tonic in Thomas’s books—his lesson plan for transcending the intolerable—isn’t pushed forward, and many readers may find themselves content in simply taking pleasure from his immense storytelling gifts, which dazzle all the more because they are so seemingly tossed-off."

Ross Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw: Cool title, fun book

2011-11-01T00:35:00.012-04:00

Thumbs up to Ross Thomas ' The Seersucker Whipsaw for its title, its subject, and its humor.

The political strategists at the Pen & Pencil Club here in Philadelphia are almost as bad as the cigar smokers and the lawyers, but Thomas' operatives, plotting a campaign for the first election in the newly independent fictional African nation of Albertia, make the profession sound like delightful fun without being more cynical than thou:

"I'm going to call him Chief," Shartelle said firmly. "It’s the first time I’ve ever worked for anybody who was a real chief and I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to address him by his rightful title.”

The book is also full of amusing social observations about its time (it appeared in 1967):

“English lit—right?”

“Wrong. Letters.”

“Letters?”

“As close to a classical education as Minnesota got that year. It was an experiment. A little Latin, and less Greek. It was to produce the well-rounded man. I think they abandoned it in favor of something called communications shortly after I was graduated.”

How good a writer was Thomas? He won two Edgar Awards, but I'm two-thirds of the way through the novel, no crime has been committed, and the book still works as highly entertaining political comedy.

With an American presidential election campaign on, the book will make especially entertaining reading. (Of course, there's almost always an American presidential campaign on.)

***

Speaking of American presidential campaigns, did I mention that, in a burst of serendipity Thomas could hardly have envisioned when he wrote the novel forty-five years ago, one of its characters is the Ile of Obahma?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Rilke on Black (Ken Bruen on humor)

2011-10-31T00:04:00.009-04:00

Ken Bruen's early novel Rilke on Black is funny and dark (though not as dark as it might have seemed a few weeks ago, before I read Derek Raymond.) Still, it's full of quotable laugh lines and, perhaps more impressive, trenchant pop-music references. A few samples:

I didn’t wish him luck. As it wasn’t that kind of business. Plus, I didn’t want to. I watched him join the crowds. Thing was, he did look like Mickey Rourke. But late-night Brixton, most do, even the women.
***
A cheap walkman as music would pass the time for him. Then a new dilemma.

What tapes would he like? From the sublime to the ridiculous. I got Aretha and Whitney Houston. I drew the line at Stevie Wonder. Not even a hostage would endure that torture.
***
She’d a lush body that summoned up jail sentences.
***
Remember it, one of those songs you heard all the time, you’d no idea what it meant. In fact, if pressed, you couldn’t even say if you liked it. But you knew it and, worse, it clung. One of those songs that hung out with, “me and you/and a dog named boo”.
***
I walked towards the Oval. Just pick any pub. I did, on the Stockwell side. This is where they mug Rottweilers.
***
I met her in the Rose and Crown on Clapham Common. A pub that still merits the name. The requirement was only to be a drinker.

You didn’t have to play pool.

Munch Hawaiian crisps.

Play lotteries.

Be yuppified.

Flaunt on sexual prowess.

A pub.

===========

And, because I just found this clip of a song I've long liked, here, for reasons that have nothing to do with this post, is Maria Bethania.

You slay me!, or Overheard at a high-level summit

2011-10-30T02:04:00.021-04:00

Summit

Two journalistic usages that have always bothered me are summit (for summit meeting) and slay.

I remember hearing about summit meetings in the 1970s, and the term made sense, even if it catered to the vanity of those involved in the meetings and the self-importance of the reporters who covered them. A summit meeting was a meeting of leaders at the very tops, or summits, of their countries. Then journalists (and maybe politicians) started abbreviating the term to summit, and, about a year ago, some reporter referred to (I am not making this up) a high-level summit.

To slay means, according to my desk dictionary, "to kill violently, wantonly, or in great numbers." To use it as if it meant simply "to kill" is to rob the language of a useful word. A few weeks ago, I read a newspaper story that said a police officer killed in a car crash while on the job had been "slain on duty."

The writers in question were, of course, ignorant of the meanings of the words they used. But does it serve a useful purpose to call them dopes? One man's illiterate mistake is another's linguistic evolution. Best to go home and read a good book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Cast your vote for a cool book

2011-10-29T02:40:00.021-04:00

Read!

An author matches wits and wills with a character who won't leave him alone. Author and character clash over the latter's plan to blow up a hospital. Character starts out as nihilistic, dope-smoking hospital porter. comes more to the fore, and turns into something more interesting.

Author and character together and individually ponder and confront the very biggest moral and ethical questions in ways occasionally touching and always hugely entertaining.

That metaphysical game of character meets author is an old one, but Burke pulls it off with panache. Not once, even when the possibility looms that the character may be writing the author, does it seem forced.

Vote!

Delta force and other stray crime-fiction thoughts

2011-10-28T00:09:00.004-04:00

Clearing my mental warehouse to make way for new ideas. Everything must go!!!

1) I asked Eoin Colfer at Bouchercon 2011 why the characters in his "young adult" Artemis Fowl books, even the non-human characters, were achievers — rich geniuses, elite police officers, and so on — while the characters in his "adult" crime fiction — the story "Taking on P.J.," the new novel Plugged — are lower on the social ladder: bouncers, shady doctors, low-level hoods. Simple, Colfer said: The Fowl stories are fantasy, the crime stories meant to be believable. What do you think of his answer? Are gritty characters synonymous with greater believability?

2) Colin Cotterill, a fellow member with Colfer of my “WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel at Bouchercon, mentioned off-stage that he'd been part of a crime-fiction event in Germany staged in an operating theater — appropriate for the author of a series whose protagonist is the chief and only coroner in Laos. What's the oddest setting for a reading or lecture that you know of?

3) Mickey Spillane's 2007 novel Dead Street, discussed here yesterday, is full of amusing references to the sexual, social, and political mores of Spillane's 1950s:

"Bettie just stood there smiling in her see-through nightie, her untrimmed delta a refreshing pleasure in these days of bizarre pubic buzz cuts."

New venture offers classic crime e-books

2011-10-27T23:14:00.006-04:00

Otto Penzler, the man behind Mysterious Press and the Mysterious Bookshop, has started MysteriousPress.com, a "21st-century publishing house is digitizing classic works of crime, mystery, and suspense fiction by the most distinguished crime writers in the world."

The new enterprise offers an impressive list in a number of e-book formats, and one lucky reader can win three of the titles by becoming a follower of its Twitter account. The Twitter address is @eMysteries, the prize will be awarded Nov. 2, and the books are:

•The City When It Rains by Thomas H. Cook

•Rilke on Black by Ken Bruen

•The Mordida Man by Ross Thomas

Other authors available or soon to be include James Ellroy, James Grady, Ellery Queen, Donald E. Westlake, Christianna Brand, George Harmon Coxe, Andrew Klavan, Wendy Hornsby, Jack O’Connell, T.J. English, David Stout, Charles McCarry, David Housewright, John Harvey, James Carlos Blake and Joseph Wambaugh.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Meet the new Spillane, same as ...

2011-10-27T01:33:00.009-04:00

When you want to unwind with some relaxing reading while crossing Delaware Bay, the only choice is Mickey Spillane.

Dead Street, published by Hard Case Crime, brought near completion by Spillane, and finished by Max Allan Collins based on Spillane's notes, is Spillane's final crime novel.

It's a non-Mike Hammer book set in our time (People think of Spillane as a 1950s author, but he wrote almost to the end of his life, in 2006). Despite the contemporary setting, Spillane and his retired cop protagonist yearn for their Hammeresque past as hard as the book's central figure yearns to recapture the memory she had lost in a car crash twenty years before.

Thus the protagonist, Jack Stang, as he hears the unlikely tale of the woman's survival:

"My hand was on the .45 now. My thumb flipped off the leather snap fastener and eased the hammer back. If this was a pathetic jokester he was about to die at this last punch line."

Stang finds a pipe, "the sort rich little slobs liked to tote around to puff on weed or hash." There's even a reference to "what used to be called un-American activities." Coming from Spillane, that sounds positively nostalgic.

Cape May Welcome Center

So, if the book is full of Spillane's well-ripened political and cultural views, how do we know that the story takes place in our time rather than Mike Hammer's? How's this for a zinger:

"`I hear fancy apartments are going in.'

"`Yeah. And guess who's behind it?'

"Another stupid little surprise, I supposed. `Tell me.'

"`A Saudi investment group.'

"`Only seems fair.'

"`Yeah?'

"`They took down two buildings, didn't they? Ought to put up a few.'"

Death on the beach

2011-10-25T19:14:00.007-04:00

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Rehoboth being a beach town, land around it, much of it only recently developed, is in great demand for housing. Er, make that luxury living only minutes from the beach.

I spent the day on delightful bicycle trails that passed through fields, along abandoned railway track beds, across moody dunes and spreading salt marshes, through a state park, and past new residential "communities" with names like Grande Canal Pointe and -- I am not making this up -- Wolfe Runne. What kind of people would spend $100,000 more for a house just for a couple of superfluous e's?

Had a pleasant and informative chat with an archaeological illustrator at work at the Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes, and witnessed what looked like a haunting, ironic death on the beach -- of a horseshoe crab, I should add, not a human.

I'd got myself hopelessly lost in Cape Henlopen State Park, and I finally abandoned the road in favor of walking and riding back along the beach to Rehoboth. It was late, the beach was empty, and I saw the creature -- call it Gregor -- on its back, its sand-crusted limbs still.

I made it home. He didn't.

I flipped it onto its front, figuring that a species that's been around for 350 million years deserves some dignity, and I felt like Schweitzer when its tail started moving. Then the tide lapped up, swept around Gregor, and he died again.

Stupid arthropod. They're supposed to like water.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

All along the Delaware watchtower

2011-10-24T18:23:00.004-04:00

World War II watchtower, Fort
Miles Historical Area, Cape
Henlopen State Park, Delaware

A more recent sentinel

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper, 2011)

I'll shut up about Derek Raymond one day ...

2011-10-23T08:02:00.002-04:00

... but not just yet. I mentioned that The Devil's Home on Leave sticks somewhat more closely to outward forms of the police procedural than did I Was Dora Suarez, the one previous novel of Raymond's that I'd read.

There's also more than a bit of the serial-killer novel to the book, which makes me wonder what role Raymond played in the development of that subgenre. (The Devil's Home on Leave, second of Raymond's "Factory" novels, appeared in 1985.)

The nameless detective sergeant's interrogation of the killer, conducted on visits to the killer's home, are informal, (verbally) harsh, full of mutual goading, and punctuated in at least one case by a beer break in which both take part. That's not just a good way for the investigator to get inside the villain's head, but also for the villain to do the same to his questioner.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

In Derek Raymond's world

2011-10-21T18:05:00.003-04:00

The Devil's Home on Leave, second of Derek Raymond's Factory novels, is talkier than the previous Raymond I'd read, a kind of travelogue through Raymond's and his protagonist's moral, social, professional, political, and emotional worlds:

"The listed name of the Factory is Poland Street police station, London W1, but it'll never shake off the name of the Factory. The name sticks to the men and women who work there, also to the people who get worked over there, downstairs."

"I got up and tried to read, to shake off my memories and dreams. I picked up a book. But it made no difference; the book lasted far too long, like a government."

Raymond sticks a bit closer to conventional detective-story-style investigation here (Odd in Raymond to see two officers dicussing crime without insulting one another or musing on the state of the world, for example.) Still, it's a funny and harrowing trip so far, and I shall send back further bulletins.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Hear Derek Raymond read!

2011-10-20T13:34:00.002-04:00

He died in 1994, but you can hear Derek Raymond read from his novel He Died With His Eyes Open in a clip on the Melville House Web site.

And here's a Raymond site that includes lots of covers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Derek Raymond, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett

2011-10-20T00:19:00.008-04:00

He was a latter-day Hammett, I thought when I read Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez. He was a new Chandler, I thought when I read the opening chapters of Raymond's The Devil's Home on Leave.

With one novel-plus of Raymond under my belt, I say he's a bit of both. His nameless detective-sergeant protagonist is as dedicated to his job as was Sam Spade or the Continental Op, and he yearns like Philip Marlowe, only there's not a trace of nostalgia about him. He's as hard and as heart-breaking as the best of the dark crime writers who followed him and who invoke his name as reverently as they do Hammett's and Chandler's.

Visit the Melville House Books web site to see what Raymond had to say about his predecessors and what some of today's finest dark crime writers say about him.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Adjustment: Scott Phillips says things funny

2011-10-19T02:10:00.007-04:00

It may not be kosher to cite an author's personal inscription when discussing his book, but in this case the message is very much in the style of the novel that follows:

"To Peter `Fuck Peter Rozovsky' Rozovsky — the real father of NOIR@ the BAR
from your pal,
Scott Phillips"

The profanity is an allusion to the equally earthy thanks Phillips and Jedidiah Ayres sent my way in their Noir at the Bar anthology, and the repetition of the names is typical Phillips: He writes things funny rather than merely writing funny things. And that's why his new novel, The Adjustment, an increasingly dark tale of a Wichita man's involvement in addiction, infidelity, blackmail and killing, is laugh-out-loud funny even when the action is not particularly so:

"`Shut your noisemaker,' Red said. `You don't determine what gets discussed.' He gestured to her. `Wayne, this here's my wife, Betty.'"

Sorry, but I horselaughed when I read that, just as I did at:

"I had made a nice illicit bundle off of Uncle Sam. In the little safe in the basement that contained among other things my discharge papers and my Purple Heart — probably the only one ever awarded for getting stabbed by a rival pimp — was a whole lot of illicit cash I'd managed to smuggle back from Europe."

The book reminds me a bit of Charles Willeford's The Shark-Infested Custard. Each is the story of an everyday working man, or men, who get involved in criminal matters, and each uses its characters to create a vivid sense of place, Florida in Willeford's book, post-World War II Wichita, Kansas, in Phillips'. But The Adjustment is darker and funnier and maybe sadder, and I like it better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

I enter the Reginald Marsh flash-fiction challenge

2011-10-17T22:38:00.013-04:00

(Junkyard Scene by Reginald Marsh,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Patti Abbott has created a flash fiction challenge for a good cause. She asked readers to create stories inspired by the American painter Reginald Marsh, and she promises to donate five dollars to Union Settlement for each entry. (Union Settlement is where her daughter Megan works. Yep, that Megan Abbott.) Here's my story.

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

"Smithers Should Have Listened"

by Peter Rozovsky

You'll drive."

“Like fuck, I will,” Cappy said. "I’m—“

Smithers put his mug down hard. “You’ll drive, or you’ll stay the fuck home. Now, here’s what we’ll do…"

***

The job went off without a hitch. Cappy pulled up to the bank's side entrance. Smithers and Ben slipped in the front and mingled with the customers. Ben queued up to see the business manager, his hat in hand, with a story about the men's haberdashery he could open with just a $2,000 loan.

At 10:06 two guards accompanied the bank president to the vault, and Smithers nodded to Ben. The president clicked the dial, the guards turned a massive steel wheel, and Smithers pulled a shotgun from his long coat. Ben brought his hand down on the business manager's wrist and said, "Don't."

Smithers stepped into the vault and raked up the cash — $175,000, the papers said. Gus stood by the front door, keeping the way clear, while Ben covered the business manager and the tellers with a revolver, making sure no one went for an alarm. In the meantime, Cappy pulled the car around the front and collected Smithers, Ben, and Gus as smoothly as if they'd been heading out for a drive in the countryside.

At least, that's what I read in the papers the next day. I sat out the job because of a hunting accident. Me, the shooter in the gang, and laid up with a keister full of buckshot!

It seemed that the boys had made it clear to the last traffic light in town, a big brewery truck bearing down from the right, Cappy laughing like a madman behind the wheel, Ben and Smithers going crazy in the back seat, the truck bearing down, Gus throwing himself from the car just as the truck hit.

None of the boys made it out alive, of course, and there wasn't much left of that fine black sedan of theirs, either. Gus's body was torn clean in half at the waist, and the traffic signal, knocked from its post but still blinking from red to green every thirty seconds, lay in a pool of gasoline, brain tissue and beer next to what was left of Cappy.

Poor kid. I knew him better than I'd known the others, known him since he was a boy, in fact. That's how I knew what he'd been trying to say when Smithers ordered him to drive: "Like fuck, I will. I'm color blind!"

Smithers should have listened.

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

(This is the second story I've written for a flash-fiction challenge. Read the first one, "Down the Shore," here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"Innovation": Breaking ground in buzz words

2011-10-17T17:04:00.009-04:00

He did not
produce innovation

I really do have a crime-fiction post lined up, but first a bit about a buzz word so pervasive that many people may not recognize it as such: Innovation.

I mean innovation as a product, not as a process, as an end rather than a means. What do I mean by this? In researching a recent post about Alan Glynn's Bloodland, I found that the author of a relevant statement worked for the Center for Innovation in something or other, and I thought, now there's a name tailor-made to capture the attention of deep-pocketed charitable foundations. What does a center for innovation produce? Innovation, I suppose.

On the other hand, there was Steve Jobs, who produced products. Yes, Jobs was an innovator (Thanks to him, millions of people can call up computer programs by swiping their fingers across a touch pad rather than clicking a button), but innovation for him was a means rather than an end. When innovation becomes a goal in itself, it's time to roll your eyes and watch millions of dollars being seduced out of millions of pockets.

(See "new and improved.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More Alan Glynn, plus "interactive discussion"

2011-10-15T23:59:00.009-04:00

Where was I? Oh, yes: buzz words, privatization, the evils of corporate control.

Alan Glynn's new Bloodland sparked much of that discussion, and the concerns in that book are a neat bookend to those in Glynn's 2001 novel The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless, title of the movie based on it).

That novel follows a New York semi-slacker on a journey through Manhattan's financial stratosphere fueled by a magical drug that lets him do just about anything, includings things he can't always remember. Here are three favorite quotation from the book which, though ten years old, is possibly more pertinent today than ever:

"The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18- to 24-year-olds."

"She worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate."

"Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex.’"

Back on my personal newspaper front, a story about young civic activists had one touting "sustainable models" and another talking about a conference that sought to encourage "interactive discussion."

"Interactive discussion." That takes redundancy to the next level.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Is privatization the new murder?

2011-10-14T18:18:00.005-04:00

Well, no, but it has come in for some caustic remarks in a pair of crime novels discussed here recently: Bloodland, by Alan Glynn, and Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström.

In the former, a private soldier placed on leave after witnessing a massacre remarks that going on leave has a different meaning for private military contractors (PMC). Unlike in the army, he says, being told to take leave for a PMC means get the hell out, and don't come back.

In Three Seconds, a thriller that meditates on the ethical pitfalls of using police informants, a character remarks caustically that informants are cheap ways of outsourcing intelligence-gathering.

What other crime novels cast an eye, skeptical or otherwise, on privatization?

***

Some of you will know that I work as a newspaper copy editor to earn Bouchercon money. Tonight at work I read a column about a gathering of investors and dealmakers pessimistic about business prospects.

The speakers included Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who rattled off a list of foreign-policy hot spots, according to our columnist, before wrapping up with "a bit of manager-speak: `None of these are problems to be solved,' Hayden said. `They are conditions to be managed.'"

"By government-funded security contractors, no doubt," our columnist added. "One of the few growth sectors."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Ray Banks, or, Who are your favorite supporting characters?

2011-10-13T14:15:00.002-04:00

Ray Banks' series about a Manchester private investigator is known as the Cal Innes series, after its protagonist, yet its most recent entry, Beast of Burden, divides the narrative voice between Innes and a police detective sergeant named Donkin.

Donkin is a greedy, uncouth, small-time screw-up, but he becomes sympathetic when, in moments of enlightenment, he realizes, without self-pity, what a screw-up he is. Here he narrates his confrontation with an unexpectedly bold superior:

"He didn't back down. He was supposed to. Everyone else did when I got this close, this aggro."

And here he is, carrying on with his work even though he's under suspension:

"Then, course, there'd be the chance that Goines would carve us the fuck up, or else expect to be arrested. Because who the fuck was I but a fat bloke with a temper right now?"

This is my first Banks novel; I don't know if Donkin appears in the earlier books or if Banks is in the habit of dividing narrative chores or giving Innes such a doppelganger. Donkin is, among other things, an amusing lampoon of the heroically principled renegade cop who can't be constrained by his superiors.

Who are your favorite supporting characters?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011