A grace note: What song has the best crime-fiction line?

Here's one more ornament to last week's Crime songs post. Your task there was to suggest songs that would make good crime stories. Someone (well, two people, including me) cited Elvis Costello's "Watching the Detectives" for this chilling line: "She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake." That line is a story in itself or at least the germ of one. What other lines from songs pack that kind of condensed narrative punch?

UPDATE: Here's another crime song: Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," about simultaneous bank robbery and romantic exhaustion and betrayal:

"Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that they got off with quite a haul.
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town.
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts."

Wikipedia says the song has inspired two screenplays, so I'm not the only one who thinks the song makes a good story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Zest

Zest has always been one of my favorite words, long before I knew it also meant the peel, esp. the thin outer peel, of a citrus fruit used for flavoring. I love the word because it sounds like the qualities it embodies: Gusto. Flavor. Hearty enjoyment. And that's the opening chapter of Adrian McKinty's Dead I Well May Be, as life-embracing a piece of literary zest as I can remember since I started reading about murder, cheating, robbery, squalor, despair and violent death in my spare time.

Here's the start of Chapter One. Pay special attention to the first four words:

"I open my eyes. The train tracks. The river. A wall of heat. Unbearable white sunlight smacking off the railings, the street and the godawfulness of the buildings. Steam from the permanent Con Ed hole at the corner. Gum and graffiti tags on the sidewalk. People on the platform – Jesus Christ, are they really in sweaters and wool hats? ... I'm smoking. I'm standing here on the elevated subway platform looking down at all this enormous nightmare and I'm smoking. My skin can barely breathe. I'm panting. The back of my T-shirt is thick with sweat, 100 degrees, 90 percent relative humidity. I'm complaining about the pollution you can see in the sky above New Jersey, and I'm smoking Camels. What an idiot."

Just one bit more, because I want to keep the post shorter than the chapter:

"Here I should point out that every time you hear Scotchy speak you must remember that each time I put in the word fuck there are at least three or four that I've left out."

Is that great, or what?

A short prologue, more effective than most examples of its kind, begins "No one was dead." How's that for a grabber?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Adrian McKinty

The Prophet Murders — Community news

A recent commenter on this blog wrote favorably of the tendency in English village mysteries for characters to gather in the local pub and talk things out. Mehmet Murat Somer's The Prophet Murders manages a similar feeling of intimacy, though the center of its universe is a transvestite nightclub in a city of 10 million people.

Somer articulates the feeling of community from the novel's first page, where the protagonist, who manages the club, has just read of a transvestite's death in a fire. "Bad news about our girls always gets me down," he reflects (italics mine).

The protagonist, never named in the book, is not just the manager of the club, he also dresses the part. He is gay and, as narrator and character, he is forthright about his sexual pleasures and practices. By day, he dresses in men's clothing and is an expert in computer security. Nothing like this is likely to turn up in an Agatha Christie novel. Still, the comparison is valid, emphasized by the protagonist's chatty observations about music, television, diets and food and the amusingly chilling gimmickry of the plot (a series of transvestites, each with the given name of a prophet in Islam, turn up dead), and made explicit by references to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Somer makes intelligent, amusing and creative use of at least one additional amateur-sleuth convention: that of the expert who provides skills that the amateur hero lacks. This protagonist has several such helpers, the most intriguing of whom we meet first in a chat room, where he posts inflammatory messages using the handle jihad2000. The name expresses one facet of the character. The other facets may be far more surprising.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Mehmet Murat Somer
Turkish crime fiction

Coda: A note on musical references in crime stories

Enthusiastic response to last week's post about Crime songs has had me thinking about music, crime fiction and music in crime fiction.

One of my complaints about the last is that a given song or musician, usually of the rock and roll variety, too often serves as nothing more than a brand name or a label. The song or the performers are simply too popular to serve as a meaningful indicator of a character's uniqueness.

Håkan Nesser uses music in his recently published Mind's Eye, where he has his protagonist, Van Veeteren, slip into his car and put on some Francisco Tárrega. The reference to the great classical guitarist is, like many musical references in crime novels, a label. Nesser does not make music an important part of Van Veeteren's makeup. But at least it's a distinctive label. Not many fictional detectives favor classical guitar.

The music references that really caught my eye recently, though, were in Mehmet Murat Somer's The Prophet Murders. In the scene in question, the manager of a transvestite nightclub insists that the club's record spinner account for his choice of music:

"`What's this music you're playing?' I demanded.

"`Adiemus. New Age. It's a new group. Great, isn't it?'

"To add insult to injury, he was poking fun at me. New Age is one of the forms of music I simply don't comprehend. Paul Mauriat, Franck Pourcel, Francis Lai and even Fausto Papetti have been playing this kind of music for years. The only difference is that they perform with an orchestra, not synthesizers and the piping of a flute. Nowadays, intellectuals have elevated this sort of music into an art form. Why the double standard? What have the others been doing wrong all these years? A succession of critics has slammed them. All right, I don't think much of their work either, but I don't see the difference, do you?"

Now, that's a good string of musical references. The scene is funny. It tells us something about the protagonist's personality. It packs an amusing, self-satirical punch line. The mention of instruments may help you imagine the music. If you know the performers, you may smile (or wince) to memories of soaring, sappy, minor-key string passages. Somer's passage is a hell of a lot more than just a label, in other words. Most important, the scene could work just as well for a reader who has never heard of the performers in question.

And now readers, what are your favorite musical references in crime novels or stories? What makes the references work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Mehmet Murat Somer
Turkish crime fiction

Noir at the Bar: The Bugs Bunny and Edgar Allan Poe edition

My post on Jonathan McGoran's Noir at the Bar II reading last week neglected to mention that Ed Pettit served once again as questioner, as he had for Noir at the Bar I .

Here's Ed's account of the rapid-fire queries with which he peppered McGoran, thanks to which you will learn, among other things, that McGoran, obviously a man of exquisite sensibility, liked to watch Bugs Bunny on Saturdays.

That's Ed at left, by the way, or rather a little friend he carries with him at all times.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Van de Wetering comes back

With hat tips to the Rap Sheet and others comes the news that Soho Press plans to reissue Janwillem van de Wetering's Grijpstra and De Gier ("Amsterdam Cops") books in paperback starting this fall. As the Rap Sheet's J. Kingston Pierce says, "This, folks, is the best way to honor the passing of an author."

See a Van de Wetering bibliography here. I think the list is complete, though it includes The Perfidious Parrot under a miscellaneous "novels" heading rather than with the "Amsterdam Cops" books, where it belongs.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Janwillem van de Wetering

Vive la France!

In honor of Bastille Day, In Reference to Murder posts a guide to French mysteries, complete with links to more sites.

In honor of my nephew Jack's birthday, happy birthday, Jack.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A noir story set in Iraq

And it includes an invasion of Lebanon.

OK, it's not all noir, and its setting was not called Iraq 4,600 years ago, when the title character lived, or 2,700 years ago, when the most complete version of the tale was set down.

The story is The Epic of Gilgamesh, called simply Gilgamesh in Stephen Mitchell's 2004 version, and, in addition to being one of the most stirring stories ever told, it offers what is likely world literature's first femme fatale.

In this scene, Ishtar, played by Joan Bennett or Mary Astor, says:

"Come here, Gilgamesh ...
marry me, give me your luscious fruits
be my husband, be my sweet man ... "

to which Gilgamesh, played by Sterling Hayden or Humphrey Bogart, replies, in part:

"Which of your husbands did you love forever?
Which could satisfy your endless desires?
Let me remind you of how they suffered,
how each one came to a bitter end,"

rejecting her advances as surely as Sam Spade rejected Brigid O'Shaughnessy's at the end of The Maltese Falcon. And then:

"Ishtar shrieked, she exploded with fury."

Not all Gilgamesh's femmes are fatales. Shamhat seduces Gilgamesh's future sidekick, Enkidu, in one of the sexiest scenes in any ancient epic, but the sex civilizes the feral giant rather than threatening his downfall. Still, the scary Ishtar and the stoic Gilgamesh earn the epic a place on history's list of proto-noir and proto-crime classics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Daggers out

The Crime Writers Association announced the winners of its Dagger awards this week:

Duncan Lawrie Dagger: Frances Fyfield, Blood From Stone
Duncan Lawrie International Dagger: Dominique Manotti, Lorraine Connection
John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger: Matt Rees, The Bethlehem Murders aka The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S. (Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Rees.)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: Tom Rob Smith, Child 44
Non-Fiction Dagger: Kesper Aspden, Nationality: Wog – The Hounding of David Oluwale
Dagger in the Library: Craig Russell
Short Story Award: Martin Edwards, "The Bookbinder's Apprentice"
Debut Dagger: Amer Anwar, Western Fringes

Shortlistees include Sian Reynolds (read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Sian Reynolds here), Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for her translation of Fred Vargas' This Night's Foul Work; Colin Cotterill, Duncan Lawrie Dagger for The Coroner's Lunch; and Andrea Camilleri and translator Stephen Sartarelli, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for The Patience of the Spider.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Crime songs

Cop Killer, Weegee, negative, January 16, 1941; print, about 1950
© International Center of Photography

This one began as a post on Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays and continued in a discussion with one of my colleagues at work. The subject as enunciated by Declan: "songs as condensed crime fiction novels – stripped-back and pared-down narratives about losers, loners and the kind of suckers who never caught an even break."

Bruce Sprinsteen's Nebraska came up, and I am proud to say that one of its crimes ("They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night") happened not far from where I live. Bobbie Gentry’s "Ode to Billie Joe" drew a mention, and someone suggested Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."

The first verse of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," the part before the song turns to crap, has the makings of a crime story, but my contribution on C.A.P. was "Ocultei," recorded by the great Brazilian singer Elizeth Cardoso with a last verse (rendered into English for blogging purposes) that runs tremulously thus:

"And my most ardent desire
– May God pardon me the sin! – (or maybe "For which God pardons ... ")
Is that another woman by your side
Kill you in the hour of a kiss."

Now, let's hear from you. What songs would make good crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The Bread line ends

Readers in Northern Ireland, New Mexico and British Columbia knew that author Timothy Hallinan was associated with the 1970s group Bread. That knowledge wins them copies of Hallinan's novels A Nail Through the Heart and The Fourth Watcher.

(A notice here offers a bit of background to Hallinan's musical career, though the last sentence contains an obvious problem of tense.)

Update: In a comment on this post, Hallinan sets the musical record straight and offers a fact I had not previously known about an Oscar-winning mega-hit song from the 1970s.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Timothy Hallinan

Crime writers and their odd former careers, plus a chance to win free books!

John McFetridge says he thinks a member of a once-successful rock band in our mutual home town is a poet these days, which reminds me of some comments I'll likely post in the next day or two. The comments will concern a crime novelist whose association with pop music includes writing songs for a fabulously successful soft-rock group of the 1970s.

The author, Timothy Hallinan, writes a series featuring a travel-guide writer named Poke Rafferty who is trying to settle down in Bangkok. The first in the series, A Nail Through the Heart, is shot through with some of the sinister things one might expect of a book set in Thailand. But it also has some of the wriest humor you'll read a crime novel, plus an affecting emphasis on Rafferty's domestic life unusual for a book by a male author.

Three lucky readers will win A Nail Through the Heart plus Hallinan's second Rafferty novel, The Fourth Watcher, if they can answer this question: For which wildly successful 1970s band did Hallinan write? Send your answer with a postal address to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net.

While you're at it, what other odd or surprising previous careers have crime novelists had? You can post those answers right here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Timothy Hallinan

When one crime writer honors another by name

My favorite tribute to the late Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier mysteries, came years before his death. Håkan Nesser named the protagonist of his long-running Swedish crime series Van Veeteren in honor of Van de Wetering. Nesser told me last month that he "enjoyed De Gier and Grijpstra a lot, of course, perhaps the way they sort of look in the wrong direction most of the time, not really concerned about their work."

I take his comment as a neat encapsulation of the duo's unorthodox crime-solving techniques, of their seeking answers through contemplation and indirection as much as, if not more than, through forensics. In any case, Nesser's own work has something of the sly humor of Van de Wetering's, and the tribute is apt.

In a post last summer, I discussed other such tributes, including Andrea Camilleri's having named his protagonist, Salvo Montalbano, in honor of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, author of the Pepe Carvalho novels. Readers cited other authors who had offered creative tributes, including Stuart MacBride, Ken Bruen and more from Camilleri.

What other authors have paid tribute in print to their own favorite writers? Who did so in paticularly creative ways? Sara Paretsky has named streets and hotel banquet halls in her V.I. Warshawski books for favorite crime writers, and I believe Carolyn G. Hart gave books by her favorite authors roles in her own work. Add to this list, please.

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

On Van de Wetering, here's what the Telegraph wrote in February when it included him on its list of "50 crime writers to read before you die" (complete with a minor misspelling of his name) along with a comment I posted on this blog in reaction:

Janwillem van de(!!) Wetering (1931-): "The capers of Grijpstra and de Gier, aka The Amsterdam Cops, are oddly appealing. One plays the drums; the other the flute. They frequent canals. There's a cat. Unique and very Dutch. Read: Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)" (Detectives Beyond Borders says: Outsider in Amsterdam may exemplify the "very Dutch" side of van de Wetering. Hard Rain highlights the "unique" side, delightfully reflecting the author's experience with Zen Buddhism and my favorite in the series.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Hakan Nesser
Janwillem van de Wetering

Janwillem van de Wetering dies at 77

With a sad tip of the hat to Euro Crime comes the news that Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier ("Amsterdam Cops") mysteries, has died.

Here's what I wrote about Van de Wetering back in this blog's first post, where I listed the books among my favorite crime fiction from beyond my borders:

This Dutch author has been a businessman, a world traveler, a reserve Amsterdam police officer, and a student at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. All, especially the last three, figure prominently in this series, which includes 14 novels and two overlapping short-story collections.

Detective twosomes are a nickel a dozen; Van de Wetering offers the only three-headed protagonist I can think of: the grumpy Adjutant Henk Grijpstra, the younger and sometimes vain Sgt. Rinus de Gier, and their unnamed commissaris, or chief, an elderly mentor with sometimes excruciating knee pains who is a sly collaborator and a kind of guru to Grijpstra and de Gier. Start with Hard Rain, in part for the larger role it gives the commissaris.

Van de Wetering has an interesting approach to translation: He does his own, and he regards the results as versions, rather than translations, of the original. The one book in the series that I read in Dutch has slightly different chapter divisions from the English version and an opening chapter with more physical description. And the first in the series, An Outsider in Amsterdam, reflects the Dutch language's more frequent use of the present perfect where English would use the simple past. This results in occasional odd sentences such as "I wonder if he has done it."

Van de Wetering wrote several books about his experiences as a Buddhist, and his chronicle of his life in a Kyoto monastery, The Empty Mirror, is refreshingly down-to-earth about the pleasant and the harsh aspects of a would-be monk's life. Van de Wetering's other work included a biography of the Dutch author and diplomat Robert van Gulik, and Inspector Saito's Small Satori, a book of intensely philosophically minded crime stories.

Van de Wetering was indirectly responsible for the creation of this blog. I was dating a Dutch woman a few years ago, so I took special notice of An Outsider in Amsterdam. I soon read the rest of the Grijpstra and de Gier books, most in editions published by Soho Crime. That was my entrée to Soho's fine line of international crime fiction and to interational crime fiction in general. The rest is blogging history.

Click here for an appreciation and here for Van de Wetering's bibliography.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Things aren't always what they meme, Part II

Oh, all right: Peter Lovesey. Declan Burke. John McFetridge. Megan Abbott. Scott Phillips. Christa Faust.

As before, how about you? Who would you miss the most if they stopped writing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Things aren't always what they meme

Even the simplest, most seemingly painless of these tagging games can be fraught with questions.

A current meme, for which Karen "AustCrime" Chisholm has tagged me, bears the headline "Three Authors You Couldn't Live Without." Simple, yes? Except that the accompanying text asks a different question: "Who are the three authors whose work you would miss the most if they stopped writing?" What if the authors you couldn't live without have already stopped writing because, say, they've stopped living? I choose to answer the first of the meme's questions.

My first author is also one of Karen's:

1) Peter Temple. The man writes such beautiful, graceful prose, full of sensitivity and wit, that it would be a shame for him to stop.

2) Bill James. His Harpur and Iles series lost a bit of its social-comic edge once the great Panicking Ralph Ember attained his goal of becoming a fairly big-time drug dealer. But the middle books of the series remain gorgeously written, deliciously dark, sometimes hysterically funny looks at British life.

3) Po Chü-I. T'ang Dynasty poet, lived 772-846. The writer whose work to have with you should you plan to become stranded on a desert island and probably the closest thing to a writer whose work I could not live without.

Last year, when I lay sick,
I vowed
I'd never touch a drop again
As long as I should live.

But who could know
Last year
What this year's spring would bring?

And here I am,
Coming home from old Liu's house
As drunk as I can be!

Incidentally, Karen's choices make entertaining reading. Here's what she had to say about Reginald Hill, author of the literate, clever and funny Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries: "I live in fear of his health. If I lived any closer I'd be making chicken soup and offering to knit warm, comfortable socks."

And now, readers, how about you? Who are your three indispensable authors?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Personal thoughts on fictional settings and a chance to out some Canadians

In January I asked how readers felt about crime fiction set in places where they had lived. A week later, I asked how they felt reading fictional accounts of periods or events they had experienced firsthand.

Thanks to my recent reading of two novels and a short story by John McFetridge, I am now prepared to ask myself both those questions. I wrote last week about McFetridge's creation of Toronto as a great city of the imagination in his novel Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. His short story "Barbotte" does something similar for Montreal. So does his first book, Dirty Sweet, though that novel is set for the most part in Toronto.

I am around McFetridge's age and, like him, I grew up in Montreal. Like many of our generation, he eventually decamped and wound up in Toronto. I left for the United States instead, but enough members of my family took off for Toronto that I feel a part of that phenomenon. And if I hadn't so felt already, I would have the first time I sampled credible versions of the best bagels in the world – Montreal-style bagels – in Toronto. And please don't make the ludicrous argument that New York bagels are better.

I suggest that McFetridge's background may account for an undertone of wistfulness in both of his highly entertaining crime books and for his unusual accomplishment in creating a body of work whose setting is not just two cities but the very process of movement from one to the other.

The protagonist's reminiscences in Dirty Sweet naturally include an old girlfriend. But they also include many rock bands, local and international, popular in the Montreal of McFetridge's youth and mine. I even knew the keyboard player for one of the bands cited as having played raucous motorcycle-gang parties.

This protagonist, Vince, has wound up in Toronto, making his way in the criminal world, after a wandering life that has taken him from Montreal's suburbs through the Alberta oil boom to prison to the new Toronto, where there is real money to be made for the man (or woman) willing to fight for it. It's not too much to suggest that he is a personification of English Canada's history from the 1970s until now.

In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, the nostalgia has hardened into a wry and funny realism. The leader of a motorcycle gang remarks that the time has come to move the gang's head offices from Montreal to Toronto. This is an amusing example of the corporate mentality that finds its highest Canadian personification in Toronto. It is especially, and perhaps ruefully, so for those who know that many Canadian businesses of a more legitimate type similarly pulled up stakes and headed for Toronto after the separatist Parti Quebecois came to power in Quebec in 1976.

Both the novels are filled with violence, laughs and characters who are likable despite the violence they get up to. The novels are superb entertainment, in other words, offering credible takes on how crime works now in a rich, sprawling, shifting city just trying to figure out what to do with its money. But – and I hope this scares no one off – they're also moving documents of a major social shift. And, so help me, that combination of the personal, the social and the entertaining makes McFetridge a major author.

And now, let's play Out the Canadians. The keeper of this site is Canadian, though he no longer lives in Canada. So are are the keepers of a number of other popular crime-fiction sites. How many can you name?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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John McFetridge
Canadian crime fiction

Noir at the Bar II: Counteracting the C.S.I. effect

Back in January, I wrote about the excruciating experience of being trapped in front of a big screen showing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit at a pizzeria, and the ordeal had nothing to do with the pizza, which was fine. Rather, my agita was induced by the show's massive information dumps, the scenes in which crime-scene investigators spout facts rather than talk like real people.

That's why I was pleased to host Jonathan McGoran at this evening's Noir at the Bar reading in Philadelphia. Under the pen name D.H. Dublin, McGoran writes carefully researched forensic thrillers, but he never forgets that his job is to tell a story, and that stories are about people.

His series about Philadelphia forensic investigator Madison Cross, now up to three books, adopts the clever strategy of following Cross from the beginning of her police career. This, McGoran says, lets the reader learn along with her. In practical terms, it means there is little need for the globby blocks of story-stopping information that make forensic TV shows hard to watch.

McGoran, while acknowledging that his novels are in essence police procedurals, said he hates the word procedural because it reminds him too much of manual, "something I'd get with my microwave." That's another indicator of the human touch he brings to his work and another indicator that forensic, scientific crime fiction can have heart, and not just severed body parts.

Why not make this a question to readers? What writers manage to make difficult, highly technical, potentially dry material interesting? How do they do this?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Jonathan McGoran
D.H. Dublin

Get smart, but not too smart, Part II, or What makes a good series character special?

So I went to see Get Smart after this blog's freewheeling discussion about crime-fiction bumblers, why we love them, and what happens when movie producers try to make them smarter.

I agree that that the movie was "listless" and "laughless" and that this was likely due to the moviemakers' decision to make Maxwell Smart competent. Once they did that, what was left? An utterly routine action movie with bits of comedy and romance that would not have been a whit better or worse had the characters borne generic names rather than those of the beloved characters from the old Get Smart TV series: Max, Agent 99, Chief, Larabee, and so on.

If thinking about crappy movies is burdensome, think about series characters instead. The makers of the Get Smart movie ruined television's equivalent of a classic series character by robbing him of that which made him special. What makes your favorite series characters special? What could they least afford to lose in any sequel, movie or TV version?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Howard Engel's Memory Book

This was the first crime novel I can remember that comes with an afterword by a neurologist. That neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writes of his acquaintance with Howard Engel, which came about because of Engel's alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer loses the ability to read but not to write -- a difficult affliction to bear for a novelist.

Sacks tells us about some of the surprising ways Engel overcame this condition and resumed his writing career. The first product of this resumption was Memory Book, the eleventh novel featuring private eye Benny Cooperman, and the first in which Benny must, like his creator, overcome alexia sine agraphia. (Engel's condition was the result of a mild stroke. Cooperman's was the result of -- but you'll have to read the book to find out.)

Confined to a rehabilitation hospital as he is, Cooperman must, like Alan Grant in Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, solve a mystery from his sick bed. Cooperman is alive to the world of the hospital, to the personalities of his fellow patients, his nurses and his doctors.

The mystery Cooperman must solve is how he wound up in the condition in which he finds himself. This leads him back into the case that had brought him from his home town of Grantham, Ontario, to Toronto, where he was hospitalized. He must solve these dual mysteries as he struggles with neurological conditions that leave him constantly tired and unable to retain names and words. His discoveries of his own slowly returning cognitive abilities as he chases down the people who put him where he is add an intriguing dimension highly unusual in crime novels to say the least. Handicapped detectives have been around for almost a hundred years, if not longer, but I don't know of any others who have shared an affliction with their creator.

I also found myself wondering if Engel's cognitive struggles accounted for my one quibble with the novel's style. In at least two places, long stretches of dialogue are uninterrupted by reaction on Cooperman's part. In at least one of these, the lack of reaction was obtrusive. Is this a quirk of Engel's style unrelated to his condition? I'll tell you after I've read more of his books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Howard Engel
Canadian crime fiction

Noir at the Bar this Sunday

Celebrate America tomorrow; celebrate crime fiction on Sunday at Noir at the Bar II with:

Jonathan McGoran

writing as D.H. Dublin and reading from and answering questions about his latest novel, Freezer Burn

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

"Come for the crime fiction; stay for the fried candy bars."

Where: The Tritone1508 South St., Philadelphia, PA
215-545-0475
http://www.tritonebar.com

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Good things from across the border, Part II: John McFetridge

One problem with New York or Los Angeles or Chicago as settings for crime fiction is that they've been around forever. Among other things, this means that the fictional cities have long since supplanted their real counterparts in most readers' imaginations.

That's a tribute to the great writers and movie makers who have taken these cities as their subjects. But wouldn't it be exciting to see a great crime-fiction city taking shape before your eyes, to see a real city becoming a city of the imagination, with all the graft, corruption, population shifts, money, drugs, and tumultuous daily life that implies?

You can do this. Your city is Toronto, your author John McFetridge, your novel Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. And why not Toronto, a city far larger, far more diverse and far richer than the settings of most crime novels? McFetridge manages the difficult feat of portraying a city in constant transition, and he does this without slipping into easy sentimentality about days gone by or easy rants against the ravages of development. "It's hard to tell about this neighborhood," one character tells another as they approach a multiethnic strip mall. McFetridge does a nice job of portraying a city that has not just changed but may well be changing even as we read.

So much for urban studies; this is a crime novel, and McFetridge has populated it with at least six characters we can care about on both sides of the law. Among these, detectives Armstrong and Bergeron, a sexy marijuana grower named Sharon, and a mysterious, ambitious operator named Ray eventually emerge, but the book really has multiple protagonists, which lends it a kind of epic feel that matches the sprawl of the city the characters populate.

There are violence, killings, corruption, takeovers, and a plot set in motion by a body that plunges from a roof. Money is the motive force, and cops and gang leaders alike share a bland management-speak upon which McFetridge has his multiple characters comment acerbically. Canadian readers may enjoy McFetridge's take on a motorcycle gang that decides to move its head office form Montreal to Toronto, as so many more legitimate operations did after the 1976 election victory of the Franco-centric, separatist Parti Quebecois in Quebec, but the satire is accessible to anyone.

The action is slam-bang, the characters memorable, the resolution a a surprise on at least two levels. More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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John McFetridge
Canadian crime fiction

Carnival of the Criminal Minds, #18

The summer's first Carnival of the Criminal Minds takes place in the winter, in Australia, with the evocatively named Mysteries in Paradise as host. Step onto Kerrie's specially fitted crime-fiction bus, and get ready for a guide to one of the world's liveliest crime-fiction scenes. The lists of Aussie crime-fiction titles, authors awards and Web sites are longer that a rabbit-proof fence and a lot more fun.

As always with this carnival that never closes, visit the previous carnivals at the Carnival of the Criminal Minds archive.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Good things from across the border, Part I

I thank the reader who brought to my attention Penguin's covers for the new Canadian editions of Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman mysteries. The one to your right is worth a comment even before I begin reading it.

Note the wheelchair, the thought balloon and the title's backwards B. These are, presumably, references to an affliction shared by Cooperman and Engel. Like his protagonist, Engel suffered from alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer can write but not read. (In Engel's case, the condition resulted from a stroke. I don't know the protagonist's circumstances.) This obviously must have been a terrible blow for an author to overcome, and I believe the cover design captures that beautifully.

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who has written with much understanding about any number of strange neurological conditions, wrote an afterword to this book, which leads me to suspect that the cover's hints at mental and physical struggles accurately reflect the book's contents.

Next: Toronto is widely known for the numerous movies filmed there but set in other cities. In the coming days, I'll be discussing a crime novel that makes Toronto so cool that producers may soon want to start shooting movies in other cities and pretending they're Toronto instead of the other way around.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Howard Engel
Canadian crime fiction

Get smart, but not too smart

Apropos of my recent reading of Bertie and the Seven Bodies by Peter Lovesey, Lee Goldberg posts a relevant criticism of the new Get Smart movie. The problem with that movie and with Steve Martin's Pink Panther remake, Goldberg writes, is that "someone made the inept decision to make the bumbling heroes smart and capable ... and very good at what they do." This, he says, robbed the two protagonists of that which made them so funny: the gap between their inflated estimates of their own capabilities and what they were actually capable of.

Lovesey's Bertie, Prince of Wales, is similarly good-hearted and similarly deluded about the extent of his own capabilities as a sleuth. Lovesey has fun with this delusion literally from the novel's opening page: "Damnit, one small oversight and I'm branded as a failure. If I'd looked in the wretched wastepaper basket my chain of reasoning would have been different, altogether different."

And now, readers, what are your thoughts on crime-fiction bumblers? Who are your favorite such characters? Why do you like them? How would your feeling about them change if they were more capable and less prone to bumbling?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Peter Lovesey

More Bertie and the Seven Bodies

The third body has just been set off to one side in Peter Lovesey's Bertie and the Seven Bodies, which means I have about half the book to go. But I can't resist passing on a delicious passage.

The book's narrator and protagonist is Edward, Prince of Wales during the reign of his mother, Queen Victoria, which ended in 1901. The book's conceit is that Edward is narrating the story after he has become King Edward VII. Here is Edward, known to all as Bertie, relating his shock when he realizes the three deaths must be connected:

"Well, you'll have gathered the direction my thoughts were taking. It seemed to me that the victims had been picked off like prey, impersonally, for no other reason than that they happened to be guests at Desborough Hall at this time. Such callous slaughter is not unknown. I can't expect my twentieth-century reader to have heard of the East End murders committed in 1888 by a seeker of publicity known to the press as Jack the Ripper. At the time they made a considerable sensation. He wrote letters challenging the police to catch him, but up to now he is still at liberty. I tell you candidly, sitting in that darkened room, I could foresee a campaign just as brutal and alarming as the Ripper's – in fact more alarming, because it was aimed not at streetwalkers, but people of refinement."

This passage contains much to enjoy, laugh at and think about.

Discuss.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Peter Lovesey

Noir at the Bar II

With the first Noir at the Bar reading safely in the can, Detectives Beyond Borders is pleased to present Noir at the Bar II on Sunday, July 6. This second crime-fiction event at Philadelphia's Tritone bar will feature Jonathan McGoran, who, under the name D.H. Dublin, has written three forensic thrillers published by Penguin.

The novels feature Philadelphia forensic investigator Madison Cross, and McGoran lends his sometimes grim subject matter a human touch by following Cross from the beginning of her career as a crime-scene technician. This, McGoran says, lets the reader learn along with her. And the reader just may learn quite a lot. One reviewer wrote that "If you are tired of all the unrealistic CSI shows and books and are looking for an author that delivers realistic crime scene and investigative procedures, D.H. Dublin is the author you are seeking. "

The Noir at the Bar reading should be especially enjoyable because McGoran does a terrific job with his characters' voices. varying them enough to keep things interesting without, however, going over the top. He also has a tendency to giggle at the gory parts, which lends his readings an unexpectedly delightful and macabre touch.

So, if you're anywhere in the Northeastern United States a week from Sunday, drop in to the Tritone. Come for the reading, stay for the music, the mahi-mahi burgers, and the fried Mars bars.

===================================
Who: Jonathan McGoran a.k.a. D.H. Dublin
Where: The Tritone
1508 South Street Philadelphia, PA
215-545-0475

“Cool bar. Great food. The most diverse music venue in Philly”

When: Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 6 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Jonathan McGoran
D.H. Dublin