On writing crime fiction in Southeast Asia

The last time I took a break from crime fiction to read Fernand Braudel, the first Detectives Beyond Borders interview resulted. (I interviewed the late, great French historian's English translator, who also translates Fred Vargas.) This time I'm reading Braudel's A History of Civilizations and, while the crime connection is less direct, one section called to mind a number of crime writers I've discussed here:

"Since the development of Greek thought, however, the tendency of Western civilization has been towards rationalism and hence away from religious life. ... With very few exceptions ... no such marked turning away from religion is to be found in the history of the world outside the West. Almost all civilizations are pervaded or submerged by religion, by the supernatural, and by magic: they have always been steeped in it, and they draw from it the most powerful motives in their particular psychology."

Each of the crime writers this reminded me of is of European descent. Each has lived among and writes with respect about a non-European culture, sometimes about spiritual matters not normally accessible to persons of the mental framework Braudel discussed.

The writers are Colin Cotterill and his series about Dr. Siri Paiboun of Vientiane, Laos; Christopher G. Moore and his "cultural detective," Vincent Calvino of Bangkok; and Adrian Hyland and his half-Aboriginal, half-white, half-amateur sleuth Emily Tempest.

A passage in Cotterill's The Curse of the Pogo Stick, I wrote:

"nicely captures the simultaneous irreverence and respect with which Cotterill portrays the worlds of the supernatural and of those who believe in it. Dr. Siri is both a scientist – the chief and only coroner in post-Communist-revolution Laos – and a shaman, an unwilling conduit to the spirit world. Does he believe in the spirits with which he comes into contact and which sometimes help him solve mysteries? He has no choice."

Moore says Vincent Calvino "sifts through the evidence in a way that makes sense of the location and people living in Southeast Asia." Hyland said of his first novel, Diamond Dove (Moonlight Downs in the U.S.), that "I suspect one could do more for Aboriginal people by portraying them as a living, loveable people, rather than as a broken museum display which is going to have us all running for the confessional."

And Hyland's second novel, Gunshot Road, opens with a beautiful version of an Aboriginal initiation rite.

In each case the author is an outsider, not pretending to be anything else, keeping an open mind and an open eye. Do that well, and you give the readers one of the special joys of reading international crime fiction. What crime writers do it for you? Who does a good job portraying a culture other than his or her own?

(I'll start you off with an honorable mention for Timothy Hallinan, whose protagonist, Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty, is constantly amazed that his Thai girlfriend loves Nescafe.)

P.S. Here's Hallinan on Rafferty from my interview with the author in 2008:

"(H)e suddenly found himself in a culture to which he actually wanted to belong.

"But the important thing, from a writing standpoint, was that he didn't belong, and because he didn't belong, he didn't have to understand everything; he could make mistakes about the people and the lives they live. And he spoke only elementary Thai. Those things were very liberating for me. I'd been nervous about writing about Thailand because I knew there was so much I didn't understand. Suddenly, I didn't have to be the guy who could write the Wikipedia entry on Thailand. My character was just another clown trying to find his way in. He was going to get things wrong from time to time."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the nulla-nulla

I've remarked often that I have no objection to well-deployed slang, dialect, and local vocabulary in crime fiction. I've said further that I enjoy having to figure out from context an unfamiliar term's meaning. Here's a bit from Adrian Hyland's Gunshot Road:

"I kept going at full pelt, knocked him off balance, managed to get him cuffed before he knew what hit him. Which would have been a satisfactory to the incident had not the victim found her feet and turned out to be Cindy Mellow. A nulla-nulla materialized in her right hand.

"The first blow hit my prisoner in the head ... "

That's Hyland's novel at left and a nulla-nulla at right. And here's a bit more about nulla-nullas, information I'd likely never have looked for if not for a crime novel. (Gunshot Road is due out in May from Text Publishing and Soho Press.)

Now, what have crime stories taught you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A peek down Gunshot Road

This one has a very cool title, and the novel that follows is off to a pretty good start, too.

Gunshot Road is the follow-up to Adrian Hyland's 2007 debut, Diamond Dove (published as Moonlight Downs in the U.S.), which I called

" something wonderful ... an unabashed amateur-sleuth whodunit that works seamlessly as character study and as portrait of a setting that is probably unfamiliar to many Australians, much less to readers like me on the other side of the world."

The character is Emily Tempest, a young half-Aboriginal, half-white woman who has returned to live among her “mob,” the shifting clan of Aborigines with whom she spent her youth in Australia’s Northern Territory. The group’s leader is killed soon after Emily arrives, and circumstances force Emily into investigating.

The new novel brings Emily back, less amateur a sleuth than before, and the first chapter has her taking joyous part in a women's celebration bidding young men farewell on the eve of an initiation ceremony. It's a gorgeous chapter that will have you fantasizing about taking long voyages unless you live in Australia, in which cases the voyages will be shorter.

(Here's my review of Diamond Dove/Moonlight Downs. Soho changed the title, presumably because it already published Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond novels, among them Diamond Dust. Diamonds are worth their weight in gold; Lovesey is one of the best and most versatile of crime writers.)

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Gunshot Road will be published this spring by Soho in the U.S. and Text Publishing in Australia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Out of the fire

Adrian Hyland, whom readers of Detectives Beyond Borders will know as the author of Diamond Dove (Moonlight Downs in its U.S. incarnation), was near the heart of the Australian bush fires that ravaged Victoria. Though he and his family survived, they lost friends.

Hyland writes in The Age newspaper about how his daughter's school has begun to bounce back from the disaster:

"... Then, on Monday, the principal, Jane Hayward, called us all together and made an announcement that drew tears from many an eye, my own included: The Strathie school was going to re-open.

"Not at some vaguely distant date, after the red-tape had been sorted, the money allocated, the tenders won.

"No, Strathewen school was going to re-open on Wednesday. ..."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Hyland flings

Kerrie of Oz Mystery Readers and Mysteries in Paradise puts me in the way of two entertaining interviews with Adrian Hyland, author of Diamond Dove (called Moonlight Downs in the U.S.).

Hyland and his debut novel have long been favorites here at Detectives Beyond Borders, and I also reviewed the book for my newspaper. I thought I knew everything about author and novel. I was wrong.

The first interview is courtesy of Barbara Fister, who asked students in her international crime-fiction class to submit questions for Hyland. The result yielded some lively and surprising answers, of which my favorite is Hyland's disarmingly straightforward explanation for why he wrote in the voice of a young half-Aboriginal, half-white woman:

"I originally wrote the story from the perspective of a young whitefeller coming up from down south, discovering his roots, etc. However, whatever I did to it, it seemed too autobiographical – a roman a clef – and nothing could be more boring (especially to me) than me."

Fister also links to Hyland's conversation with Stuart MacBride in Shots Ezine, a discussion made especially enjoyable by MacBride's freewheeling interviewing style. The chat includes, among other things, an amusing riposte from the Australian Hyland to the Scotsman MacBride on the subject of dialect and slang.

MacBride's fiction has a harder edge than Hyland's, which makes this funny, enlightening interview a productive exercise in boundary-crossing. Don't miss this entertaining and instructive opportunity to watch a couple of writers sitting around talking.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Adrian Hyland in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Adrian Hyland's novel Moonlight Downs (a.k.a. Diamond Dove) appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Click here to read the online version.

A heads-up: I liked the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Australian crime fiction

Summer reading in Australia

Those of us shivering here in lands where cold winters are the norm (but newspapers nonetheless think cold weather and snow newsworthy) can sigh wistfully at a blog devoted to summer reading. But you just wait. We'll get back at them in six months.

The State Library of Victoria had the delightful idea not just of asking readers what their summer choices are, but of inviting authors to post essays and lead discussions.

Guests so far have included two writers discussed here: Adrian Hyland and Garry Disher. Disher offers detailed discussions of crime fiction, of how he works, and of his own characters. Hyland offers yet more delightful stories behind his novel Diamond Dove and his life amid Australia's indigenous people.

I'd like to see libraries elsewhere follow suit. This is a terrific way to connect authors and readers. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Garry Disher
Adrian Hyland
Australian crime fiction

Ask an Australian author (Adrian Hyland)

The Oz Mystery Readers group is hosting an online discussion with Adrian Hyland, Ned Kelly Award-winning author of Diamond Dove, about which I rave here. Hyland's passionate defense of his decision to write in the voice of an Aboriginal narrator/protagonist is especially worth reading. I urge you all to sign up, log in, and sound off. It's free, and it's fun.

(Soho Press will publish the novel next year in the U.S. under the title Moonlight Downs.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Australian crime fiction

Awards in Australia

The Crime Writers Association of Australia has announced the winners of the 2007 Ned Kelly Awards. Among the honorees is Adrian Hyland's Diamond Dove for best first novel. Read it yourself, and see what I and Australia raved about!

Also, hat tips to the several bloggers who have highlighted this interview with Peter Temple, the multiple-Ned Kelly (and also Dagger) winning author of The Broken Shore, the Jack Irish novels and others. Among other things, he has high praise for Hyland and Diamond Dove.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Peter Temple
Australian crime fiction

Title changes that drive you nuts (or not)

Why do publishers change a book's title when translating or reissuing it? Why does Åsa Larsson's Solstorm become Sun Storm in the United States but The Savage Altar in the United Kingdom? How about The Smell of the Night and The Scent of the Night? Again, same book.

And could political sensitivities lie behind the change in title of Matt Beynon Rees' first crime novel set in the Palestinian territories? The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S. became The Bethlehem Murders in the U.K. (The British edition also changes Rees' name, dropping Beynon.)

Sometimes a change is easy to understand. Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All made a better English title than a literal translation of the French original would have been: Leave Quickly, and Return Late. And Cornell Woolrich's story "It Had to Be Murder" is more easily found these days under the title of the movie that Alfred Hitchcock made from it: Rear Window.

OK, readers, what title changes delighted or infuriated you — or made you scratch your head or roll your eyes?

And here's a special Detectives Beyond Borders quiz: Adrian Hyland's wonderful Australian debut novel, Diamond Dove, will be published in the United States as Moonlight Downs. Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

The international side of Mystery Readers Journal

I have now received the print version of Mystery Readers Journal's Ethnic Detectives, Part I issue, the online version of which I wrote about recently. Much of the issue focuses on "ethnic" detectives in the United States, including several articles that wonder what terms such as ethnic and outsider really mean.

Two of the articles relate more directly to international crime fiction: Adrian Hyland's, on how the Central Australian Outback drew him in, and Matt Beynon Rees's, on his novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem. I've written about Hyland's novel Diamond Dove before, and I'd read about his affection for the people of the Outback. Here he expands on this matter and talks also of his love for the land.

I haven't read Rees yet, but he has some interesting things to say about his setting and his novel, the first of a series. Here's my favorite:

By learning the language, I was able to give my characters some of the formalized greetings and blessings that are an important part of Palestinian speech. I translated them, rather than just putting the original Arabic phrase in italics, because I wanted readers to get the poetry of everyday speech. For example, to wish someone good morning my characters say `Morning of joy,' and the response is `Morning of light.' When someone gives them a cup of coffee, they tell them `May Allah bless your hands' Isn't that beautiful?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Matt Beynon Rees
Crime fiction in translation

New issue of Mystery Readers Journal

The Spring 2007 issue of Mystery Readers Journal is online and off the presses. It includes essays and reviews by Reed Farrel Coleman, Adrian Hyland, S.J. Rozan, Barbara Nadel, the Friends of Chester Himes, and many more, including a review by yours truly of Hyland's Diamond Dove (to be titled Moonlight Downs in its U.S. release from Soho Press).

Each issue of Mystery Readers Journal is devoted to a theme, often of special interest to readers of international crime fiction. Recent issues discussed mysteries set in Italy and mysteries set in the Far East, for example.

The new issue is the first of two on ethnic detectives, with articles on "The Post-Charlie Chan Era", "Who Is Ethnic?", "The Outsiders" and other interesting, even provocative topics. The Mystery Readers Journal link gives you the table of contents for the print magazine, with links to selected articles available online and to information about Mystery Readers International.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland

Diamond Dove

I read so few mysteries that I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find myself in the middle of a good one. Oh, I read plenty of crime novels, all right, but most could be called mysteries only by force of musty Golden Age tradition. My favorite crime novels and stories may be urban portraits, morality plays, slices of life, colorful foreign tableaux, character studies, stories of divorced, self-pitying middle-aged men who drink too much, violent and funny romps. But mysteries? The very word has a quaint sound, like vicarage or locked room or village green.

With some novels, I nod indulgently at the mystery parts: the clues, the detective’s self-doubt, the obvious misdirection, and I marvel at the superstructure the author erects just so he or she can throw in a bit of mystery. Or at the handy availability of mystery as a plot engine, a framework on which to hang the author’s view of some exciting locale or pressing social or psychological problem.

And then there is something wonderful like Adrian Hyland’s Diamond Dove, an unabashed amateur-sleuth whodunit that works seamlessly as character study and as portrait of a setting that is probably unfamiliar to many Australians, much less to readers like me on the other side of the world.

The protagonist is Emily Tempest, a restless young woman of Aboriginal and white parentage who has come back to live among her “mob,” the shifting clan of Aborigines among whom she spent her youth in Australia’s Northern Territory. The group’s wise and revered leader is killed soon after Emily arrives, and circumstances force her from the group’s camp into the neighboring town of Bluebush, which Emily refers to, if I recall correctly, as a “shithole.”

Along the way, we and Emily meet miners, cattlemen, police, pub owners, aid workers and all manner of inhabitants that one might expect in a town near nowhere and a settlement outside the town. The characters are variously dirty, violent, kind, hilarious, empty-headed and of unexpected strength and talent. This applies equally to the novel’s white characters and its Aborigines, and a comment by Hyland in The Age newspaper seems pertinent here. Diamond Dove, he says,

“is based on people I know and love. Anyone who reads it will see that I hang shit on everyone – the miners, the meatworkers, the station owners and even the Lands Council types who are my friends. It's a comedy satire. I was joking about everybody I knew, and it was written in the spirit of affection about a dying world, a world no one's really written about. … A precious world that's fading. … I suspect one could do more for Aboriginal people by portraying them as a living, loveable people, rather than as a broken museum display which is going to have us all running for the confessional."

But Diamond Dove is also a mystery. At least four credible suspects present themselves, and Emily is a perfect vehicle for Hyland’s artful misdirection. As smart and as determined as she is, she’s a neophyte. Her doubts and misdirected certainties work because in her place, we might react the same way. She is a perfect amateur sleuth. Diamond Dove is Hyland’s first novel so, if we’re lucky, we’ll see more of his precious world.

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Diamond Dove is published in Australia by Text Publishing of Melbourne, and I have read that Hyland has signed a two-book deal with Soho Press that includes Diamond Dove. This could mean more convenient availability for readers outside Australia. My advice, though, is not to wait. Order the book now, enjoy it, then lord it over your friends when the book hits the shops in your country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Adrian Hyland
Australian crime fiction