Cavanagh, McKinty, and Child at the Mysterious Bookshop

Lee Child, Steve Cavanagh. Photos by Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond Borders.

Steve Cavanagh is a lawyer in Northern Ireland who sets his legal thrillers in New York because the U.K. legal system, which divides a lawyer's job into the two professions of barrister and solicitor, would force him to create two protagonists, and besides, who could take seriously a hero in a white powdered wig?

That's what Steve said, at least, and if he was having his audience (Friday, at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York) on a bit, that would be thoroughly in keeping with the sort of fun and misdirection that he says characterizes great courtroom advocates.  Such lawyers, Steve said, know just how to hold the room's attention and when to misdirect it. It may help if you know that Steve's protagonist, the irrepressible Eddie Flynn, star of The Defence (The Defense in the U.S.), The Plea, and The Liar, is a con man turned lawyer, and the type of lawyer I'd want on a my side even if he sometimes sleeps in his clothes, tiptoes along high ledges, or works with a bomb attached to his body.

"Is there anything you have thought about having Eddie do but then rejected as too wild even for him?" I asked.

"No," Steve said, and if you suspect from this that the Eddie Flynn novels are fun, you're right.

###

Steve Cavanagh, Adrian McKinty

Cavanagh appeared with Lee Child at the event, and the audience included Adrian McKinty, in downtown Manhattan by way of Carrickfergus, Melbourne, and uptown Manhattan. Adrian is a longtime Detective Beyond Borders favorite, an Edgar Award winner, the author of two superb series in addition to a bunch of standalone novels, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of beer, and an erudite boon companion whom it is always a pleasure to see.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

Adrian McKinty wins another award

Adrian McKinty's novel Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly has won Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. The award follows his capture of the Best Paperback Original prize at the Edgar Awards in New York this past spring for Rain Dogs. Here's what I had to say about Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly earlier this year.

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

 Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series, now six novels into what was once called the Troubles Trilogy, keeps getting better and better.

The language is gorgeous, the characters are endearing, the atmosphere full both of humor and of off-hand, everyday life, menacing and otherwise. With this much good crime writing coming out of Northern Ireland, how can anyone mention the Nordic countries in the same breath? Hell, how about the rest of the world? With McKinty ably supported by a cast that includes Stuart Neville just as a start, why is Northern Ireland not routinely numbered among the world's great crime fiction locations?

McKinty's books portray their settings as vividly as do Arnaldur Indriðason's Erlendur novels, set in Iceland (and they're a lot funnier). His Sean Duffy is as endearingly flawed as Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano (Poetry and music are to Duffy what food is to Montalbano, and the two characters lead similarly complicated romantic lives, although— but you'll have to read Book Six, the recently released Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, to complete that thought.)  McKinty's Belfast is every bit as vivid a crime fiction locale as Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseille.  And he turns as unsparing an eye on that locale as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did on Sweden in their Martin Beck novels

Not only that, but McKinty deftly takes on any number of traditional mystery and crime tropes, and the Duffy series and their protagonist are erudite without being condescending. McKinty has also long attacked the notion that a writer's style ought to be workmanlike and invisible. He champions David Peace and James Ellroy, for example, so you know you're bound to find a gorgeous passage or two, prose you can relish for its own sake, in every book.  And if you listen to books, you're in for a treat. Gerard Doyle, the reader of the Sean Duffy audiobooks, is a master of accents, and he gives each character a distinct voice without ever descending to bathos and exaggeration. The audio versions pair the best of crime novels with the best of audiobook readers.

(The five previous Sean Duffy novels are The Cold, Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; In the Morning I'll be Gone; Gun Street Girl; and Rain Dogs. I've been a McKinty fan for years. Read all my Detectives Beyond Borders posts about his work.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Leitmotifs, tag lines, and a question for readers

In Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy novels, it's the protagonist checking under his car for mercury tilt switch bombs. In Fred Vargas' Debout Les Morts (translated as The Three Evangelists), the glue is merde, in its various semantic and syntactic forms--that, and the tag line "il haussa les épaules" ("he shrugged [his] shoulders.")  And Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels always repeat the protagonist's back story, the part about his return from Vietnam to find his wife involved with another man whom he kills in a particularly creative manner and about the reason he avoids prison for the crime.

I've written before about leitmotifs in crime novels, what they contribute to a book's texture, its feeling. (This is not the sort of thing one often reads about in discussions of books.)

Max Allan Collins

"Leitmotifs in fiction are more than quirks," I wrote, "less than plot elements. A leitmotif should, according to a definition of leitmotifs' use in music, be "clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances." Used well, it indicates an author in control of his or her material, with a firm idea of what kind of story he or she wants to tell. Leitmotifs might not come to mind right away if someone asks you what happens in a given novel, but they are part of what a novel is about, part of the world it creates."

Now it's your turn: What are your favorite tag lines and recurring motifs in crime novels or stories? What do such refrains add to a story?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2017

At the 2017 Edgar Awards, with acceptance speeches!

Last year's Edgar Awards speeches by Sara Paretsky and Walter Mosley so impressed me that I thought the two authors would make a good presidential ticket. The only problem, I wrote, would be deciding who would take the top spot.

"It would have to be Sara Paretsky," Mosley said as we collected drinks at the Edgars bar (one of several bars, really) this year, which is one example of why I enjoy this annual gala: Mingling is fun for we fans, and sometimes the stars say entertaining things.

Max Allan Collins

Mosley was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master at last year's Edgars; Max Allan Collins was one of this year's honorees, and a chat with him before the awards dinner was a highlight of the evening. I first met Max at the 2014 Bouchercon in Long Beach, where he was a panelist on a discussion I moderated on "Beyond Hammett and Chandler: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras." Max was on that panel to talk about other authors, but I read one of his Quarry novels out of curiosity and liked it so much that I read in short order the rest of the books then available. (One more Quarry title has appeared since, and another is due later this year from Hard Case Crime, which has republished the entire series.)

Lawrence Block,
winner of the Best
Short Story Edgar

Max discussed Roy Huggins and Ennis Willie on that 2014 panel, and he was pleased to talk about Huggins with me again this year, about Huggins' influence on subsequent generations of crime writers through his co-creation of The Rockford Files. He also had some nice things to say about one of his publishers, complete with examples to back up his praise. Collins' appreciation of the crime genre and its history is bracing, and you should talk with him if you get the chance. In the meantime, hear and see his Grand Master acceptance speech on the MWA website at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZe5x2f-iBU

Lisa Lutz, Megan Abbott

The evening's other new Grand Master, Ellen Hart, exemplified something I love about crime conventions and other events: the chance to get acquainted with authors and genres out of my wheelhouse.  Hart is a lesbian, and she writes mysteries with lesbian protagonists that sound to me like cozies. Neither has been a part of my reading experience, and I found quite moving Hart's statement that her protagonists had been criticized for not being gay enough. That, I would imagine, is one more burden she has to bear that most other authors do not. You can hear and watch Hart's speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWiLaWsVId4

Donna Andrews

Among the awards, Adrian McKinty's capture of the Best Paperback Original award for Rain Dogs was a highlight. McKinty was home in Melbourne, but his wife, Leah, did a nice job accepting his prize. I've been a McKinty fan for years. You should be, too.

*

Charles Todd, Hank Phillippi
Ryan, Wendy Corsi Staub, nom-
inees for the Mary Higgins
Clark Award. Todd won.

Visit the MWA website at http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html for a complete list of the Edgar Award winners and nominees.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

My first seven audio crime books

Audiobooks are a cool medium: They don't compel engagement the way a real printed book does; one drifts in and out or does other things, the reading fading into background music. So here's a fragmented discussion of my first batch of audiobooks, appropriate to their fragmented medium:

1) Gun Street Girl and Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty. The author is a friend. He's also one of the very best of all crime writers, far beyond silly discussions about whether crime fiction can be serious literature. His probing, funny, beautifully written novels are unafraid to use traditional crime fiction forms, including the locked-room mystery. Whichever crime writer you're reading, McKinty is better.

2) Grinder and Darwin's Nightmare, by Mike Knowles. Some of the most exciting and intelligent action stories you're likely to read, exciting because they're intelligent and intelligent because they're exciting.  Readers who like Richard Stark's Parkerd novels or "Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai" might like these.

3) One or the Other and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by John McFetridge. No one better and more seamlessly combines character, story, and history, in this case that of Montreal and Toronto in the 1970s and '80s.

4) Montalbano's First Case, by Andrea Camilleri. Among the delights of this short-story collection is one harrowing meta-fiction that at once demonstrates Camilleri's ability to write hyper-violence and shows why he chose not to do so.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Stop the presses: Crime stories are no longer just whodunits, or crime novels that transcend transcending the genre

Professor David Schmid has posted a link to an interview whose headline announces that "there's nothing crime fiction can't do." The statement came from Ian Rankin, who proceeds to offer some interesting thoughts on his evolution as a crime novelist, notably his coming more and more to ponder what makes humans commit crimes:

“I think at first my books were whodunits, but as I got more confident about the form and about what the crime novel could do, I thought, ‘Well there’s nothing it can’t do.’ If you want to talk about politics, if you want to talk about society, if you want to talk about good and evil, if you want to talk about big moral issues, big moral questions: here’s the perfect form for doing that.” 

That's an unexceptionable thought, but why, fifty-two years after Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Roseanna first appeared, after decades and decades and decades of Dominique Manotti and Jean-Claude Izzo and Andrea Camilleri and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Didier Daeninckx and Carlo Lucarelli and Adrian McKinty and Jean-Patrick Manchette and Leonardo Sciascia and Ross Thomas and Garbhan Downey and Stuart Neville and John McFetridge and Gary Phillips and Alan Glynn, do the article's author, Daneet Steffens, and publication, Lit Hub, think crime novels' ability to do more than tell a whodunit story is so newsworthy as to be the story's main subject and the subject of its headline? And that's not even to mention, say, Georges Simenon, who probed human psychology and the margins of society long before Daneet Stevens discovered that crime stories can be more than whodunits.

This is no knock on Rankin, who singles out some of the authors on my list as noteworthy practitioners of the crime story. The problem is that Steffens and Lit Hub are either ignorant of crime novels' evolution over the past fifty or or so years, or, worse, assume that their readers are so ignorant. At least Lit Hub did not tell us that Rankin's work transcends its genre.

Much more interesting are those crime novelists whose books work as character studies and dissections of society and all those things that intellectually respectable crime novels are supposed to do these days and at the same time are so confident of their writerly chops that their books work as locked-roomed mysteries or whodunits or some other traditional form at the same time. You might say that they transcend transcending the genre.  Adrian McKinty does this in In the Morning I'll Be Gone and Gun Street Girl, part of his Sean Duffy novels.

Or take the traditional English mystery, a genre so out my wheelhouse that I was surprised when I discovered that Martin Edwards, that award-winning practitioner of and expert on traditional mysteries, dealt with certain social problems much more subtly than, say, Stieg Larsson.

"I've just opened Martin Edwards' Waterloo Sunset," I wrote a few years ago, "and I've noticed reflections on urban growth and boosterism, not to mention a character who just might be disturbingly demented. I hadn't expected this from an author who has proclaimed his allegiance to traditional mysteries. Heck, the man even named his novel for a song by the Kinks. 

What are your favorite crime novels that are thoroughly contemporary in subject and tone yet brave enough to explore traditional crime fiction forms at the same time?

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Don't hold it against Adrian McKinty that he can write

I have begun browsing Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, sixth of Adrian McKinty's novels about Northern Ireland police officer Sean Duffy. Ian Rankin loves these books, and he's not wrong; I'm a fan, too.

I've read far too little of Police at the Station ... to write a review, and, since I'm reading an advance reading copy, I'm honor-bound not to quote from it in any case. I can tell you, however, that the book demonstrates once again McKinty's flair for suspenseful, funny surprisingly lyrical opening scenes, sometimes all at once, other times in varying proportions. This latest is up there with the opening chapters of Cold Cold Ground, Rain Dogs, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and Fifty Grand. Moreover, the parts of his books that come after the first chapters are pretty good, too.

Adrian McKinty. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders

Reviewers praise crime novels for their plots, their themes, their characters, their sociology, their psychology, their politics, their settings, their conformity with or deviation from trends, where they fit in the publishing landscape, and whether or not they're from Scandinavia.

Writing? That doesn't get mentioned much. I suspect this is because reviewers and other people are uncomfortable talking about writing at best or wouldn't know good writing if they saw it at worst.  McKinty has noted something like a puritanical aversion in some writing  circles to writing that exists for its own sake, that shows off a little. He is not constrained that way in his own work, which is one reason you should read him. That, and all that good stuff about Northern Ireland, and the jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Adrian McKinty and the fourth Sean Duffy novel: How to build a series

Here's a previous post about how an author can lay the groundwork for a series whether he wants to or not.  Once you've read McKinty's Sean Duffy books, why not try his other work? My favorite from a strong field there is probably Dead I Well May Be.  

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

 Adrian McKinty has expressed skepticism of series fiction, but he does a fine job writing it.  Gun Street Girl, fourth in his Troubles no-longer-a-Trilogy (following The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and In the Morning I'll Be Gone), shows McKinty laying the groundwork for further books, whether consciously or not.

The novel lays down plots and subplots ripe for development in future books, and it continues at least one subplot (or is it a leitmotif?) from the previous novels. (This book is set against the background of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, and includes thinly disguised versions of other historical events of the time, including one that will be of especial interest to Americans.) Moreover, it proposes a vision of Northern Ireland's post-Troubles history as a long-range game, so a long-range series could well carry Detective Inspector Sean Duffy along with that history, reacting to it and commenting, sometimes acerbically, on his place in it.  In Gun Street Girl, that commentary includes McKinty's customary good jokes and one of the funniest Beatles references you'll read anywhere.

Most important, perhaps, for its long term-prospects, the trilogy series has, in Duffy, an engaging protagonist/narrator with personal and professional triumphs and defeats that never, however, get in the way of the story. So sorry. Adrian. You may be in this for the long haul.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Stuart Neville isn't as good a writer as you think he is; he's better: A look at his next book

Back in 2010, I wrote about the clever and effective chiasmus in Stuart Neville's second novel, Collusion.

A chiasmus, as I wrote at the time, is a literary figure in which a phrase includes a list of concepts, and the following phrase repeats those concepts in reverse order — the old A-B-B'-A' form (or A-B-C-D-D'-C'-B'-A' and so on). The Bible uses chiasmus all the time, and so did Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. And Alexander Pope ("His time a moment, and a point his space," Essay on Man, Epistle I. ). Neville's extended chiasmus in Collusion ran thus:

"`I've been called lots of things. Smith, Murphy, Tomalty, Meehan, Gorman, Maher, I could go on.' He leaned forward and whispered, `There's some people say I'm not even really a Pavee.'

"A dead mask covered O'Kane's face. `Don't get smart with me, son. I'm a serious man. Don't forget that. I'll only warn you the once.'

"The Traveler leaned back and nodded. `Fair enough. But I'm a serious man too, and I don't like answering questions. You'll know as much about me as I want you to know.'

"O'Kane studied him for a moment. `Fair enough. I don't care if you're a gypsy, a traveler, a knacker, a tinker, or whatever the fuck you lot call yourselves these days. All I care about is the job I need doing. Are you the boy for it?'"

Collusion was Neville's second book; So Say the Fallen, to be published in September, is his seventh, and I have yet to discover a chiasmus in it. But I did find, in the novel's very first paragraph, further evidence that Neville pays more attention to writing well than most writers do, that the themes commenters note most often in his writing—guilt, sin, suspense, racking internal conflict—make themselves clear not just at story level, but in the very structure of his sentences.
 
I haven't seen a finished copy of the book yet, so I can't quote the paragraph here. What I can tell you is that it achieves exactly what I said the Collusion chiasmus does. It lends the passage in which it occurs

"weight and rhythm and a fair bit of grim humor, too. Most of all, it makes the reader sit up and pay attention, alert for what comes next."

Reviewers, readers, and blurbsters quite rightly praise Neville for the ends he achieves: the suspense, the emotion, the characters for whom sins of the past are anything but dead. Why do so few people notice the means by which he achieves those ends?

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

(Adrian McKinty, Neville's friend, co-editor, and fellow Northern Ireland crime writer, sheds some light on this question in a post called "Genre Fiction and Bad Prose" at his Psychopathology of Everyday Life blog, http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2016/06/genre-fiction-and-bad-prose.html)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Why you should cop The Plea

Steve Cavanagh, seen previously in this space as author of the hyper-kinetic legal thriller The Defence (published in the U.S. as The Defense) and as an enthusiastic participant in highjinks at Crimefest, is back with The Plea, another legal thriller that is just as fast and just as much fun as both.

It's tempting to compare The Plea's construction to its protagonist's personality. That protagonist, Eddie Flynn, is a con man turned lawyer who makes good use of the tricks he learned in his former profession. Cavanagh loves to put Flynn in ticking-clock situations, making him work with a time bomb strapped to his chest in The Defence, or under the gun to avert a federal indictment hanging over his wife's head in The Plea.

Steve Cavanagh (right) in conversation with Ali Karim at Crimefest 2016. (Photo by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders)
========================

That means Flynn must do much of his legal work at the last minute and by the seat of his unpressed pants. Though he occasionally guesses wrong, Flynn is a brilliant lawyer and advocate. (Cavanagh is a lawyer in  his day job, albeit in Northern Ireland rather than in New York, where he sets the books. He knows how to convincingly capture the texture, the give and take, and the dilemmas of legal procedure.)

That's Eddie Flynn, the lawyer. Steve Cavanagh, the writer, plants twists and surprises at the end of almost every action-jammed chapter, ramping up the pressure on the characters and speeding the reader along like Eddie Flynn with a bomb on his bod. But, like Flynn, who almost always has a brilliant legal stroke lurking beneath the mayhem, Cavanagh plots his novels with great cunning, liberally sprinkling the story with small observations that bear narrative fruit many chapters later. He also knows just when to slow the action down for a bit of back story or exposition. 

Though The Plea is primarily a thriller, it has enough misdirection and wrong guesses to qualify as a mystery. More than most crime novels, it gives the lie to the silly distinction between plot-driven and character-driven.  Flynn, highly moral if ethically dubious, brilliant, subject to wrenching crises that, however, take place mainly off the page, is a lovable, admirable protagonist and pretty near an ideal hero. But the attributes would be nothing without the action, and the reverse is also true.

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

In addition to The Defense and The Plea, Cavanagh has a fine story in Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville. His Eddie Flynn novella The Cross is available in the UK.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Photos from the 2015 Edgar Awards banquet

James Ellroy

The Edgar Awards, given by the Mystery Writers of America, are coming up April 28, 2016, and this year two friends and associates of Detectives Beyond Borders' are up for awards: Adrian McKinty, up for Best Paperback Original Novel for Gun Street Girl, and Duane Swierczynski, nominated in the best novel category for Canary.

Ian Rankin, Stephen King,
Karin Slaughter, Stuart Neville

I'll be there taking pictures, schmoozing, and maybe asking a question or two of 2016 MWA Grand Master Walter Mosely.  In the meantime, some photos I took at the 2015 Edgars.

Stephen King, Hilary Davidson

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Sara Paretsky

Stephen King, Karin Slaughter

James Ellroy

Sara Paretsky

Modern Ireland and modern Irish crime writers: A St. Patrick's Day post

For St. Patrick's Day, here's a post from a couple of years ago about Irish history and what you can learn about it from Irish crime writers.

 =================

 A passage in Adrian McKinty's novel The Bloomsday Dead alerted me to a certain tendency in Belfast to romanticize the present and the past (though McKinty states the case more pungently), and I may first have heard the term irregulars, for the anti-treaty military forces in the Irish Civil War, through Kevin McCarthy.

The dicey subject of Irish-German relations in the middle of the twentieth century? Stuart Neville deals with one strand of its aftermath in his novel Ratlines. (And it appears that Declan Burke may do so as well, in his latest.)  And Eoin McNamee wrote about the chilling sectarian hatred at the heart of one of Belfast's most notorious murder gangs in his novel Resurrection Man.

The strange, orphaned position of Northern Ireland, unloved by both the United Kingdom and Eire (or is that Ireland? Or the South? Or the Republic?) cannot have been portrayed more directly and more touchingly than in the passage of Garbhan Downey's (I forget in which book) where a politician from the North tells a counterpart from the South something like: "I know you regard us as the unwanted child you'd rather tie up in a sack and toss into the river." And my first inkling that Irish history was more complicated than the Manichean pieties we get in America came when Gerard Brennan took me to the Irish Republican History Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast.

I've just finished reading Part IV of R.F. "Roy" Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, and I was periodically surprised and delighted when his entertaining, opinionated, analytical, non-ax-grinding history would touch upon subjects dealt with in some depth by each of the above-mentioned Irish crime writers. Foster's declaration, for example, that

"For all the rhetoric of anti-Partitionism, opinion in the Republic was covertly realistic about this point, too: the predominant note of modern Ireland in 1972 was that of looking after its own."

says in historical terms what Downey does in fictional ones, and induces a similar twinge of sympathy for Northern Ireland's people, if not its leaders.

So thanks, Irish crime writers, for writing entertaining popular fiction while casting an intelligent eye on the problematic present and past of your problematic country.

*

Foster's bibliographic essay at the end of Modern Ireland mentions one Irish crime writer by name, though not for her crime fiction:

"There are few first-rate biographies for the period, one glowing exception being R. Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, which illuminates far more than its subject."

Looking for more? Edwards, Downey, McNamee, and Brennan contributed stories to Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by McKinty and Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Shtetl, with a glottal stop

Rick Ollerman, Adrian McKinty

You haven't lived until you've heard an Irishman say "shtetl." Thanks to Adrian McKinty, I can now say I've lived.

Oh, sure the audience at Sunday's Noir at the Bar in New York ate up McKinty's reading from his latest novel, Rain Dogs, and sure, his was not the evening's only good reading, but that was no shock. Hearing shtetl pronounced with a glottal stop, on the other hand, was an experience I never thought I'd have. (McKinty's wife's ancestors were from a shtetl, in case you were wondering how the subject came up.)

MC Todd Robinson

Rick Ollerman was there, too, and was too polite to correct me when I kept referring to his fine novel Shallow Secrets as Shallow Grave. Rick Ollerman: Editor, novelist, mensch.

Dennis Tafoya

The Philadelphia area's own Dennis Tafoya read from a work in progress—searing, hard-hitting stuff from one of the original readers from back when I created Noir at the Bar in 2008. (Dennis read the next year.)

New York's Noirs at the Bar happen at Shade Bar, and accolades to the bartender, Laurie, who not only mixes a good Hendrick's and tonic, but also knew my name. And thanks to Suzanne Solomon and Tim Hall, who joined forces for a two-part reading; Dana Cameron; Danny Gardner; Vincent Zandri; and Jason Pinter, who also read, and to Jen Conley, who sat quietly in the audience without organizing an event, reading a story, or announcing her engagement, all of which she tends to do at Noirs at the Bar.

Danny Gardner

Adrian McKinty, Suzanne Solomon, Tim Hall

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

What do history and crime mean to you?

I've taken a break from crime to read some history, here's an old post about history and crime.

=====

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

Bono gets a one-two punch from two top crime writers

(Design by Heads of State)

Poor Bono. Poor, poor Bono.

Here's the beginning of Adrian McKinty's fine new Sean Duffy story, "Shadowboxing" (available free at the Radio Silence site):

"Even the fulminating racists on the far side of the police barriers were temporarily awed into silence by their first sight of the Champ as he stepped nimbly—lepidopterously—from the bus onto the pavement in front of Belfast City Hall. He was bigger than ordinary men, physically, of course, but there was an aura about him, too. Ten years past his prime, heavier, grayer, and with what was apparently early-onset Parkinson’s, this was still the most famous man on the face of the Earth. He was wearing Adidas trainers, a red tracksuit, and sunglasses. He was flanked by two Nation of Islam handlers in dark jackets and bow ties, and a pace behind them was the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a celebrity in his own right in America but a largely unknown figure here, and finally to his left—to no one’s surprise—Bono."

And here's the opening of "The Gumshoe," from Paul D. Brazill's The Gumshoe and Other Brit Grit Yarns:

"In the beginning was the sound. The light came later.

"The sound was a horrifying wail that skewered its way deep into my unconscious brain until I awoke sharply—drowning in sweat, my heart smashing through my ribcage, my head about to burst.

"Some twat, somewhere, was playing a U2 song over and over again ... "

Do you think that, now that the whole world is catching on that Bono is a putz, it may be time to lay off him?

Nah.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

More Irish history and why you should read it

Here's some more of what I've learned about Ireland's history, this time mostly from Ronan Fanning's Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922:

1) German arms shipments to Ireland date back at least to April 1914—to the Ulster Volunteer Force; unionists, not nationalists.

2) A much smaller German arms purchase by Irish nationalists, co-led by Erskine Childers a month later for maximum publicity, resulted in a bloody a crackdown by a British regiment.

3)Yes, that Erskine Childers, author of the early spy novel The Riddle of the Sands.

4) The Irish tradition of secret societies and volunteer groups long predates the alphabet soup of organizations that became familiar during the sectarian Troubles that began in 1969.

5) That "The IRA’s initial focus in what is known either as the ‘War of Independence’ or the ‘Anglo-Irish War’ of 1919–21 was the ostracisation of the police."

What does this have to do with contemporary crime fiction set in the present, or a lot closer to it than 1910 to 1922? Not much, unless one is reading Stuart Neville or Adrian McKinty or Eoin McNamee or Garbhan Downey, or Kevin McCarthy, or Anthony Quinn, or Andrew Pepper, or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

McKinty's voice: An early look at the fourth book in the Troubles trilogy

Sean Duffy is the narrator as well the protagonist of Gun Street Girl, just as he is in the previous three volumes in McKinty's trilogy about a young Catholic officer in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary at the height of Northern Ireland's Troubles. And an engaging narrator he is, too.

Here are some examples from the book's first few chapters:

"Oscillating waves of sound. A fragment of Dutch. A DJ from RFI informing the world with breathless excitement that `EuroDisney sera construit à Paris."

" ... as soon as the word `Inspector' has passed my lips I can see she has lost interest.  There are assistant chief constables and chief superintendents floating around and I'm well down the food chain."

"Fireworks behind. Darkness ahead. And if that's not a metaphor for the Irish Question I don't know what is."

"Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn't like that?"

"Home. The music on the turntable was classic Zep, and I let the plagiarizing bastards take me through a shower and a shave."

I expect exciting things will happen to Duffy, as they do in The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and In the Morning I'll Be Gone.  But even more important than coming up with a good story is knowing how to tell it well, and McKinty can do that.  So yes, the Duffy books will teach you something about the grit and everyday tension of living in Northern Ireland amid murderous sectarian strife. More important than that, they're also lots of fun.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bouchercon 2014: I never knew there was a police code for "dinner"

Relaxing in my local coffeehouse (my L.A. local, not my Philadelphia local), regaining my power of coherent thought after six days of hard drivin', low-sleepin' fun at Bouchercon 2014.  Here are some things that stuck with me from the convention's panels.

Lots of these in Long Beach. All photos by
Peter Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper

1) Connie Dial, a Los Angeles cop turned crime novelist, said during Thursday's panel on crime in Hollywood  when she worked patrol in South Central L.A., "You'd ask for a Code 7, which was dinner, and they'd say, "Take twenty more calls."

2) Someone recalled the lavish spread provided for the crew during filming at a police precinct house, a spread whose appeal extended well beyond the police station in question? "Cops came from everywhere to eat." Walpow also recounted the snacking habits of the movie's star, Paul Newman: "Newman wandered around the station ... He ate them out of jelly beans."

Kwei Quartey

3) Kwei Quartey's suggestion that writing crime fiction set in his native Ghana poses challenges that fiction set in large American cities does not. Why? Because Ghana is changing so rapidly, over the course of months rather than years.

John McFetridge

4) John McFetridge recalling a rewriting of the history behind his novel Black Rock, whose principal crime is a series of killings of young women based on real-life killing in Montreal in 1970. His research turned up suggestions that authorities had issued warning for young women to be wary, but McFetridge's sister, about the same age as the victims, said she recalled no such warnings. "I thought that was a bit of revisionist history," McFetridge said, "`We should have warned them, but we didn't. Now we're claiming we did.'"

Ragnar Jonasson

5) Ragnar Jonasson's debunking of the popular belief that weapons are scarce in his native Iceland. Guns are plentiful there, he said, and so, in a nation of hunters, are guns.

Chris Ewan

6) Chris Ewan, crime novelist and resident of the Isle of Man, on a difference between Manx Halloween customs and those in American and England: "It's not easy to carve a turnip."

7) I wish I could remember which author described the process of research and writing this: "You get out in the world. Then you go hermit. You don't wear pants for nine months."

8) DBB favorite Adrian McKinty won the Barry Award in the best paperback original category for I Hear the Sirens in the Street.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014