Why you should read John Rector

John Rector, Voodoo Lounge,
New Orleans, September 2016.
 Photo by Peter Rozovsky

John's Rector 's 2015 novel Ruthless is a terrific noirish, wrong-man-in-the-wrong-place story, perhaps a bit more emotionally pitched and certainly elegantly written than most. Things get especially interesting when the third circle of hell into which the protagonist plunges threatens to veer off into another genre entirely. But Rector, in supreme control of his storytelling at all times, makes it work.

That paragraph is deliberately vague in order to avoid giving anything away. Suffice it to say that if the main storyline is reminiscent of Charles Williams, the surprising turn may put readers in mind of Alan Glynn. That's a high compliment to Rector on both counts.

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John Rector first jumped onto my radar screen in a big way a couple of weeks ago when he read his story "In the Kitchen With Rachel Ray" at Jay Stringer's Noir at the Bar in New Orleans. The story is not only jam-packed with hilarious surprises, but rendered with fine control, and the author read it well. You should hear him read if you have the chance.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

What Kirkus didn't tell you: Three more new crime novels you can read this summer

Kirkus Reviews recently published a list of twenty crime novels due for publication this summer and recommended for your consideration. It's not a bad list, but here are three novels that it missed:

1) Paradime, by Alan Glynn (Picador U.S. August/Faber U.K. May) Reviewers have invoked James Ellroy and John le Carré when discussing Alan Glynn, and if I squint and hold my head at the right angle, I can see resemblances. But Glynn's new novel is a lot more like David Mamet's 1997 movie The Spanish Prisoner than it is like anything by Ellroy and or le Carré. The novel's fever-dream narration is intoxicating, its first section in particular a kind of contemporary nightmare picaresque. (A worker for a private military contractor in Afghanistan witnesses a shocking incident, comes back to New York City, discovers that the incident won't leave him alone, and finds aspects of the result a strangely attractive escape — addictive, even.)

The novel shares some themes with Glynn's previous books, The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless), Winterland, Bloodland, and Graveland: alienation, paranoia, helplessness in the face of corporate and government power, and the uncertainty of boundaries between the two. But the action centers more on the protagonist than it does in the earlier novels, with distant but distinct echoes of mid-twentieth-century American noir. The book also seems carefully constructed, full of epiphanies that shed shocking new light on earlier scenes. And that may be one more mark of its kinship with The Spanish Prisoner.

2) One or the Other, by John McFetridge (ECW Press, August). I know of no crime writer who writes about suburbs and people who live there with the respect that McFetridge does, even though his books are set mostly in cities: Toronto and, in his three most recent novels, Montreal. But I also know of no crime writer who writes more vividly about cities, and who integrates character, crime, and history as seamlessly as McFetridge.

McFetridge's empathy with his protagonist, a young police constable named Eddie Dougherty, may remind readers of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, but McBain never had anything like McFetridge's eye for the way big events and individual lives intersect, the lives always more important than the events. McFetridge's Dougherty books, of which One or the Other is the third, following Black Rock and A Little More Free, don't try to transcend any genre, but I can easily imagine that they would appeal to readers who love to empathize with characters and wonder about everyday lives lived in tumultuous times, whether or not the stories involve crime.

3) A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto (Bitter Lemon Press, August U.S./June UK) Too many invocations of one crime writer to describe another are silly, but Matsumoto really is reminiscent of Georges Simenon. This is true especially in his portrayals of dogged, unexceptional characters, bewildered, sometimes to the point of pathos, as they navigate the consequences of crimes they understand only dimly.

Matsumoto died in 1992, and little of his large output has been translated into English, so any new publication is welcome. A Quiet Place is a noirish tale full of sparing but sharp observations and pointed critiques of postwar Japanese society. The novel is reminiscent in that respect of Matsumoto's Points and Lines, which I named one of my favorite international crime novels in the first Detectives Beyond Borders post back in 2006.  The novel's close examination of a setting observed by the protagonist as he travels through it may remind readers of Akira Kurosawa's classic crime movie Stray Dog or of work by the contemporary Japanese crime writers Keigo Higashino and Fuminori Nakamura.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Alan Glynn's latest

Reviewers have invoked James Ellroy and John le Carré when discussing Alan Glynn, and if I squint and hold my head at just the right angle, I can see resemblances. But Glynn's new novel, Paradime, is a lot more like David Mamet's 1997 movie The Spanish Prisoner than it is like anything by Ellroy and or le Carré.

The novel's fever-dream narration is intoxicating, its first section in particular a kind of contemporary nightmare picaresque. (A worker for a private military contractor in Afghanistan witnesses a shocking incident, comes back to New York City, discovers that the incident won't leave him alone, and finds aspects of the result a strangely attractive escape — addictive, even.)

The novel shares some themes with Glynn's previous books, The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless), Winterland, Bloodland, and Graveland: alienation, paranoia, helplessness in the face of corporate and government power, and the uncertainty of boundaries between the two. But, it seems to me, the action centers more on the protagonist than it does in the earlier novels, with distant but distinct echoes of mid-twentieth-century American noir.

The book also seems carefully constructed, full of epiphanies that shed shocking new light on earlier scenes. And that may be one more mark of its kinship with The Spanish Prisoner. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A new book by, and an old post about, Alan Glynn (on words as self-deluding weapons)

Today's mail brought a copy of Alan Glynn's upcoming novel Paradime, and that is beyond good news. No crime or thriller writer is more alert to the scary power of language, to its manipulation by government and business elites (including, of course, Apple), and to our eager complicity in that manipulation. Have you ever been part of the conversation? Part of a narrative?  (If not, you will be. We can partner on that going forward.) If so, and if you take words seriously, and think they should mean what they say, you'll like Glynn.

Paradime is Glynn's fifth novel, following Winterland, Bloodland, Graveland, and The Dark Fields. (The last is also available as Limitless, the title of the movie adaptation that starred Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro.) All the books are excellent.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

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Words are weapons, and Alan Glynn knows weapons can be evasive and defensive as well as offensive.  Anyone who says "going forward" clearly would prefer that you not examine what he or she has left behind. (Is it any accident that going forward entered the American lexicon in a big way around the time Mark McGwire torpedoed his Hall of Fame chances by telling the U.S. Senate that he was not here to talk about the past?)

Glynn is alert to the ominous vogue uses of conversation and narrative, especially by corporations and politicians. But even the good guys in his books slip into jargon of their own, which adds to his novels' all-embracing sense of dread. Here's the crusading reporter Ellen Dorsey in his new novel, Graveland, (emphasis mine):

"Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics."

Perps is probably widespread enough in American usage (Graveland is set in New York) by now to have been stripped of whatever moral weight it may once have carried, and I'm not sure vics (for victims) is real slang. But intel is real, as fraught with self-importance and grandiosity as good, ominous slang ought to be. (A good test for a buzzword's bullshit quotient is how easily it can be replaced with an ordinary word. In this case, intel says nothing information would not. Its bullshit score is therefore 100.)

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Here's Glynn on 1970s paranoia thrillers. And here's a question for you, readers: What are your least favorite buzzwords and phrases that have come into wide use since the early 1990s, say since the beginning of Bill Clinton's first administration? Why do you hate them? Here are two more of mine:

• Friend modified by a person's name, e.g., a Clinton friend. Calls attention to the clubbiness of America's controlling elites, which might be good news except that reporters embraced the construction wholeheartedly. A (fill in the name) friend may a uniquely American construction. No one in the UK would see the need to call a prime minister's associate a Cameron friend because everyone would take for granted that, having gone to the same public schools before going on to Oxford or Cambridge, of course they were friends.
• Conversation, as a neat catch-all for the vast, messy sprawl of opinions, verbal ejaculations, and seeming irrelevancies on a given subject, with the implication that the mess can be tidied up and manipulated. Trust no one who invites you to be part of the conversation, much less, as one of Glynn's characters does in Bloodland, to "change the conversation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

End of story, or what ever happened to plot? (With questions for readers)

It's no secret that plot has less cachet than character, setting, and atmosphere in harder-boiled crime writing, and probably at the cozier end of the spectrum as well.

Why is this? Why are character especially, but also atmosphere, considered more literarily prestigious than a brilliantly crafted plot?  When was the last time you read critical praise for a hard-boiled novel's plot? (I haven't read Gone Girl, but that's the only recent example that comes to mind. Well, that and anything by the brilliant Alan Glynn. But I suspect that even Glynn's thrilling chillers are likelier to find their way into book discussions for their larger themes of paranoia and government and corporate control than for the mechanisms by which Glynn tells his stories.)  Can you recall the plot of any Stieg Larsson novels? Probably not, but you sure as hell do know who and what Lisbeth Salander is.  Character is for serious writers. Plot? Why, that's something for trashy airport best sellers.

I don't mean that hard-boiled and noir novels have bad plots, but commentators (and, I'm guessing, readers and even authors) regard plot, if they think about it all, as a serviceable armature on which to hang ideas about men or women or the city or despair or economic deprivation or greed or violence or heroism or depravity, or just to give their characters something to do.  I've read two brilliantly plotted hard-boiled crime novels recently, one published in 1953, the other in 1961, and the third novel in my new holy trinity of crime fiction plotting appeared in 1959. (The books are, in order, Nothing in Her Way, by Charles Williams; Any Woman He Wanted, by Harry Whittington; and The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, whose story is so brilliantly worked out that one can almost overlook Macdonald's wince-making amateur Freudianism and badly dated jabs at suburbs.) In none of the books is plot a mere mechanism to activate the characters. Plot reveals character and is inseparable from it. The books reveal the shallowness of expressions like plot-driven and character-driven.

Those novels appeared more than 50 years ago, and here are your questions: Were the 1950s and early 1960s a high point for plot in hard-boiled writing? If so, when did plot lose its prestige, and why? What are the more brilliantly plotted crime novels you have read?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

One city, one crime novel — but which novel?

I have in the past gently chided the Free Library of Philadelphia for the high-mindedness of its "One City, One Book" choices. Why can't Philadelphia do what other cities and institutions have done and sneak a Chandler or a Hammett in there once in a while?

Hammett has long enjoyed popular and critical esteem, and his work, I was surprised to learn recently, can appeal to younger readers. Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and recent editor, told me last week: "I talk to kids about Hammett. The Maltese Falcon has helped reach some reluctant readers."  Teenagers, she said, responded especially to the novel's celebrated "Flitcraft Parable," a story of sudden, cataclysmic, arbitrary change.

Alan Glynn's novels could serve as a springboard for discussion of corporate and government infiltration into our lives. Kevin McCarthy's could meet American interest in its immigrant populations and their histories. So could Paco Ignacio Taibo II's. Same with Andrea Camilleri's, which would also tally nicely with the boom of interest in cable television food shows and diversity in dining. Want a contemporary view of China? How about Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine?

If Philadelphia wants to stay local, why not David Goodis' Black Friday? Sympathy for the downtrodden. Survival against daunting odds. Finding one's own destiny.  Black Friday is full of big themes, the sort of thing to generate big discussion and draw in even readers who have not read the novel. Or how about Hammett's Red Harvest? That book would lend itself easily and deliciously to discussion of Philadelphia's history of rotten politics.

Or what about— But that's where you come in. What crime novel or story collection would you have your city, county, province, state, or country read? And why? It's not enough that the book be good or great. It must have the potential to appeal to readers young and old, to crime fans as well as to those who normally don't touch the stuff, and to those who might need a nudge to pick up a book in the first place. How does your choice meet these criteria? How will it grab readers the way "The Flitcraft Parable" snared Julie Rivett's teenage existentialists?
 
 © Peter Rozovsky 2013

Alan Glynn, meet Leonardo Sciascia

I don't like when reporters slip into the jargon of the beats they cover, even something as simple as politics writers calling the Justice Department "Justice" or education reporters calling charter schools "charters."  If a reporter talks like his sources he might identify with them, think like them, act like them.

I seethe at the evasive intent of "going forward," and my allergy extends to apparently harmless locutions such as "Thank you so much" or "reach out." Why the effusion? What is the speaker hiding?

So my heart beat faster at the following, near the beginning of The Moro Affair, by Leonardo Sciascia:

"He was obliged to express himself in a language of non-expression, to make himself understood by the same means he had sought and tested in order not to be understood."

"He" is Aldo Moro, an Italian politician kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 with the apparent post-facto consent of leading figures in Italian society and, in the communications his kidnappers and killers allowed him with the outside world, forced to try to tell the truth without appearing to do so after a career of doing precisely the opposite. 

I can think of no writer of crime fiction (or, in this case, of true crime and cynical, deadly corruption) other than Alan Glynn who thinks so deeply in his writing about what words mean and what they conceal. Alan Glynn, if you read this, you should read Leonardo Sciascia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Alan Glynn nails youth

Alan Glynn's Bloodland showed a sharp eye for the anaesthetizing power of buzz words. His new Graveland takes on an even bigger target than people who use words like brand and narrative seriously: Youth.

"They're nice guys, friendly, reliable. and a lot more savvy about all the tech stuff here than he is, but at the same time there's something about them that he doesn't get. It's a sort of dumb, uninquiring compliance..."

I don't know how large this motif will loom in the book, and I'm not sure this passage is all that hard on youth.  Glynn may simply be uttering the heresy, counterintuitive to lots of Americans, that youth are more. not less ready than older people to surrender to corporate control. (Put down your iPhone 5; I'm talking to you.) Still, it's not the sort of sentiment one is likely to encounter in everyday productions of the media-social media-industrial-advertising-entertainment complex.

It's early in the book, but Graveland has done nothing yet to dissuade me from a suspicion that Glynn may have more to say than any other crime novelist about the world in which I live.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Getting ready for the Edgars

The Detectives Beyond Borders wardrobe department is busy kitting me out for Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt in New York, hosted and presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

Overseas nominees (several from Ireland, naturally) are up for awards in several categories: Alan Glynn, for best paperback original (the excellent Bloodland); Declan Burke and John Connolly for best critical/biographical book (Books to Die For); and Jane Casey's The Reckoning, for the Mary Higgins Clark award. Teresa Solana (Spain) is up for best short story with "Still Life No. 41."  Malla Nunn's Blessed are the Dead (South Africa) is on the shortlist for best paperback original.

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French is up for best fact crime book. (See French in conversation with Parker Bilal and Adrian McKinty at the Adelaide Writers' Festival.)

Read my reports on the 2012 Edgars. See a complete list of the 2013 Edgar nominees.

(This just in: The wardrobe committee has made its decision. We're going with the charcoal gray suit, the white shirt, and a silk tie with a splash of purple.)

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Meanwhile, Open Road is celebrating the Edgars with contests, news, and low-priced e-book versions of selected past winners.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Social decay at home and abroad

I hopped into a cab in Montreal this morning, and the driver immediately turned down the volume on his radio. Such unbidden courtesy would be unimaginable in Philadelphia or New York, I thought, and I was grateful for the civility of a fellow Canadian.

Alas, when I arrived at the airport, I was reminded I was flying to the United States. United Airlines charged me $28.75 for my one checked bag. At 7:20 on a Monday morning, the dense, snaking lines for security and U.S. Customs were more typical of a holiday weekend "Due to the current budget situation limiting the number of border agents at the airport," as several signs informed me.

The one-two-three punch of private-sector cupidity, governmental paralysis, and bad grammar (the adjectival due to misused for the adverbial because of) should have prepared me for the overzealous inspection agent who had me hauled aside for an interview that left me worried I'd miss my plane. But I got to the gate in plenty of time to find out that the United Airlines fight would be delayed by mechanical problems long enough to make me miss my connecting flight. As of this writing, I hope the American social fabric holds together long enough to get both me and my luggage to Philadelphia by this evening.

Speaking of social fabric, two Irish crime novels I'm reading show sharp awareness of Ireland's financial troubles. Alan Glynn's Graveland has a pair of bankers being murdered and, though the novel is set in New York, I suspect strongly that Glynn, a Dubliner, had his own country's problems and the impunity of those responsible for them very much in mind.

Gene Kerrigan's The Rage, winner of the 2012 CWA Gold Dagger for best novel, meanwhile, includes bits such as these:

"Not bad enough the pay's shit — he's just had a wage cut, he's paying shitty levies the government takes to bail out the fucking banks."

and

"Trade unions are out of fashion now, but everything we ever got we had to fight for it —money, hours, conditions. Today, it's like everyone's grateful to be a unit of labour."

and

"My father was a die operator in a plastic extrusion factory — small place, non-union. Only time you got to open your mouth was to say `yes, sir.' What he said to me — you get there habit of bowing and scraping, it becomes part of your nature. Don't get the habit, he said."

Now, off for some coffee so I don't sleep through announcements of the next delays or cancellation.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Big O is now a big e-book

A while back I glommed onto an Irish crime novel called The Big O.

"The deliciously complicated plotting," I wrote, "the wry dialogue and the sympathy Burke engenders for his cast of characters made this one of the most fun and purely pleasurable reads I've had in a while."

Reviewers invoked names such as Westlake, Leonard, and Hiaasen, which lets you know you'll crack a smile reading it. And now you can read it on your mobile reading device for $4.99, as well you should. Find out why Detectives Beyond Borders called The Big O a "tour de fun."

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I sent Alan Glynn a verbal high five a year and half ago for exposing narrative's use as a contemporary weasel word in his novel Bloodland. His new Graveland, out this spring, does something similar with going forward, as well it should.

Read more about corporate and government weasel words at the Weasel Words Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The real St. Patrick's Day

It comes in May, and it celebrates the month the Irish drive boring crime fiction out of America.

May marks U.S. publication of the most recent novels by Adrian McKinty and Alan Glynn, each of whom has been mentioned with admiration and respect here at Detectives Beyond Borders. McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Street (Seventh Street Books) is the second in a trilogy that began with The Cold Cold Ground. Glynn's Graveland (Picador) follows on the scary dissection of paranoia and manipulation in his Bloodland.

Here's part of what I wrote about that book:

"Glynn is unprepared to accept the giddy assurances of boosters and innovators that online news heralds the path to a bright new world. His worries about the state of my profession are just a small part of a chilling, brilliant first chapter in which no one is sure of anything, so everyone is alert to everything, antennae twitching at the slightest whisper of disturbance."

And here's my take on I Hear the Sirens:

"Like its predecessor, Sirens is a serious portrait of one man's progress through troubled times (early-1980s Belfast and Carrickfergus, the author's home town). Like The Cold Cold Ground, it feels organic. Every joke, every grim encounter, or musing on the crappy Irish weather, or setback or advance in the police investigation contains the seeds of the whole. And it's a hell of a whole; these books are as smart and fun and harrowing as crime fiction gets."

So forget the green plastic leprechaun hats, will you, and read some good books instead.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Edgar is Irish, or DBB friend lands a nice nomination

Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Detectives Beyond Borders friend Declan Burke, has been nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award in the best critical/biographical category.

The Edgars will be presented May 2 in New York. Congratulations to Burke and Connolly for a bit of payoff on their stupendous effort, and good luck.

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Alan Glynn's Bloodland is up for best paperback original novel, Glynn joining Burke and Connolly as Irish nominees for this year's Edgars. Bloodland has its finger on the pulse of contemporary paranoia and manipulation like no other crime novel I can remember, not least in its invocation of 21st-century Orwellianisms such as "narrative," "brand," and "to the next level."

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Here's Glynn on  the Golden Age of paranoia.   Here are my previous posts about Bloodland. And here's a list of nominees in all categories, from the Edgars Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

When you Whish upon a star

Line of Sight, second novel by Australia's David Whish-Wilson, bears an epigraph from Leonardo Sciascia, and the tone of the novel's opening pages reminds me of that great Sicilian writer and social critic.

It also reminds me of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a bit of Dominique Manotti, and of Alan Glynn. That means the tone is deadpan. It also means there's no slowly dawning realization for the book's cop-against-the-cops protagonist that the world is set against him; we (and he) know that from the first. And that's a hell of a set-up for suspense. How will he get out of this?

Here's a sentence from the first chapter: "Before the news was days old the rumour was that Ruby Devine had been murdered by the police." Here's one from the second, as far as I've read so far: "It had been a long afternoon watching the fix come in."

Now, that makes me want to keep reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

News flash!!!

Mannion

Pearson

I've singled out Alan Glynn's fine novel Bloodland for recognizing narrative as a contemporary weasel word. So I was especially pleased just now when, 8 minutes, 51 seconds into Series 3, Episode 4 of The Thick of It, the jargon-spouting political spin doctor Stewart Pearson says: "Let's imagine here a narrative—" at which Peter Mannion MP rightly and righteously rolls his eyes and replies: "Oh, goodie." 

Sorry, The Onion and P.G. Wodehouse. Pack it in, S.J. Perelman. We can still be good friends, but I have a new love: The Thick of It.

***

I've just watched the first 3 minutes, 43 seconds of Veep, the new American TV series created by The Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci, and that was enough to send me back to The Thick of It. A Wikipedia article on Veep says the show uses "the same cinéma-vérité production style" as the TToI, and all I can say is what was that particular publicist watching?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More James McClure on the way

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

Good stuff, ja?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Paranoia strikes deep

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

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

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

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Lean, green Irish crime-writing machines

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

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

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

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

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

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

All crime writing should be this much fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"Innovation": Breaking ground in buzzwords

He did not
produce innovation

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

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

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

(See "new and improved.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More Alan Glynn, plus "interactive discussion"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2011