Shots

Three from Bristol shot by me, one from New Orleans not.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016, 2017

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

Crimefest, Bath, and London: What I did, and what I'll do when I get back

I'm on my way back to America after Crimefest in Bristol, three days in and around Bath, and two days in London. Some highlights for now, with normal blogging and discussion to resume shortly.

Maj Sjöwall. All hotos by
your humble blogkeeper

I met more new authors and other book-loving folks than usual at Crimefest, had more initial face-to-face meetings than usual with longtime online friends than usual, and attended more panels than usual. The only thing usual was the superb job by the organizers: Adrian Muller, Myles Allfrey, and Donna Moore. Well done, and discussion of authors and issues to follow once I get home, get some sleep, and do some laundry.

Next up was Bath, where I resumed my acquaintance with that harmonious Georgian city and, on a day trip to the Neolithic stone circle of Avebury and the West Kennet Avenue, stepped into a muddy furrow and sank up to my knees. The solicitude of my hotel manager, who had the trousers washed, dried, folded, and back in my hands by the next day, was another highlight.  If you plan to fall in the mud at a UNESCO World Heritage site, make sure you're staying at the Kennard in Bath.

Chinatown/Soho, London

Finally, London, where Mike Stotter, Ali Karim, Ayo Onatade, and the galleries of Early Renaissance painting at the National Gallery provided much high-jinks and cultural exaltation. See you all in Raleigh, Bristol, or London.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Crime writers and reviewers, as they looked at Crimefest 2015

Martin Edwards

Kati Hiekkapelto

Ali Karim

Jake Kerridge

Anthony Quinn

Gunnar Staalesen

Steve Cavanagh

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Hans Olav Lahlum

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Why you should be at Crimefest 2015

I always enjoy Crimefest in Bristol, England, not least for its stellar lineup of guest authors.  P.D. James appeared there. So have Bill James, Peter James, and Dan James. 

Maj Sjöwall

I met that affable superstar of Scottish crime writing, William McIlvanney, at Crimefest, and I heard Declan Hughes sing country and western to a fellow author at the hotel bar. (As a singer, Hughes is a damn good author and playwright.) It was Frederick Forsyth's entertaining and informative presentation at Crimefest 2012 that finally got me to read his classic Day of the Jackal.

Your humble blogkeeper
with the great Bill James,
author of the Harpur & Iles
novels, at Crimefest 2010

But this year's special guest is as special as any guest at any crime festival anywhere. Maj Sjöwall wrote the classic Martin Beck series of crime novels with Per Wahlöö, and she'll be at Crimfest 2015 to be interviewed by Lee Child and to present the Petrona Award for best Scandinavian crime novel.

Your humble blogkeeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013

Sjöwall and Wahlöö blazed a number of crime fiction trails (or at least were there at the very start), among them those of social criticism, a multiplayer cast of detectives, and elevation of the investigator's personal life to importance comparable with that of the mysteries he or she investigates. Their ten Beck novels, from 1965's Roseanna to The Terrorists in 1975, were among the first to examine a society critically as well as tell a crime story, and authors to this day cite them as influences.  

The best photo ever of Ali Karim
(right), with Peter Guttridge at
Crimefest 2013. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

So this is big, a chance to hear and meet one of crime fiction's modern greats, and I'll be there, May 14-17 in Bristol. (The award  Maj Sjöwall will present is named for the blog maintained by the late Maxine Clarke, a longtime reviewer and supporter of crime fiction. She posted the first ever comment here at Detectives Beyond Borders, back in September 2006.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon 2014 in a few more words and pictures

Gary Phillips brought up the mysterious Roosevelt Mallory during the  "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.  I now have Double Trouble, third of Mallory's four Radcliff novels, on order.


I've already mentioned my discovery of Dolores Hitchens, Charlotte Armstrong, Roy Huggins, and Ennis Willie in the course of my preparation for the panel, thanks to panelists Sarah Weinman, Sara J. Henry, and Max Allan Collins.

This was an especially rich Bouchercon for new discoveries, and I'm grateful to the panelists who helped me make them. (I intend no slight to the fifth panelist, Charles Kelly. I'd already started reading his author, Dan J. Marlowe, two years before the convention.) And here are a few more photos from Bouchercon 2014, all photos by your formerly humble blog keeper, with the exception of the Double Trouble cover.

At left is Ingrid Willis, who did such a fine job as chair of this year's Bouchercon. The noirish fellow at right is Stacey Cochran, who is doing the same job for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. I've already registered. Have you?

Finally, two pics of my Bouchercon peeps and one from after the con. At left, Ali Karim points to the visual welcome from the Hyatt Regency Long Beach. At right/below, Mike Stotter contemplates the world through the prism of David Morrell's Macavity Award for Murder As a Fine Art. Below left, a mammoth reflected in the Lake Pit at the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits. The mammoth is a reproduction based on fossil evidence. The oily slick is real.  (Read all my Bouchercon posts from before, during, and after the convention.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Nelson Algren: The answer, plus what the ancients can teach us

Yesterday's post here at Detectives Beyond Borders asked What ever happened to Nelson Algren, and why? The good people who run the Nelson Algren Twitter account suggested I might find some answers here. The article's headline:

"Despite his literary brilliance and humanist resolve, Nelson Algren was the type of loser this country just can't stomach."

***

 I miss the medal stand in the How Many Books Do You Own? Olympics (fourth place, behind Ali Karim, Jon and Ruth Jordan, and the Library of Congress), but I still can't take three steps anywhere in my house without tripping over a pile of mid-listers. So I took two bags of books to a used bookstore today and traded them for credit and three books.

Two of the three have some connection to crime: James Ellroy's Crime Wave, and Sophocles' Oedipus plays. Everyone knows about Oedipus Rex's sublime plotting, but what grabbed me was Oedipus' declaration in the prologue that

"Children!
"I would not have you speak through messengers
"And therefore I have come myself to hear you."

That has to be as good a job as any writer has ever done getting right to the heart of the action without, however, resorting to desperate action for the sake of action. It's a perfect balance among action, atmosphere, and suspense.  The ancients have much to teach us.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crimefest 2: Drop your pants, this is a fire drill

Thank heavens a fire drill emptied my hotel Friday afternoon just as I'd removed my pants preparatory to a refreshing nap. For a moment there  I was afraid I was going to get some rest and recover from my jet lag ...

... and, in retrospect, that turned out to be a relatively enjoyable parts of my day. I shall expose the institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that tried so hard to make my life a misery, but I'll wait until I'm safely home and out of their clutches.

Meanwhile, the Crimefest part of Crimefest makes me feel like Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former head of the International Olympic Committee who would inevitably declare each recently concluded Olympics "the best Games ever." This six-year-old festival keeps getting better and better. More snapshots from its first two days:

Ali Karim said: "America is mental."

William McIlvanney said: "Glasgow has an opinion about everything."  A hard city of hard men? said the father of tartan noir. "I don't think it's hard so much as confrontational."

Michael Sears, half of the writing team of Michael Stanley, suggested a reason police in southern Africa may be less than eager to investigate cases of humans killed and dismembered for use of their body parts in religious rituals:  "Partly because they're scared of the witch doctors, partly because they're scared of who might be paying the witch doctors."

McIlvanney again, on the impetus for his Laidlaw novels: "I wanted to acquaint straight society with its darker side, to introduce Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll."

Ruth Dudley Edwards, speaking during a panel on crime and humor, of herself and her Irish countryman Declan Burke: "We were both brought up in a society of performers."

Aly Monroe, an author new to me, on why she made the protagonist of her espionage series an economist: "Because the Cold War was all about money."

John Lawton, a fellow member of Monroe's panel on Cold War espionage fiction: "The thing about spies is that they can't wait to tell you things."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Convivial quayside kebab with Karim at Crimefest

Peter Guttridge (left) with crime critic/kebab eater Ali Karim.

When the pace slackens and the volume starts to die down at the Crimefest hotel bar, somebody says: "Hey, Ali! Let's go for a kebab!"

Only hours after the photo above was snapped, I joined Ali Karim and Mike Stotter for refreshment procured from a late-night kebabery and consumed on a quayside bench. By day, Bristol's quay bustles. By night, under the stars of a cool spring sky, it's a delightful place to recount the highlights of the festival's first day.

For me, these included:

1. Valerio Varesi's citation of Carlo Emilio Gadda as a forefather of Italian crime writing. I'd mentioned Giorgio Scerbanenco as one such but, since the introduction to my edition of Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana invokes such names as Robert Musil and James Joyce, I'd figured Italians might regard Gadda as a literary rather than a crime writer. Varesi thanked me for citing Scerbanenco, but he also said: "There's another great forerunner: Carlo Emilio Gadda."  Varesi also said, in response to a question from the floor about which countries' crime fiction each of the panel's authors liked to read, that he enjoyed French crime writing. This made sense to me, as his atmospheric fiction reminds me a bit of Georges Simenon, Fred Vargas, and Pierre Magnan.
2. Meeting up with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite John Lawton,  and buttonholing guest of honor William McIlvanney at the bar and finding that this author of the Laidlaw novels, revered by authors and readers as the father of Scottish crime writing, is a fine gentleman.
3. My pub quiz team's coming within a second tie-breaker question of being the first group or person ever to best Martin Edwards at anything at Crimefest.

On to Day 2, and the arrival of the Irish crime writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bombay Sapphirecon (Post I from Bouchercon 2012)

I arrived in Cleveland and ran smack into Ali Karim before I'd checked into the convention hotel. No surprise there; Bouchercon would not be Bouchercon otherwise.

Chatted briefly with John Connolly about Books to Die For, which gets its U.S. launch here. Renewed acquaintances with Kirstie Long, Christa Faust, Mike Stotter, and Barbara Fister, among others. But mostly I realized with frightening clarity something I'd missed by not staying at the convention hotel during Bouchercons 2009, 2010, and 2011: Order a drink at the bar, and you don't have to pay for it -- some nonsense about charging it to the room, you see.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crimefest 2012 highlights

A gentle spring wind dissipates the gin fumes over College Green, and Bristol is an eerily quiet place now that Ali Karim has left town.

With Crimefest 2012's remaining stragglers marshaling their strength before the Sunday dinner, here are some highlights of my third Crimefest, one of the most enjoyable crime festivals I've been part of:

1) Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool wins the Last Laugh award, for best comic crime fiction published in the U.K., besting a field that included hacks and pikers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.

2) Your humble blogkeeper loses the Criminal Mastermind quiz to Peter Guttridge on the crime-fiction equivalent of penalty kicks. Guttridge and I each answered fifteen questions correctly in general crime-fiction knowledge and our specialty categories. (His was Richard Stark's Parker novels; mine was Dashiell Hammett.) Guttridge won the prize of Bristol blue glass and a free pass to next year's festival because he had passed on only five questions whose answers he did not know while I passed on seven. I think, however, that my showing may be the best ever by a North American, and proof to the Brits that there's more to America than bluff good humor, rustic colonial manners, and a flair for tall stories.

3) A post-dinner discussion with Gunnar Staalesen, who agreed with a Detectives Beyond Borders commenter's suggestion that the Anders Breivik case will halt fruitful, honest discussion of immigration and integration in Norway for a generation.

4) Finding a crime writer (William Ryan) for whom Isaac Babel (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry) is both an inspiration and a character.

5) Reunions with the delightful floating cast of authors, organizers, critics and fans who spend their vacations criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean to attend every crime festival they can in England and America, and the addition of Alison Bruce, Laura Wilson and Stav Sherez to the cast. See you in Cleveland or Harrogate or Bristol or Albany or Long Beach or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon 2011 in pictures

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

(At right, Bouchercon stragglers head to Laclede's Landing in St. Louis for dinner Sunday night. Below, Ali Karim [left] with Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

"Do you get much—"

(Two scenes on Bush Street, Nob Hill, San Francisco. Photos, as always, by your humble blogkeeper)

Your kind comments on my previous post got me reflecting fondly on San Francisco's Bouchercon 2010 and my other recent crime-fiction convention, and I realized I had more to show and tell. (So does Ali Karim, though he exaggerates about me and the waitress.)

Back in Philadelphia, a pair of profane utterances ran through Noircon 2010 like leitmotifs through a Wagner opera. Here, then, are some of that conference's best-loved lines:

"Do you get much pussy?"

— inmate to George Pelecanos after Pelecanos had talked to a prison audience about being a writer


"Do you get much pussy?"

— shouted response to "Any questions?" following every subsequent panel session. Much laughter ensued.


"Fuck you!" (and variants including "Fuck you, Cullen!", "Fuck you, Peter!" and "Fuck you, Megan!")

— panelists' response to the equally ubiquitous (and equally jocose) post-discussion question "How do you define noir?" Much laughter ensued.

Want more? See you at Noircon 2012, Nov. 8-11.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Late-breaking convention pictures

Here are me and my "Stamp of Death Panel" at Bouchercon 2010.

From top left: your humble blog keeper; Christopher G. Moore; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, known to readers as Michael Stanley.

At left are me and my man Bill James at Crimefest 2010. At right, it's me at the same festival with Ali Karim, who kindly provided these photos and is here pictured for the first time ever without a gin and tonic in his hand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day -1: Friends, Romans, countrymen ... lend me your Yrsa

Arrived in San Francisco after a productive flight, on time but jet-lagged. Was about to give up on my 9 p.m. meeting at the convention hotel with panelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir when she showed up to deliver a copy of her new book, Ashes to Dust. Then the floodgates opened.

I had one of my panels drinking at one table, the other at another, and the estimable Christa Faust with her entourage at a third. I ran shuttle-hospitality missions among the tables with no great result except the possible germ of a revolution in the distribution of crime fiction in South Africa.

But all good things must come to an end when one has an 8 a.m. breakfast the next day. On the way back to my hotel, I found a familiar face enjoying a late-night pick-me-up in front of his hotel after a hellishly long travel day. Nothing says Bouchercon like Ali Karim with a glass of gin in his hand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon I

Arrived in Indianapolis a full day ahead of the formal start of Bouchercon, which meant a few hours for socializing and for taking midnight pictures of the city's imposing Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

Ran into old friends from previous conventions -- Anita Thompson, Dennis Tafoya, Toby and Bill Gottfried, Janet Rudolph, Jon Jordan (who is already hard at work on Bouchercon 2011) and so on. Ran into Ali Karim as well, but then, one is always running into Ali Karim at these affairs.

Dinner turned into a Pied Piper parade that dwarfed what I'd experienced at previous cons. About thirty of us all told wolfed down pasta, and each of us was asked to stand, introduce him or herself, and name the best book he or she had read this year. A few votes came in for Louise Penny (Canadians were well represented at the dinner), and one each for Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water and Megan Abbott's Queenpin, both of which I endorsed.

Donna Moore stood and thrust her head straight into the low-hanging lampshade at left. It set off her hair nicely.

Tomorrow, my translation panel, plus an Irish crime fact and fiction discussion that includes Ruth Dudley Edwards and Stuart Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009