My cover arrives, with a book attached

My copy of Love and Fear, by Reed Farrel Coleman, arrived today, its cover a photo I shot a block from where I work.

I'll be interested in what's under that cover, too, both because Coleman is good at writing emotionally wounded P.I.s, and because the book is part of Orca Books' Rapid Reads line. The series consists of short novels for adults, inspired, Orca says, by the success of its previous books for younger, reluctant readers.

Allan Guthrie's 2007 novella Kill Clock persuaded me that such books can coincide nicely with my own fondness for concise narration in the Hammettian style. So I'll read this book with special interest, though probably more slowly than some readers, because I'll be busy sneaking peeks at the cover.

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The first link in this post will take you to the spring 2016 Rapid Reads releases. I also shot the cover for a second book in the series, Linda L. Richards' When Blood Lies.



© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Get Carter: Who needs an accent if you can act?

I've rolled my eyes here at Detectives Beyond Borders at movie stars whose hardest work seems to consist in showing us how hard they work. My targets have included Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling in The Usual Suspects,  Ed Norton's meta-mugging in The Score, and the unspeakably awful accents in The Drowning Pool.

Then there's Michael Caine in Get Carter, playing a gangster who returns home to investigate his brother's death. Caine's character is from the north of England, but to my uneducated ears, he might never have ventured out of earshot of Bow Bells. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because Caine does not see it as his job to mumble, lurch, limp, or gain 60 pounds to play a role. All he does is act, and if you can do that, you don't need an accent or any other Method crap.  Watch Caine in Get Carter, and you'll see a great actor in a great movie based on a great crime novel.

Ted Lewis

And that brings me to the international crime fiction event of the year. This week I'll attend a launch for Syndicate Books, a new imprint that is releasing not only Get Carter (original title: Jack's Return Home) in the U.S. for the first time in decades, but a good chunk of rest of author Ted Lewis' oeuvre, including two more of the Jack Carter novels, some for the first time ever in the U.S.

This new edition of Get Carter includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the film adaptation that starred Caine.The novel earns a spot as one of Allan Guthrie's 200 Noirs (as does Lewis' Billy Rags, due as an e-book from Syndicate)  Eight more novels to look forward to from an author whose admirers include David Peace and Derek Raymond? I'm excited, and you should be, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Strange Loyalties: William McIlvanney in words and a picture

Your humble blog keeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013, Bristol.
Photo courtesy of Ali Karim

. Once again I'm rereading a novel by William McIlvanney, and once again I am struck immediately by how different he is from the legion of crime writers who acknowledge his influence.

This time the novel is Strange Loyalties (1991), third of McIlvanney's three Laidlaw novels and, like its predecessors, Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch, rereleased in trade paperback by Canongate.

A hard-drinking detective or police officer comes slowly to himself after a binge and boy, does his head hurt. You're read that scene a few hundred times, but probably not the way McIlvanney writes it. Here's the opening of Strange Loyalties:

"I woke up with a head like a rodeo. Isn't it painful having fun? Mind you, last night hadn't been about enjoyment, just whisky as anaesthetic. Now it was wearing off, the pain was worse. It always is."

First, McIlvanney comes with a funny, inventive, eye-catching way of saying, "I was drunk, and my head hurt." That's a good way to grab a reader's attention, a good thing to do in a novel's first sentence. Second, the humor is a welcome change from the pain and self-pity with which many another crime writer endows such first-person hangovers.

Third, McIllvanney immediately leavens the fun with somber self-realization that to me, at least, tugs at the heartstrings without getting maudlin.  If you've never read the Laidlaw novels, read that opening again. Don't you want to know the character who thinks those lines? Doesn't that mix make Laidlaw seem more real, more human?

So, who is like unto William McIlvanney? Allan Guthrie probably comes closest in his mix of humor and compassion, but even that top-flight crime writer doesn't do it with the concentration of his fellow Scotsman McIlvanney. Ken Bruen does something like it in Priest, though its characters lean more toward martyrdom and away from humor.

Ian Rankin calls it doubtful that he'd be a crime writer without McIlvanney's influence but, other than that McIlvanney's Laidlaw and Rankin's Rebus both work the streets of a tough Scottish city, I don't see striking similarities between the two. So I'll dump the question in your laps, dear readers: Which crime writers best combine humor and compassion? Which authors, if you want to put the question this way, will make you laugh and cry in the same book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Pulp in Italy: An interview with author/editor/publisher Matteo Strukul, Part I

Matteo Strukul's Edizioni BD publishes Italian translations of comics, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction by authors including Dennis Lehane, Alan Moore, Joe R. Lansdale, Moebius, Michael Chabon, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee, Kazuo Koike, and Jacques Tardi. The Revolver imprint, of which he is line editor, brings hard-hitting authors such as Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Russel D. McLean, and Victor Gischler to Italian readers, with more to come from the likes of Charlie Huston and Christa Faust. He lives in Padua (Padova) in northern Italy's Veneto region and, when not publishing and editing, he writes. His first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, was shortlisted for Italy's Scerbanenco Prize. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Matteo Strukul talks about pulp fiction, Italian hard-boiled authors, comics, and his own discovery as an author by Massimo Carlotto. And, proving himself true kin to Detectives Beyond Borders, he has kind words about some of this blog's favorite Irish crime writers.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matto Strukul.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: Talk about the Revolver imprint, about the authors you chose, and why you chose them.

Matteo Strukul: First of all, Peter, thank you for the opportunity that you have given to me. It's great to answer your fantastic questions. I’m honored. Now, about Revolver… Revolver is an imprint focused on pulp crime fiction. We love to collect fast-paced novels. Every story has to be a real roller-coaster, a furious, well-plotted patchwork of wit and wise guys, ultra-violence and thrills, and unpredictable, lunatic characters. For these reasons we chose authors like Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, Tim Willocks, Christa Faust, Ray Banks. Personally, I love all these authors who are completely crazy and original but all of them have an intriguing, fascinating, irreverent approach to the genre. We want to have authors who have courage enough to break rules and to have faith in their stories and characters, doesn’t matter how crazy and strongly cruel those stories are. 

DBB: Your online biography says you were discovered by Massimo Carlotto. How did this discovery happen?

MS: Well, I was at the international Book Fair in Turin (Il salone del libro) in 2010 and, of course, Massimo Carlotto was also there. I remember that I went to the E/O publisher’s stand and said to him that I have a novel for him. Well, it was incredible when he said that he want to read it, because, man, I was and am a real fanatic of his work. At that time I was press officer with an independent and well-reputed publisher: Meridiano Zero.  I organized press campaigns for authors like David Peace, James Lee Burke, Derek Raymond. So, of course this fact doesn’t mean that I was an author but means, without any doubt, that I had a strong background. For this reason, I mean, he was curious.  I wrote for “Il Mattino di Padova,” my hometown newspaper, so he knew who I was, because Massimo is from Padova, too. So I was very lucky, in fact. Anyway, after some months, Colomba Rossi, who was responsible, together with Massimo, for a new imprint at Edizioni E/O, called Sabot/Age, sent to me an e-mail. I remember she said that my manuscript was fantastic and the character of Mila was amazing. She said also that Massimo Carlotto was really impressed and so, after that, they told me that they want to have me on board as author for the new imprint. It was amazing! 

DBB: Italy has produced some excellent, dark crime writers, such as Leonardo Sciascia and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Besides Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli (with the De Luca novels), who are the best modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers? And what does the Anglo-American tradition give Italian readers that they will not find in Italian crime writing? Who are your favorite writers, artists, and filmmakers from that tradition?

MS: Modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers are Giancarlo De Cataldo, author of Romanzo Criminale and many other novels. A bigger-than-life and epic criminal saga, a cruel, merciless, bloody and magnificent tale about Banda della Magliana: a gang of thugs and mobsters that during the end of the seventies created a criminal empire in Rome and Italy. The novel tells the story of the relationship between criminals and corrupted politicians in Italy at that time, with gangs fighting for the control of drug traffic, prostitution and gambling in the different quarters of Rome. Another wonderful Italian novelist that I love is Maurizio De Giovanni, author of the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples in the early ‘30s, a fantastic police-procedural series.

DBB: Your own first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, which was based on a comic book. You also publish a novel by Victor Gischler, whose work sometimes reads like a comic book without the pictures. How do comics influence the fiction you write and publish?

MS: Comic books are a big inspiration for my work. More than this, recently I have written Red Dread, an arc, drawn by international artist Alessandro Vitti (Marvel), with Mila as the main character. The arc was awarded the “Premio Leone di Narnia 2012” as best comic-book arc of the year. But anyway, I love authors like Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Victor Gischler, as I said they are a big influence, in particular I think that Mila has a big debt to Ennis' The Punisher. When you read comics, sequences and cruel feelings like violence, anger, hatred, are literally graphic. I love to study the rhythm, the action, the storytelling. Comic-books and movies are a big inspiration for my work. For instance, Punisher stories like “Mother Russia” or “Barracuda,” by Garth Ennis, or “Welcome to the Bayou,” by Victor Gischler, are stylish visions of hell. You could taste (thanks to the amazing work of guys like artists Goran Parlov or Leandro Hernandez) reasons and motivations, souls and blood, and at the end of the story what you really think is that authors like Garth and Victor are able to go right to the point. No mercy on you, as reader, no fuckin’ cheesy lines.

DBB: A number of the authors published by Revolver write slam-bang, action-packed novels: Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Victor Gischler, and Christa Faust, for example. But you also publish Brian McGilloway, a quieter and more reflective writer than some of your other authors. How does McGilloway fit in with the publishing philosophy of Revolver?

MS: You know sometimes, we have to breathe. As you said, we love to publish action-packed novels, but at the same time we would like to offer different kind of crime fiction, different tunes and tastes, and Irish noir, for instance, is a wonderful new creature that, as publisher, we would like to show to the Italian readers. I hope to publish as soon as I can guys like Adrian McKinty or Stuart Neville but sometimes you cannot publish everything you want.

*

Practise your Italian at Revolver's Web site and at Matteo Strukul's own site. Read about Italy's best current crime writers, crime in northeastern Italy, and a new Italian literary movement and crime fiction festival, coming soon in Part II of Detectives Beyond Borders' interview with Matteo Strukul.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders dissects a joke

The wait is over. It's been barely a week since I finished reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but when the book in question is quite possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a week seems long. But my copy of Volume 2 arrived today, and I shall keep you posted as appropriate. The novel's third part, with which Vol. 2 begins, is called "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," so I suspect I'll come up with a post or two to interest the crime readers of intelligence and good taste who visit Detectives Beyond Borders.

I made good use of the inter-Musils interval, reading, among other things, one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Allan Guthrie's funny, violent, touching novella Kill Clock, and a whole bunch of newer writing influenced by pulp, paperback originals, and 1970s and '80s adventure stories.

Along the way, I revisited a previous comment I'd posted about wiseass crime writers, talented authors whose good jokes occasionally obtrude on the story rather than helping it along. Such jokes sometimes seem to me the verbal equivalent of an actor mugging for the camera.

Eric Beetner has an interesting relationship to those guys. I read two of his books while waiting for TMWQ2, the novella Dig Two Graves and The Devil Doesn't Want Me, a novel. Beetner is good at creating entertaining variations on crime themes, such as the prison story and the revenge tale (you might call his takes on the former two, in Dig Two Graves, oral storytelling), the road epic, and the saga of the aging hit man and the hotshot young gun. (The latter works all the more because the young gun is such a little shit.)

I thought some of Beetner's jokes were a bit jokey in the novella, but hell, it's a novella. When he stretched out to novel length, in The Devil Doesn't Want Me, I was pleased to see an occasional rueful tone to some of the jokes, which shows me that the guy has chops and that he knows how to create a range of moods.

And the book is filled with good things: amusing byplay involving FBI agents who never get involved in the main story, and trenchant observations about the new Las Vegas and the old, among them. But a time or two, I think Beetner loved a joke too much to let go once he'd told it. Here's an example: The protagonist, Lars, a middle-aged hit man who keeps body and soul together with yoga, contemplates his superiority to the musclebound thug holding a gun on him:

"Guys like the big brute...smashing Lars' own gun hand into the tile floor cared only about the muscles. Lifting, squatting, pumping. For what? A thick neck like that can't turn to check out a great ass anymore."

That's the kind of touching, surprising, humanizing thought that Allan Guthrie is so good at. But Beetner has Lars continue the thought:

"And why did evolution put a swivel on a neck if not for that?"

That may be funny, but what does it add? What does it say that the preceding lines did not? I say Beetner should have cut the line and saved it for another book. To me that coda to the joke was a bit like being elbowed in the ribs and asked "Get it? Ya get it?" And that was all the more frustrating because the first joke was so good.

Your questions: Am I wrong? And what makes a joke function effectively as part of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Allan Guthrie, funnyman

I recently expressed misgivings about wiseass crime writers: talented authors who can write the hell out of an action scene, who are good at going for the laughs, but who sometimes crack wise when (in my humble opinion) restraint is called for.

I am happy to report that Allan Guthrie is no wiseass. The extended edition of his novella Kill Clock had me laughing out loud and reminded me that the author, often cited for his chilling noir, is not just good at coming up with funny lines, but is a craftsman of the comic. Here's one sample:

"Pearce grabbed the wrist and used Baldie's momentum to pull him forward. His face bounced off the roof of the car with a dull sound like a dropped mug hitting carpet.

"That had to hurt.

"Pearce let go.

"Long time since he'd been behind a wheel. Hadn't had much experience before he went to jail, and since he'd come out, he'd not had the chance.

"First thing, he put on his seatbelt."

That's funny because it's 100 percent deadpan, without the slightest hint that author, narrator, or character know they are up to anything funny. The Guardian recently criticzed a BBC production of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings stories for breaking the commandments of comedy, the first of which is: "Don't let your cast behave as if they are acting in a comedy. Wodehouse depends on all the characters taking their predicaments very seriously."

Guthrie does not need to be told this, not when he has a 5-year boy curse in amazement at protagonist Pearce's three-legged dog, or the boy's 2-year-old sister curse in imitation of her brother. And not when he has the children's mother plead for Pearce's help in terms that might be objectionable if another character applied them to her but are touching and maybe even a little heartbreaking when the she uses them about herself:

"`Doesn't help that I've spent time in psychiatric care.'  

"`Why should that make any difference?'

"`I was committed, Pearce. I'm a nutjob.'

"`Ah.'

"'My head was all over the place when I was a teenager. Didn't used to have my shit together like I have now.'"

I don't know about you, but I root for a character like that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Vanity Game

Andy Warhol is not often associated with the murkier precincts of the inner life, but author H.J. Hampson detects a dark side in his work:  "Screen prints of car crashes, suicides and riots, and, most memorably for me, the Tuna Fish Disaster – a screen print of a newspaper story about two women who died from botulism contracted from tinned tuna."

That dark view colors Hampson's take on Warhol's Jackie- and Marilyn-worshiping side. Her new novel, The Vanity Game, is a dark satire about a celebrity whose life turns bad, worse, and then worse than that, and not necessarily in ways one might expect.

The cheat is that the narrator/protagonist, a narcissistic, cocaine-snorting soccer star named Beaumont Alexander, is just funny and just self-aware enough to keep readers interested. Lines like the following redeem him from complete self-absorption and, whether or nor they mesh well with the narcissistic side of his character, they work as acid commentary:

"Everything you've been through?" Alexander tells his wifty singer girlfriend. "You know most people aren't that sympathetic to minor celebrities with coke habits."

For all his dope, fame, and money, Alexander is a child who, when things go bad, wants to retreat under a blanket at his mother's house. But childlike self-absorption (Alexander is always saying, "I can't get my head round it.") can be entertaining as well, as here, at the first of the novel's several deaths:

"She's tried to drag herself about two metres across the floor, leaving a thick trail in her wake. Blood everywhere. Cherry red, just like my Invicta sports car."

The novel turns considerably darker and more fantastic in its last third, with sadistic but calculating gangsters who prey on people's desire for fame. And that makes a line near the end of the book funny, pathetic, and horrifying at the same time:

"She said, `I know what happened to you, it happened to me too. I used to be on prime time TV."

***

The Vanity Game is published by Kyle MacRae and Allan Guthrie's Blasted Heath.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Steven Torres' worlds

Steven Torres' Concrete Maze is a revenge story with two nice twists: the point-of-view character is not the vengeance-seeker but rather his nephew, who both narrates the quest and describes its effect on his uncle. And the tale is no revenge fantasy. Rather, it offers a human and physical landscape (the Bronx and Manhattan) that feels real.

Here's one example I especially like:

"Finding a Carlos in Manhattan was like finding a Bob in Kansas."

The nephew-narrator is both an insider and an outsider, part of the quest for revenge but not its center. Torres' own circumstances may predispose him to such a narrative stance. He was born in the Bronx to parents who had come from Puerto Rico, then moved to a small town in Puerto Rico briefly before returning to New York. Torres acknowledges that the town is part of the background of his Precinct Puerto Rico series. More generally, I have to believe that moving between two worlds sharpens one's ability to both partake of and objectively observe those worlds.

(Torres talks about The Concrete Maze in an interview with Allan Guthrie.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Goodis the great

Some of the borders I've crossed recently have been ones of time, into American crime writing of the 1940s and '50s.

Based on my first readings of all three authors, I like Bruno Fischer and Fletcher Flora a little better than I like Day Keene. But none was as good as David Goodis.

I'd read some Goodis before, the short story "Black Pudding" and the 1951 best-seller Cassidy's Girl, and I'd been impressed, notably by the heart-breaking compassion he mustered for his characters. But Dark Passage (1946) is, in its opening chapters, even better, a knockout of a book.

I'll likely have more to say later, but for now it's interesting to view the novel as an argument for the old proposition that the way to become a good writer is to write, and write, and write. Dark Passage was Goodis' second novel, and it appeared seven years after his first. In between, Goodis wrote prodigiously for pulp magazines, more than five million words in five years in the early 1940s, according to his own estimate. (See Robert Polito's notes to David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.)

The result may not tug at the heartstrings quite as hard as some of Goodis' later works do, but it is self-consciously stylish without going over the top, a difficult feat for any writer, much less one not yet thirty years old. The book's first chapters are full of words repeated to amusing effect. And if you like how Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie use humor at dark moments and somehow make it seem right, you'll find the roots of the practice in protagonist Vincent Parry's conversation with the taxi driver in Chapter Seven.

But first, my favorite line of the book so far, tough, naive, funny and touching at the same time:

"Being good to people sounds nice but it's hard work."

***

Mingle with Goodis-heads and noir fans this Nov. 8-11 at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Allan Guthrie's black shorts

Allan Guthrie, that sharp noir author, scholar, editor, agent, and impresario, is back with a collection of cheap shorts.

Hilda's Big Day Out offers four gut- and heart-wrenching slabs of noir, including the title story, which is atypical in at least two ways: It has an arguably happy ending, and its narrator is a dog.

Of the remaining tales, "Bye Bye Baby," which gave rise to Guthrie's novella of the same name, may wring tears of pity from even the hardest-hearted reader. Like David Goodis' novel Cassidy's Girl, its noirness inheres not in a tragic ending, but rather in an inconclusive sort of non-ending. Not every tragedy has the easy out of catharsis or death. Sometimes the nightmare just goes on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Blasted Heath: Cool name, exciting new e-book "imprint"

Allan Guthrie, author, agent, editor, noir scholar, and e-book evangelist, has now turned publisher, with Blasted Heath,  promising about thirty e-book titles a year.

The initial offerings include Anthony Neil Smith's All the Young Warriors, which humanizes international conflicts in a way that not even Twitter and Facebook can. Two Somali students kill a pair of Minnesota police officers, then flee to their native land to join the fight to liberate it, even though there seems little to liberate the terrified, anarchic country from. Disillusionment, love, and adventure ensue both in Somalia and back home, where an angry cop and the gang-leader father of one of the students team up.

Smith offers chilling descriptions of what religious fundamentalism does to both its targets and its believers, and even more chilling descriptions of Minnesota's winter winds, just what we need as we bid fall goodbye here in the Northeast.  Thanks, A.N.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What's so funny about noir?

While we're on the subject, noir and other dark crime fiction seems often to include humor (Derek Raymond, Allan Guthrie, Ken Bruen, Scalped). Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

E-books on the march in a new blog, at a new press

One sign that e-books have arrived, or at least that they have their seat backs and tray tables in their full upright and locked positions, is a newish (since March) blog devoted to them.

The blog, Allan Guthrie's Criminal-E, offers short interviews with crime writers whose work is available as e-books. In addition to his own work as an author, Guthrie is an agent and an editor. He knows the business side of books, and the discussions on the blog reflect that knowledge. So, in addition to "Sum up your book in 25 words," "How important is a good title?" and James Henderson on his own strengths and weaknesses, you'll get Roger Smith on e-book pricing,  Christa Faust on "reviews" in the Amazon age, Guthrie himself on pricing and self-publishing, and many, many more.

Looks like a good chance for readers to get authors' perspectives on some important questions — and to learn about some good books.

***

Also in the e-world, there's a new outlet for dark fiction. It's called Snubnose Press ("Compact. Powerful. Classic."), it's brought to you by the folks from Spinetingler Magazine, and it's devoted to publishing stories of 20,000 to 60,000 words that "that could, within the broadest definitions of genre possible, be categorized as crime and horror."

***

FLASH: From Bitter Lemon Press, June 30, 2011:

E-books now have their own page on our site. The eBook catalogue has 20 titles and is growing quickly. The books are available on most platforms, Apple, Sony, Nook, etc. and, via our site or directly, on Kindle. Click here for our list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Falling Glass: A review

Falling Glass, the new novel by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Adrian McKinty, is:

• A meditation on aging

• A dream of escape from urban life

• A mini-course on Ireland's Pavees, or travelers, or tinkers

• An expression of love for Ulster

• An expression of disdain for professional `Oirishness'

• A hard look at what economic disaster means to those not at the top of the heap

• A scathing attack on the cynical oligarchy of money, power and protection that crosses Northern Ireland's sectarian lines

• A similarly scathing attack on the cult of the self-made millionaire

• A reminder that politics is personal

• A series of homages to, among others, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, the Coen brothers (don't blame me; it's McKinty's book), Ken Bruen, Ernest Hemingway, The Godfather, Sergio Leone, and Warren Zevon

• A globe-hopping tale of quest that manages the difficult feat of seeming alternately leisurely and fast-paced, as necessary

• The return of Michael Forsythe, though in a supporting role

• Possibly — just possibly — a meditation on the art of telling stories

The hero this time is Killian (just one of his names), an enforcer with brains who has been forced back into the life by Belfast's real estate crash. His job is to find an Irish tycoon's wandering wife, only he winds up being pursued himself, and we find out why the millionaire really wants his wife back. Among the pursuers is a very scary Russian, and it's part of the book's story that, for all his cool savagery, he's not the scariest thing in the novel.

***

Killian is a hard man, violent, a killer when he has to be, yet redeemed for readers by his heart, his brains, and because he is pursued by people worse than he is. He's a bit like Alan Guthrie's Pearce or McKinty's own Michael Forsythe or maybe even Stuart Neville's Gerry Fegan that way.

McKinty and Neville are from Northern Ireland; Guthrie is Scottish. Is that coincidence, or is there a reason crime writers from that part of the world specialize in hard men with a heart? And who's your favorite protagonist of that type?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bye Bye Baby: Fast, hard, cheap and good

"In the car, Erica said, `I don't know whether to laugh or cry.'"

Allan Guthrie's Bye Bye Baby is fast, hard, twisted and, thanks to a publishing quirk, cheap.

The novella's publication was pushed back to 2013 and, in the interim, Guthrie secured electronic publication rights. That's why you can read this affecting, ingenious kidnapping tale with a twist for $2.99.

Guthrie wrote Bye Bye Baby for Barrington Stoke's series of crime stories for adult reluctant readers. What does this mean for enthusiastic readers? A story that moves quickly, in short chapters of crisp prose, with plenty of plot turns to hold the attention, and characters you can love and others you can hate. And what's wrong with that?

Like Guthrie's full-length novels, Bye Bye Baby is sly, noir as all hell (more noir than some, actually), and it just might bring a tear of pity to your eyes. It's a police procedural filled with incident and back story, and man, what an ending.

***

Click here for a discussion of the challenges and, just maybe, the possibilities involved in publishing novellas and other short crime fiction.

G© Peter Rozovsky 2010

If you like X, you'll love Y

A colleague who knows I read crime fiction asked if I liked Guy Ritchie's slam-bang English gangster movies.

I did, I said, and I suggested that if he liked those movies, he might enjoy reading Allan Guthrie and Ken Bruen, his Brant and Roberts novels and his three collaborations with Jason Starr especially.

Then I thought, isn't this a fine way for authors and publishers to find new readers? Find out what people like to do, watch or think about, then suggest books to match. And you can help! Just fill in the blanks in this simple equation

If you like non-book X, you'll love book (or author) Y

Thanks, and have fun!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Up with e-shorts!

I bought Allan Guthrie's novella Bye, Bye Baby last night, and I asked last week when someone was going to put out a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories.

I mention this because I bought the Guthrie as a downloaded e-book, and if electronic books are here to stay, we might as well take advantage of what the medium can do. I don't mean weird technological gimcrackery that in most cases adds up to nothing more than what a simple paperback does at a fraction of the cost, I mean the flexibility to publish narrative forms such as novellas and short stories that might be economically unfeasible as traditional books.

Bye, Bye Baby is about seventy pages; hard to imagine a publisher taking a chance on a traditional book that size (though Five Leaves Publishing Crime Express series does so with, among other novellas, Guthrie's Killing Mum, and Barrington Stoke with his Kill Clock). But lower production and distribution costs might encourage them to do so with books in electronic form.

And where is a reader to turn who loves an author's short fiction and would like it collected in one place, as I would with Phillips or Jean-Hugues Oppel or Dominique Manotti? (Ken Bruen, too, though he's popular enough that some publisher might be able to sell his collected shorts as a traditional book.)

Short-story collections by a single crime author are few and far between, and I suspect uncertainty about their sales prospects helps account for this. So why not sell collections as cheap e-books, or even let readers build their own books electronically out of the short stories they want to read?

What are the barriers to doing things this way? And which crime writers would you like to see come out with collections of short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

There's a money shot in Donna Moore's book

There are also a Big O, a two-way split and probably lots more I haven't noticed or have not got to yet.

Moore's book is Old Dogs, and Money Shot, The Big O and Two-Way Split are novels by her fellow crime writers Christa Faust, Declan Burke and Allan Guthrie, respectively.

Moore's salutes to her friends are unobtrusive and will bring a smile to those who have read the novels (I recommend all three). And now your question: What other writers pay similar tribute to the titles of their own favorite books?

P.S. I'll enlarge this list of Moore's tributes as I discover more of them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Papers of Tony Veitch, or showing, telling and compassion

"Show, don't tell" is one of those writing mantras that I think I believe in but have never examined thoroughly.

I guess the idea is that readers don't care what the author has to say, they want to see what the characters do. The Scottish novelist William McIlvanney intrudes on his own narrative far more than most crime writers do, often with thrilling results. Here's McIlvanney getting inside his protagonist's head in The Papers of Tony Veitch:

"He could recall giving up any belief in an overall meaning to living because any such meaning would have to be indivisible, unequivocally total, giving significance impartially to every drifting feather, every piece of paper blowing along a street.

"Eck was like one of those pieces of paper. You couldn't say the meaning of things was elsewhere and Eck was irrelevant. That was a betrayal. All we have is one another and if we're orphans all we can honorably do is adopt one another, defy the meaninglessness of our lives by mutual concern. It's the only nobility we have.

"Laidlaw tried to reinstate his energy by declaring war, over his whisky, on all brutalisers of others, all non-carers. Yet the very thought embarrassed. He would have been such a compromised champion, a failure opposing failure."

McIlvanney invokes compassion implicitly and, elsewhere, explicitly, compassion for victims, for perps, compassion for those who feel hopeless compassion. I've noticed a similar tendency in Allan Guthrie's novels and in Ken Bruen's Priest.

And now, two questions: 1) How do you feel about showing vs. telling? and 2) Is it any surprise that authors of hard stories about hard men should be attracted to compassion as a theme and a human attribute?

(Read about William McIlvanney here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010