More DBB visits ALA (If I'd stopped by the Tor/Forge booth, I could have called this post Tor and Peace)

Melville House's display at the American Library Association's 2014 Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia included Giorgio Scerbanenco's Traitors to All (published in Britain under the title Betrayal), a welcome reminder that Scerbanenco, the Father of Italian Noir, will finally be easily available in the U.S. for the first time in more that forty years. The novel appears later this year, as will Scerbanenco's A Private Venus, the appearance of whose U.K. edition had to be the event of of the international crime fiction year in 2012.

Scerbanenco may be Melville House's greatest gift to America since it reprinted Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

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Scerbanenco may be Melville House's greatest gift to America until it publishes U.S. editions of David Peace's The Damned United, Red or Dead, and GB84 later this year. The publisher offered a 30-page excerpt of Red or Dead at its ALA booth, and the first few pages make me want to read more.  The novel is the story of a soccer manager's revolutionary salvaging of the then down-on-its-lick Liverpool F.C., but it reads like James Ellroy.

Old meets new in a cool chair
at the ALA 2014 Midwinter
Meeting. Photo  by your
humble blogkeeper.

The relentless prose suggests Ellroy, whose American Tabloid, Blood's A Rover, and The Cold Six Thousand I've read in the past month. Peace's novel, like Ellroy's trilogy, is based on history, though of a man, a city, and a soccer team, rather than of a tumultuous era in a nation's history. I expect I'll find myself comparing how the two authors make fictional sense out of reality.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Cut!: Popular anxieties in crime novels

Even if I hadn't known that postwar masculine anxiety was one of the staples of American pop culture and psychology, I might have guessed it from Lester Dent's Honey in His Mouth (1956) and Charles Runyon's Color Him Dead (1963); each has a castrated character.

From the same period, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is famously supposed to have played on the era's political fears. Were movies and crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s especially rife with political, sexual, and social anxiety? What crime novels (or movies or TV shows), whether from that time or any other, make contemporary fears and anxieties part of the story?

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Celebrate Mystery Month over at Booklist's Likely Stories blog, which will feature posts from a wide variety of crime fiction blogs, journals, and magazines throughout the month. Guest posters talk about their publications and what they have to offer, and they point readers' way to even more blogs and websites. Have a look, won't you? Support your local library, and let it support you!

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012