Anne Holt, or which crime writers should be in politics?

Anne Holt (Photo for Detectives 
Beyond Borders by Peter Rozovsky)

Kati Hiekkapelto said during a panel on Morality, Society And Justice In Crime Fiction at Crimefest 2016 in Bristol last week that laws were made for middle-class white people. Anne Holt disagreed, invoking the Ten Commandments in citing laws as setting standards toward which humans can aspire.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the two authors' résumés might expect as much: Hiekkapelto is an activist for immigrants' and refugees' rights when she's not writing her Anna Fekete crime novels, and Holt's CV includes a stint as Norway's minister of justice. It would be easy to tag Hiekkapelto as the rebel and Holt as the representative of the establishment, especially by the constricted standards of what passes for political discourse in the United States.

One could almost think that Fear Not, whose plot turns in part on an asylum seeker's death, is a Hiekkapelto novel. But it's not; Holt wrote it. Elsewhere during Crimefest, Holt said she bristled at descriptions of her as leftist. Instead, she said, her political passion is human rights.  That tells me that she's no doctrinaire politician, and Wikipedia describes her party, Norway's Labour Party, as social-democratic.

Wouldn't it be cool if Holt were American? She could run for office as a Democrat, and Republicans would find it difficult to attack a candidate who cited the Ten Commandments among the touchstones of her conception of the law.  Even a Republican Senate might be unable to stonewall her nomination forever. And wouldn't it be nice to have a crime writer in the cabinet or the White House?

I wrote after last month's Edgar Awards that Walter Mosley and Sara Paretsky might make a good president-vice president ticket. Anne Holt, provided she could get the citizenship thing straightened out, could be attorney general. What crime writers would you like to see as presidents, prime ministers, or heads of government departments? Call it the Shadow cabinet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

"The fact that," or Is it possible to be a good translator but a bad writer?

The classic handbook Elements of Style (Strunk and White) includes the injunction that "the expression the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs," and I see no reason to disagree.

I started tallying the number of the fact thats in Anne Holt's 1222, but I stopped when I got to fifty. 1222 is a fine novel, but I wish translator Marlaine Delargy had avoided that clumsy phrase, which is easily replaceable, never necessary, and wholly characteristic of slapdash, amateurish writing.

There's more weirdness in the book, too, writing that's not exactly bad, but that lacks the polish I expect and generally want. The narrator calls one character "A thief, without a shadow of doubt" — not beyond, but without. When the book's trainload of passengers settle into the hotel where they have been stranded by a derailment, we are told, "Basically, everything was more or less OK." Coffee is described as "red hot," which liquids don't get, except maybe molten steel. A character receives supplies "on a daily basis" (Why not "every day"?) A crowd panics, and "total chaos" ensues. How does "total" chaos differ from any other kind?

Elsewhere Delargy gives us scenario when the right word would have been scene. Scenario means script — something written down, in other words, and not something visual. And no, the narrator does not describe a scenario being played out before her. She uses the word as if it meant scene, which it does not. And then "The noise level was rising." Why level?  A character "has been tasked" with keeping everyone calm. And why "With every harrowing experience that occurred ..." rather than "With every harrowing experience ..."?

The narrator recalls an earlier conversation, and "I could literally hear his tense, high-pitched voice." Literally? Really?  Not unless Holt intended an infusion of the paranormal or the narrator was having auditory hallucinations. If you're still with me, you won't be surprised by "This person must also carry within them a hatred powerful enough to make them murder Cato Hammer ..."

Is it possible to be a good translator but a bad writer?

(By comparison, The Devotion of Suspect X, translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander, offers only a character "vainly attempting to do some damage control," unnecessary words italicized by me; tarp and prepping rather than tarpaulin and preparing; and three gottas, which is three too many.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Edgars, Part I

Anne Holt was both gracious and jovial when I told her after last night's Edgar Awards dinner how much I was enjoying her novel 1222, but she kept addressing me as "sir."

She's about my age, so there was no call for such formality. "Typical Scandinavian reticence and reserve," I thought, until I noticed sometime afterward that I'd lost my name tag. So all Holt, whose book had been short-listed for the best-novel Edgar, had to go on was an empty plastic card-holder with a yellow strip dangling from it that read "Press." Anyone who detects irony in the juxtaposition can take it somewhere else, pal. I have a job to do.

I finished reading Holt's book on the train home from New York, and I remain impressed by her boldness in taking an old Agatha Christie formula and infusing it with tension and a thoroughly contemporary feel. The novel's dénouement may have just a touch of the anti-Americanism that makes some readers of Scandinavian crime fiction roll their eyes, but if it does, Holt's handing of the matter is nuanced and humane.

(Mo Hayder's Gone won the best-novel Edgar. Here's a list of winners. And here are the nominees.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charlie Stella's polemical porno pizzazz and a handful of Holt

I've finished Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella and started 1222 by Anne Holt, the latter because it's up for a best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America on Thursday night, and the former because no one in crime fiction is more fun to read than Charlie Stella.

With Stella the fun starts before the novels proper do; how can you not smile at an author's note that addresses readers as amici (friends)? The note that follows is a zesty polemic on the historical moment in which the novel is set: 1973, after a New York judge ruled Deep Throat obscene.

"As films go," Stella writes, "one has to acknowledge Deep Throat was nothing more than a campy, cheaply made porno that showcased the `sexual talent' of a young woman stage-named Linda Lovelace. With a soundtrack comprised of silly parodies and jingles and a plot born of male fantasy, the movie might well have come and gone without the slightest notice had the government ignored it. Instead, political directives from the White House launching a moral crusade that had much more to do with distracting the public from the war in Southeast Asia and an ever growing Watergate scandal guaranteed the film’s iconic success. What it also did was provide organized crime with a new way to make a fast buck. It is fittingly ironic that the name given to the secret informant (FBI agent William Mark Felt) who provided information that would eventually take down the Nixon White House itself shared the name of the film."

That polemical thread runs judiciously through the novel that follows, adding social and historical oomph to Stella's cast of hard-working guys, reluctant gangsters, cops, bookies, wives, girlfriends, and families, almost all of whom the author means us to view with a sympathetic eye.

***

1222 is the first novel of Holt's that I've read (she's published about sixteen), and I'm impressed because she has given herself the challenge of taking a well-worn crime-story set-up (group of people trapped by a snowstorm in an isolated hotel; one of them is found dead) and making it fresh. She has succeeded so far, in part by making the narrator/protagonist not especially likable, in part by doling out information about her characters only gradually.

1222 is one of at least six novels by a non-American author up for an Edgar (Holt is from Norway) and, based on what I've read of it so far, I won't complain if it wins.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012