A quibble about The Golden Scales

I'd guessed that The Golden Scales, by Parker Bilal (nom de plume of Jamal Mahjoub), had been translated from Arabic and that tin-eared rendering was responsible for some of the clunky prose in the book's prologue. But I can find no translator's credits, and online biographies say Mahjoub was born in London, brought up in Khartoum, educated in Wales and Sheffield, and lives in Barcelona. Given that background, I now assume that he writes in English.

Whatever the original language, sentences like the following do nothing but get in the way:

“Liz Markham reared back, completely stalled by the human mass that confronted her.”

What's the difference between stalled and completely stalled? What does completely add? What does it do except slow down what the author clearly intends as a heart-pounding opening?

“Behind her she heard someone make a remark that she couldn’t understand.”

Why the extra words? Why not “she heard a remark” or “someone made a remark”?

“Glancing back, certain that someone was behind her, she moved away from the hotel, pushing impatiently through the crowd of tourists and tea boys...”

Pushing impatiently? How else would one push through a crowd? Yet again Bilal tells rather than shows and uses too many boring words doing it. That's apt to try a reader's patience, especially in an action scene.

My first guess was apparently wrong, but I'll try another: Mahjoub, described by some sources as an acclaimed author of “literary” novels, can't write action. I hope either that I'm wrong or that he chooses methods other than action scenes to tell his story, because I'm curious about what this writer of Arabic and African background can do with the Western crime-fiction tradition, a la Yasmina Khadra or Naguib Mahfouz.

Here's part of a blurb for the novel:

“Makana, a former Sudanese police inspector forced to flee to Cairo, is now struggling to make ends meet as a private detective. In need of money, he takes a case from the notoriously corrupt mogul Saad Hanafi, owner of a Cairo soccer team, whose star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing ..."

P.S. An author chooses Parker Bilal as a pseudonym for his first venture into crime fiction. What are the odds that he had Richard Stark or Robert B. Parker in mind?

P.P.S. Read my 2008 post on “Who will be the next Samir Spade? ... (Crime fiction in the Arab world)”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

When does the Arabic crime-fiction boom start?

(Blogger's paragraph formatting is malfunctioning yet again. I hope what follows is readable.)

Matt Rees, who sets his crime novels amid the corruption and violence of the Palestinian world, suggests that the current unrest throughout the Arab world will give rise to crime fiction, if not now, then later. "One of the offshoots of the downfall of Arab dictators," he writes, "is sure to be an explosion of thrillers and mysteries." Why?

"I believe Arabs have eschewed crime writing because it’s a democratic genre. One man wants to find out something that a big organization – the CIA, the mafia, the government – wants to keep secret. ... For people who live in democracies, it’s easy to find fiction credible that suggests a man can investigate – and once he fingers the bad guy, the bad guy will be punished."

I wonder when such an explosion of thrillers and mysteries will begin (if it has not done so already) and how we will know about it in today's atomized publishing world.

Much short crime fiction in English is published on the Internet these days, particularly on the darker, more violent end of the spectrum. I suspect that little of this work is translated into other languages. Will such be the case with any future boom in Arabic crime fiction? Will the boom happen on the Web, in Arabic, untranslated and under the noses of the outside crime fiction world? Has it started already? Is someone sitting in Tahrir Square or Benghazi at this moment typing and circulating dark tales of crime, justice and corruption?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011