Detectives Beyond Borders makes the news in Australia

I've never been to Tasmania, but I made it into this week's Saturday Mercury newspaper of Hobart, capital of that hospitable Australian island. 

The occasion is a profile of David Owen, a Tasmania-based crime writer whose novels featuring Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken I have enjoyed for years.  The writer, Sally Glaetzer, overstates my radio experience, but she does a hell of a job with the article, very much better than what newspapers generally do when they deign to notice crime writers. I thought I knew Owen and his work fairly well, but Glaetzer's piece told me things I had not known before, about his political activity in South Africa, for instance.

Here's the article. Here's my review of Owen's most recent novel, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Pufferfish: Return of the world's prickliest detective

David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, the prickly detective inspector in Hobart, capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, is back, his prickliness mellowed into wry, sardonic observation and acceptance that just rarely flare into open rebellion. In compensation, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder is a terrific mystery and a tragedy and a comedy at the same time, with amusing and affecting allusions and references to George Eliot thrown in.

As always, the wit is here. as in the description of a polo club as

"a strange but beguiling rather than tacky mixture of showy wealth and understated environmentally conscious good taste."

or

"Another little session of silence, which seems to bemuse Brody Hearn somewhat. It;s calling thinking, son."

As a bonus, the novel answers my one complaint about Devil Taker (1997), the fourth Pufferfish novel and the last before the character returned in 2009. Owen is also a naturalist who has written several book on endangered species in Tasmania, where he lives, and I thought Devil Taker let that interest crowd out the crime.

13-Point-Plan, by contrast, introduces interesting information about the animal and plant life of Tasmania unobtrusively and always in ways relevant to the plot. Readers might be amused that his description of Tasmanian devils, related in an utterly straightforward way, is very close to the fictional Tasmanian devil that many of us know.

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I've liked Pufferfish for years, since I read the character's explanation of the moniker thus: "The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severely provoked." Read my previous Detective Beyond Borders posts about Pufferfish (click the link, and scroll down.)

And should you happen to be near Hobart this Thursday, July 21, visit Fullers Bookshop for the novel's launch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A bit about the best hard-boiled writer named Cain

Two crime novels I’m reading now have nothing in common except startlingly good prose style. Paul Cain’s Fast One, the only novel by that most elusive of the great Black Mask authors, is a textbook for today’s neo-noir and neo-hard-boiled authors and movie makers. It has all the pace, all the wit, and, though there is lots of shooting, none of the hyperviolence and over-the-top jokiness that sometimes mar the newer efforts.

Possibly most astonishing for a novel published in 1932 is that it is not at all dated. There are no “dames” here, and none of the archaic diction that mars the work of other writers from the same period, such as Raoul Whitfield or even some early Hammett. If only the mysterious Cain had written more, he would be mentioned right up there with Chandler and Hammett, and the Chandler-Hammett debate might be over which was the second-best of the group. As this brief discussion reveals, Cain is also an ancestor of the tradition by which hardboiled writers seek to buttress their tough-guy credentials with extravagantly glamorous hard-edged work histories.

The other style king is Australia's Peter Temple, about whom readers of this blog will have read much. Dead Point, third of Temple’s novels about lawyer/cabinetmaker/horse-racing expert Jack Irish, contains more of the gorgeous prose that Temple readers know well. Here’s the novel’s opening:

“On a grey, whipped Wednesday in early winter, men in long coats came out and shot Renoir where he stood, noble, unbalanced, a foreleg hanging. In the terminating jolt of the bolt, many dreams died.”

That’s gorgeous, I’d say, the kind of stuff that may make you want to stop just so you can savor the prose. And that leads to today’s tough question for readers: Who are your favorite crime-fiction prose stylists? Whose sheer skill with words takes your breath away? And is this necessarily a good thing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007 

McKinty makes the Ned Kelly shortlist

Kelly's Horse, by Sidney Nolan

Detectives Beyond Borders friend Adrian McKinty is a finalist for what may be the world's only literary award named for a man who wore a metal trash can over his head. The prize is the Ned Kelly Award for best novel, Australia's highest honor for crime fiction, and the shortlistee is Adrian McKinty, for I Hear the Sirens in the Streets.

Here's what Detectives Beyond Borders said about McKinty's novel, the follow-up to his The Cold Cold Ground:

"Like its predecessor, Sirens is a serious portrait of one man's progress through troubled times (early-1980s Belfast and Carrickfergus, the author's home town). Like The Cold Cold Ground, it feels organic. Every joke, every grim encounter, or musing on the crappy Irish weather, or setback or advance in the police investigation contains the seeds of the whole. And it's a hell of a whole; these books are as smart and fun and harrowing as crime fiction gets."

McKinty's competition includes Blackwattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin, whose name has come up here a time or two.

The awards will be presented by the Australian Crime Writers Association Sept. 7 as part of the Brisbane Writers' Festival.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crime Factory: Hard Labour

That's right, labour. It's how they spell the word in Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth of Nations. Here in America, labour is under attack, letter by letter. It's labor now, and God knows whether the word will even exist once America becomes a nation of Apple store iPhone hawkers — if we're lucky enough to have jobs at all.

Hard Labour is a collection of noir and hard-boiled stories from Australia put together by the folks at Crime Factory, and it has some good people in it, including some you've read about here.

Here's the opening of "In Savage Freedom," the contribution by David Whish-Wilson, a subject of recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders:

"A father is God to his son. 

"My father said that before I killed him, but he wasn't talking about us."

Then there's "The Dutch Book," by DBB favorite Adrian McKinty, the tale of a bookie's runner and his friend who try to pull a fast one on a vicious mobster. The story does not end the way you probably think, and that is reason enough to read it, and the rest of the stories in the collection, and McKinty's stunningly good Cold Cold Ground and I Hear the Sirens in the Street (the latter out Jan. 7 in the UK). They're the best there is even if you won't see splashy ads for them or read about them in your local newspaper.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

When you Whish upon a star

Line of Sight, second novel by Australia's David Whish-Wilson, bears an epigraph from Leonardo Sciascia, and the tone of the novel's opening pages reminds me of that great Sicilian writer and social critic.

It also reminds me of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a bit of Dominique Manotti, and of Alan Glynn. That means the tone is deadpan. It also means there's no slowly dawning realization for the book's cop-against-the-cops protagonist that the world is set against him; we (and he) know that from the first. And that's a hell of a set-up for suspense. How will he get out of this?

Here's a sentence from the first chapter: "Before the news was days old the rumour was that Ruby Devine had been murdered by the police." Here's one from the second, as far as I've read so far: "It had been a long afternoon watching the fix come in."

Now, that makes me want to keep reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Awards down under

The weather is heating up in the antipodes, and so is the crime-fiction awards scene.

From Craig Sisterson comes word that Neil Cross (right) has won the Ngaio Marsh Award for best New Zealand crime novel for Luther: The Calling.

Across the Tasman Sea in Melbourne, Australia, Sisters in Crime presented the Davitt Awards for crime fiction written by women. The awards honor the memory of Ellen Davitt, who wrote Australia's first known mystery novel in 1865, and the 2012 winners include Sulari Gentill, adult fiction, for her novel A Decline in Prophets. Find a complete list of winners at the Sisters in Crime Web site.

Finally, Australia's Ned Kelly Awards honored Pig Boy by J.C. Burke (best fiction), The Cartographer by Peter Twohig (best first fiction), Sins of the Father by Eamonn Duff (best true crime), A.J. Clifford "Summer of the Seventeenth Poll (S.D. Harvey Short Story Award).

Well done, mate, to all the winners and presenters.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

New magazine launches

The Detectives Beyond Borders publicity department sends words of a new multilingual Australian publication of international writing called Contrapasso Magazine.

Of special interest to crime-fiction readers may be the first issue's inclusion of a 2005 interview with James Crumley in which Crumley's first words are:

"It’s September 21st, the last day of summer in Missoula, Montana, and I can see the snow in the future!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Grab bag: Pufferfish, TV, good writing

Another reason to like David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken:

"`So, Rafe,' Walter says when we're all seated. `Do you want to talk to the Bellyard affair?'

"And that's another thing that gets my goat, Walter's shameless use of corporate speak. I hope he asks me to talk to Rory Stillrock, because I'll reply I can't, the poor bastard's dead."

That's an amusing line with a righteous target. I should add, too, that while crime fiction offers plenty of acerbic protagonists and plenty of introspective protagonists and quite a number of funny protagonists, Pufferfish is among the few who are all three. The Pufferfish novels are: Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995), The Devil Taker (1997), No Weather For a Burial (2010), and the new How the Dead See.

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In one episode of The Thick of It, a civil servant catches a government minister in a lie, the minister tries to deflect the accusation, and the following exchange ensues:

"Are you inferring that I—"

"Implying."

Misuse of infer for imply has long been a common mistake, and correcting it can get a copy editor in trouble. I loved the exchange.

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As good as the actors are on The Thick of It, the show has me thinking about writing.

Discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders and on Adrian McKinty's blog, which introduced me to show, has elicited comparisons with celebrated television comedies of recent years, including Seinfeld.

What made Seinfeld the show that it was? Look at the post-Seinfeld television careers of some of that show's principals. Jason Alexander, who played George, and Michael Richards, who played Kramer, each starred in a show shunned by viewers and panned by critics as among the worst ever. Series co-creator Larry David, on the other hand, went on to make the excellent Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Conclusion? Writing matters. Maybe that's why another Seinfeld cast member, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. chose a show with a distinguished writing team behind it for her latest TV series: Veep, created by Armando Iannucci, who also created The Thick of It.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The return of the return of Pufferfish

David Owen is back with a sixth novel about Tasmanian Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, known to readers as:

"The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severly provoked."

This one comes with a big, fat review blurb from me; click here then scroll down for my previous posts about Owen and his prickly protagonist. Click here for  Crime Factory: Issue Ten, which includes an interview with David Owen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

JJ DeCeglie's downward spiral from Down Under

I don't know if Australia's JJ DeCeglie has been anywhere near Oklahoma, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or any of the other psychic nowheres of American noir, but he sure can channel their spirit well.

Drawing Dead is about a P.I. in Western Australia, a busted gambler and self-proclaimed asshole who goes drunkenly, lustfully, and violently to his own destruction, narrating his demise with amused detachment.  Jim Thompson might have produced something similar if he'd infused his stories with a bit more humor and his protagonists with a bit more violent action-hero flair.

Thompson is a presence in Drawing Dead, an object of the book's dedication and the source of its epigraph. Charles Willeford makes the scene both as dedicatee and as one of the authors the protagonist, Jack, thinks about reading on his doomed wanderings. John Fante makes that list, as do Louis-Ferdinand Céline and — no surprise — Charles Bukowski. And that, friends, ought to give you an idea of the ride you're in for in DeCeglie's book.

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What makes some of our darker noir writers cite their literary idols so explicitly? Maybe it's just literary preciousness. But maybe writing about characters who embrace doom is so psychologically perilous that authors need to reach out for predecessors who lived close to the edge but still managed to hold themselves together long enough to write a few books.

DeCeglie pays looser homage to the hard-boiled but non-noir tradition. Though Drawing Dead is more a doomed road novel than a P.I. story, Jack is, nominally, a hard-luck private investigator. And the case that quickly degenates into his downward journey is — naturally — a wandering-daughter job.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

McGeachin and Cleave are tops down under

The Detectives Beyond Borders research branch has been so busy preparing for Bouchercon that it has neglected some antipodean crime-fiction honors.

Congratulations to Geoff McGeachin, whose Diggers Rest Hotel took Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best novel. McGeachin is a funny guy whose novels Fat, Fifty & F***ked  and D*E*D Dead! I've discussed here, and he once sent me some Vegemite along with a package of books, for which I should thank him, I think.

Over in New Zealand, Paul Cleave's Blood Men is the second winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for best crime novel. Cleave told New Zealand's Herald on Sunday newspaper last week in an article that bears the headline "Paul Cleave: Too dark for home market"  why he was surprised to win the award. As always for things New Zealand, a hat tip to Craig Sisterson.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Peter Temple to be adapted for television

Courtesy of Australia's Boomerang Blog is this news that Peter Temple's Jack Irish novels will be adapted for a television mini-series. I don't know how the series will turn out, but the source material is just fine.

(Guy Pearce has been cast as Jack Irish. He was fine in Memento and L.A. Confidential, so this might not be a bad choice.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Who do you like?

Jon Cleary's Scobie Malone has to be among the most likable crime fiction protagonists ever set to paper, and Cleary uses the likability to considerable effect in The High Commissioner, building dramatic tension out of the sympathy Malone develops for the man he has been sent to arrest.

Today's question is simple: Who are your favorite likable protagonists? I don't mean admirable, brave, or morally upright. I mean the sorts about whom you might say, "Oh, him. Nice guy." or "She's all right!" How does likability help (or hurt) a crime-fiction protagonist?

(Oddly enough, the one other likable crime-fiction protagonist who comes immediately to mind is also Australian: Peter Corris' Cliff Hardy. Comment welcome, especially from Australians.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Delicious details

A detail in Jon Cleary's The High Commissioner made me cheer quietly. I neglected to note the passage, but its substance is that the protagonist, Scobie Malone, sees a subordinate police officer smile sardonically at a superior's remark and can tell from that smile that the subordinate will not advance far in the force.

I thought that a humorous insight into organizational behavior and one with which I have particular sympathy. Without having anything to so with the main action, it nonetheless told me something about where Malone's sympathies lie and enhanced the pleasure of reading.

What are your favorite delicious details? What do such details add to a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Meet Scobie Malone

There's considerable sociological interest to The High Commissioner  (1966), first of Jon Cleary's twenty Scobie Malone novels.

The book takes Malone from Sydney to London, where he is to arrest the Australian high commissioner on a murder charge. The first chapters offer  the familiar clash between police work and politics and, since the police officer is the protagonist, one knows who the good guy is. But Cleary's political sketches are move vivid than most. Not only do inter- and intra-party rivalries come into play, but tension between state and federal branches as well. The opening chapters also use anticlimax as an effective suspense-builder.

But I liked the sociological detail best, notably Malone's surprise and amusement at London's sounds and sights. The trip is his first out of Australia, and the London scenes may have struck a chord in a country flush with postwar prosperity and reaching out to the world.  

Here's a bit of Cleary's innocent abroad:

"The taxi pulled in before the big four-storied house. Malone got out and, conditioned by another habit, paid the driver the exact amount on the meter.

"`You Aussies,' said the driver, an economist from Bethnal Green. `I bet you don't have any balance of payments deficit.'

"Malone, who had never tipped a taxi driver in his life, looked at the man blankly. `Get lost,' said the latter, and drove off, gnashing is gears instead of his teeth."

Cleary also takes an ironical slap at the White Australia immigration policy, still in force at the time of the book's publication. And he has Malone's boss deliver what seems to this outsider a declaration of Australia's sense of itself:

"Take Flannery, for instance. I'd bet not one percent of this State's population could tell you anything about his early life. They couldn't care less. It's what you are today that counts in this country, not what you were."

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Cleary, who died in 2010 at 92, was prolific and much-honored. He wrote more than fifty books, and his honors include Edgar and Ned Kelly Awards for best novel and the first Ned Kelly Award for lifetime achievement. Read more about Cleary, including links to several interviews.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Garry Disher's Wyatt comes to America

Parker is Richard Stark's professional thief, Wyatt is Garry Disher's.

Similarities between the two protagonists are obvious, including everything from their names to their personalities to the targets of their heists to the titles of the books. And, though Disher has paid amusing tribute to Stark, the influence may extend from Disher as well as to him.

My posts on the subject in this blog's early days drew passionate comments from some Australian readers angry at what one called a "cultural cringe" — excessive imitation by the Australian Disher of an American source. Disher himself weighed in on my Parker/Wyatt questions, though his comments seem to have disappeared from the State Library of Victoria's Web site. (No conspiracy need be inferred. He posted the comments four years ago, and they may have been removed to clear space.)

If I recall correctly, Disher said he wanted Wyatt to be a more fully rounded character than Parker. Indeed, the fifth Wyatt novel, Port Vila Blues, has Wyatt displaying remorse, which Parker never did.

American readers will soon get their chance to meet Wyatt; Soho Press is publishing the seventh and latest novel in the series, called simply Wyatt. A first glance at the book finds Wyatt sizing up a potential human obstacle to a heist, much as Stark often had Parker do, but with a good deal more psychological analysis than Parker was given to. One way is not necessarily better than the other, but it's good to find differences between two protagonists in many ways so similar.

Wyatt follows Disher's previous Wyatt book, The Fallout, by thirteen years. The series' resumption after a long layoff may remind readers of another crime series.

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• Take a look at Disher's lengthy, genre-spanning bibliography, including his Hal Challis novels.
• Browse his Web site.
• Read an excerpt from Wyatt.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Openings

We're big on conventions here at Detectives Beyond Borders, namely the ways crime writers adhere to conventions of their genre while still trying to keep things fresh. Here's Barry Maitland's spin on the just-another-day-in-the-protagonist's-life opening in All My Enemies:

"By lunchtime Kathy was reduced to the word-puzzle in the Sunday paper. Form words of three or more letters from the title of The Grubs' latest hit single, `Claim to Dream.' No proper named; target 130; include at least one 12-letter word.' "She had begun the day with good intentions. There were plenty of things that could be done before she started her new job: letters that could be written, bills that could be paid, housework that could be done.

"Mad, ran, mat, tic, model, modal, rot."

All but mat and model are promisingly evocative, and even they might turn out to hold clues to the story to come. I particularly like the combination of modal and rot.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Yang Hengjun is missing

Chinese Australian spy novelist and blogger Yang Hengjun has disappeared in China after reporting he was being followed. Here's a creepy excerpt from his Fatal Weakness.

Two crime writers on corruption and cultural misunderstanding

Christopher G. Moore, crime novelist and student of cultural differences between East and West, wrote once that in Thailand

"The gift giving which flows as a tangible sign of respect is the slippery slope that descends easily into corruption. It becomes the basis of patronage and the client/patron relationship."

Elsewhere he has enumerated the right to ignore traffic laws as an unearned privilege that accrues to the Thai elite.

I expect that he'd approve of the following passage from Charlotte Jay's The Yellow Turban in which a character looks back at his arrival in Pakistan:

"If the doctor had offered me his bribe a month or so later after I had contracted a few of the local money-getting habits, I might not have been so overwhelmed with indignation. But I was new to the land. I obeyed the signals of traffic police without thinking and was shocked when Iqubal had slipped past them. I queued up at the post office for stamps, instead of thrusting my way through the grubby peons gathered round the window and slamming my money on the desk, as I was to do a month later. And the taking of a bribe was neatly labelled in my mind as antisocial—even criminal perhaps."

and this:

"Naturally he had heard of the corruption of the East but he had, I think, believed that this was largely a charge manufactured by certain Europeans to explain their own failure to understand the Oriental, and that with the departure of the British such evils would simply and automatically cease. And he was too honest and naïve to stand up to the collapse of his ideals."

Jay, an Australian, lived in Thailand when the novel, published in 1955, was released, according to a blurb for my edition. I'd guess from the two passages I cite here that she, like Moore, thought with considerable insight about what happens when Westerners try — and, in the second case, fail — to adjust to Eastern notions of conduct and ethics.

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Read more from Christopher G. Moore on East, West and the places where they meet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010