DBB in Nordic Noir book

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV has lots of Swedes and Norwegians, roving gangs of Danes and Icelanders. a smattering of Finns, and a Faroe Islander or two.

It also has me, holding forth on Stieg Larssonism on Page 38 and Harri Nykänen's Raid and the Blackest Sheep on Pages 107 and 108, and I admit it was fun to see my name in the index.

The book's author, Barry Forshaw, is probably best known for his biography of Stieg Larsson, but he writes all over the crime fiction, film, and television map. He's the man behind British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, Italian Cinema: Arthouse to Exploitation, and British Crime Film, for instance, and I was chuffed when he asked me to take part in this project.

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide is out now in the U.K. in paperback and e-book formats, with a U.S. edition to follow in September. As always, Forshaw packs lots of information into a compact space (I have just verified that the book does indeed fit in a pants pocket.) He brings a light, conversational touch to a subject not always celebrated for such qualities, and I'd call the book a good choice if you want to know what the Scandinavian fuss is about and who the up-and-comers are.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crime books you should plotz, they're so good

Shots e-zine has asked a worldwide panel of crime-fiction experts and me to choose books to die for, the occasion being celebration of a new book called, as it happens, Books to Die For.

The book is a collection of essays by some of the world's best crime writers (Megan Abbott, Christopher Brookmyre, Ken Bruen, Sara Gran, Jason Goodwin, Allan Guthrie, John McFetridge, Adrian McKinty, Jo Nesbø, Leonardo Padura, David Peace, Scott Phillips, and many more) writing about their favorite crime writers, and it's coming soon to a country near you.

Each contributor was asked, in the editors' words, for

"passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they would place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so that they could be sure they had done all in their power to make you read it."

I have yet to see the book, but I did get the lowdown from one of its editors, Declan Burke, over a restorative fruit juice after Crimefest in Bristol this year, and the book sounds like a cracker, with a surprising choice or two.

Those are the captains and sailors of the great ship Crime Fiction. Among we critical barnacles clinging to the hull, Shots leads off with Barry Forshaw on Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene, and me, on how Bill James' Roses, Roses changed my life. I know I'll check back often as the Shots list grows; you should, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Larsson-y: I review Lars Kepler in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of The Nightmare by Lars Kepler in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer posits the existence of a school of Nordic crime writing called Stieg Larssonism (its practitioners are Larssonists) that

"combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader get dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time."

While preparing the review, I came across a comment by Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, that Stieg Larsson had revitalized crime fiction and that the Lars part of their pen name was a tribute to him.

At the same time, I was reading Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate, which includes a chapter on the Larsson phenomenon but also another called "The Anti-Larsson Writers."  Finally, my post on realism, naturalism, and their opposite in crime fiction elicited this comment in Larsson's defense:

"[Larsson] was doing something different. He loved potboilers. He wrote fanfic when he was young and omnivorously consumed pop culture. He wrote a mashup of everything he loved and borrowed from Modesty Blaise to Sarah Paretsky but he also threw in everything he cared about in his day job as a journalist."

That commenter and I analyze Larsson and Larssonism in substantially identical terms, in other words, though her assessment is more positive than mine.

This, plus Forshaw's chapter on anti-Larsson writers, leaves me with a bracing feeling that I and the world now understand Nordic crime fiction better than we once did and the hope that we'll be spared further silly invocations of this, that, or the other utterly un-Larssonian writer as the next Stieg Larsson.

But mostly I liked writing the review because I got to define Stieg Larssonism as "potboiler plots with didactic political intent; call it Harold Robbins meets Noam Chomsky."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

P.D. James at Crimefest

(P.D. James in conversation with Barry Forshaw at Crimefest 2012)

I've read very little of P.D. James' work, but I should only be that cheerful, alert, productive, and optimistic when I'm nearing 92 years of age.

"I'm trying to tell the truth about men and women," she said in a guest-of-honor interview at Crimefest 2012. "I try to write well with respect for what I think is the most beautiful and versatile language in the world."

If James' declaration that "The thing about (the Golden Age of crime fiction) is that everyone knew how to write English" sounds stodgy (though I find her sentiment admirable), consider her views on the liberalization of divorce laws in the United Kingdom to benefit women since James' writing career began: "Divorce happens, and it is necessary," she said, "but there is a price." I'd call that an admirably clear-headed, non-Utopian view. Changes in sexual mores can also make life difficult for mystery writers, the Baroness James said:

"In the Golden Age you could consider murder if you were having an affair with your secretary and wanted to avoid exposing it. Nowadays if you have an affair you write about it in the Sunday papers. Motive is very difficult for a modern crime writer."

*

Other revelations of the day included Anne Zouroudi's that the somber, grand, handsome appearance of her mysterious protagonist, Hermes Diaktoros, is based on that of a local bank manager and Peter James' that he was once Orson Welles' housekeeper.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crimefest Day 2: Fire and Iceland

"You never hear anyone telling Norwegian jokes anymore, and I think it's because of the money," Swedish crime writer Åsa Larsson said during today's Crimefest 2012 panel on Scandinavian crime fiction.

"Now it's the other away round," Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger replied. Norway's oil wealth has apparently muted at least one outward expression of Sweden's superiority to its neighbors.

But the panel was not all doleful observations and good-natured gloating. Gunnar Staalesen gave a plausible answer to a question I'd long had about Scandinavian crime writers: Why did Satanism and the fear thereof figure in a number of their crime novels in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (a.k.a. The Savage Altar) among them? Tursten appeared to take umbrage when I put the question to her a few years ago, apparently thinking I implied she had copied Nesbø. I implied no such thing, and I'll chalk Tursten's impatience up to fatigue from a gruelling tour schedule.

Larsson said a church figured in her book simply because, while secular now, she had had a religious upbringing; churches were simply a part of her background. But Staalesen suggested that a real-life wave of church burnings in the 1990s by a black-metal musician who wrote about Germanic neo-Paganism might have brought Satanism to the fore as an issue of public concern.

The intriguing thing about the resulting novels, at least the three I named, is that Satanism and satanists tend to be suspects and sources of fear rather than the actual villains of the piece. The books do not decry or praise Satanism, they merely take it up as one aspect of Swedish and Norwegian social and spiritual life.

I asked Staalesen after the panel whether an amusing, geographically specific metaphor for oral sex in the English translation of his 1995 novel The Writing on the Wall was an accurate rendering of the Norwegian original. He did not remember the line, which he'd have written seventeen years ago. But he did say the metaphor would work just as well in Norwegian as in English.

Finally, Ragnar Jonasson paid tribute to the trail blazed by his fellow Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. That Arnaldur did not publish his first novel until 1997 indicates how new Icelandic crime writing is. "Prior to that," Ragnar said, echoing a battle that crime writing has had to wage in a number of countries, "crime fiction was looked down upon by the public."

*

 The panel's moderator was Barry Forshaw, who really has written the book on Scandinavian crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Scanning Scandinavian crime

Declan Burke asks a provocative question about why Scandinavian Crime Always Pays: Whither the mavericks?

His thesis, to which commenters, including your humble blog host, provide but minor correctives, is that there's a certain sameness to the Nordic crime fiction translated into English, as good as some of that crime fiction may be.

You can find the rest over at his place, but to expand on one of Declan's rhetorical questions, where are the Scandinavian Eoin McNamees, Ronan Bennetts, Eoin Colfers, Adrian McKintys, and Kevin McCarthys?

The hook for Declan's post was the publication of Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Forshaw was kind enough to provide some advance material from the book last year when I moderated a panel full of Scandinavian crime writers at Bouchercon.   And here's a post based on some notes Forshaw sent along some months ago about the book.

*

Declan's post may be a message from above, as it comes just when I had picked up his interestingly neo-Chandlerian novel Eightball Boogie for a second reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A bit of reading while you wait

That outside commitment is cutting into my blogging again. In the meantime, here's an interview with Charlie Stella, who offers blunt assessments of American society, current crime writing, and himself.

And here's a link you might like if you've wondered where to start with Scandinavian crime fiction.

Finally, one of this blog's favorite commenters finds herself in some exciting company.

(Just opened my copy, and it appears she's not the only friend of DBB who had a share in this project. Patti Abbott, Loren Eaton, BV Lawson, Sean Patrick Reardon and Sandra Seamans, who has posted a kind word or two at Detectives Beyond Borders, contributed stories as well. Congratulations, gang! I look forward to reading your work.)

And, since this site is about writing by DBB commenters, Dana King's Wild Bill is now available.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The fjord foundation: Forthcoming book to examine Norwegian crime fiction

"On a slow news day [Friday]," writes Barry Forshaw, "here's the Norwegian Noir piece I've done in today’s Independent," drawing on research he did for his book Death in a Cold Climate: Scandinavian Crime Fiction, due early next year.

Forshaw writes that "Norway remains, in most people's consciousnesses, the most imposing of the Nordic countries, with the ancient legacy of the Vikings still casting a shadow over the country."

That's interesting; I'd have thought Sweden was the big boy on the local block, with Norway insecure about its relatively recent North Sea oil wealth. The man Forshaw calls "the uncrowned king of Norwegian crime fiction" called Noway "a young and, in a way, an insecure nation" when I interviewed him.

I'm also not sure Jo Nesbø is uncrowned these days, but let's wait to hear what Forshaw's book has to say. I'll also be eager to see how the book expands on Forshaw's contention in the Independent that

"despite the proximity to one another of the various Scandinavian countries, their individual identities are remarkably pronounced. The patience generally shown by the inhabitants when the British and Americans lazily lump all the Scandinavian nations together is both surprising and admirable."

***

While you wait for Forshaw's book, catch up on Norwegian crime fiction at the Scandinavian Crime Fiction database and blog.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Biographies of crime writers: Who deserves to get a life?

I cross a new border this week, into literary biography, with Richard Layman's Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett.

What makes someone a fit subject for biography? Towering achievement, for one, and Hammett has that in spades. But he also appears to have been entertaining and elusive quarry. Here's the beginning of Layman's short preface:

"Dashiell Hammett seemed, for most of his life to crave privacy."

Standard celebrity stuff so far. But the paragraph goes on:

"Unlike many literary celebrities, he never took his fame seriously. He never relied on it, never expected it, and he was always contemptuous of those who treated him with deference because of his literary reputation. When he was in certain moods, he delighted in fooling interviewers, interested listeners, and sycophants with fabricated tales about his past and his future plans."

And here's the 1924 extract from Black Mask, in Hammett's own words, with which Layman heads the first chapter:

"I was born in Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, on May 27, 1894, and was raised in Baltimore.

"After a fraction of a year in high school ... I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like. Usually I was fired."

One can tell Hammett had fun writing that — no surprise to readers who delight in the wit of his fiction.

***

In November I heard Joan M. Schenkar talk about her biography of Patricia Highsmith. And the British crime fiction and film critic Barry Forshaw has written a life of Stieg Larsson.

What other crime writers have been subjects of a biography? What crime writers should be? Whom would you like to read about — and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

We are the world (of crime fiction)

My advance copy of Following The Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction (right) is on the way; you can pre-order yours at bookstores and computer terminals near you.

Maxim Jakubowski edited this collection of essays about fictional detectives and the cities and countries where they work and live. I contributed chapters on Andrea Camilleri's Sicily and Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but I'm just a sixth-magnitude star in a coruscating firmament of crime-fiction luminaries that includes authors, critics, commentators and men and women about the international crime-fiction scene such as:

• Martin Edwards
• John Harvey
• Barry Forshaw
• Sarah Weinman
• Declan Burke
• J. Kingston Pierce
• Jakubowski himself
• And more.

Only 140 shopping days until Christmas, should you wish to order the book here (free shipping!), from the publisher, here, here, or from an independent bookseller in the UK or Canada.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

CrimeFest Day I: It's in the bag

The formal CrimeFest proceedings got off to a smashing start, with a panel on psychological thrillers moderated by Margaret Murphy and also including Jenni Mills, Steve Mosby, Sheila Quigley and Claire Seeber. One highlight might be useful to would-be authors: Each writer talked of an experience, small or large, that germinated into a book. In one case, it was repeated visits to a young relative in a mental hospital. In another, it was panic induced when confined in a narrow passage in a cave. Lesson: Use your imagination, and see where it takes you.

My question to Mosby about serial killers who act in the name of civilized virtues won me a bag of books for the cleverest question.

A panel on historical mysteries offered a practical answer to a question I'd only been able to formulate in theoretical terms: How does one remain faithful to one's historical setting while writing for an audience of one's own time? The panelists were Roger Hudson, who sets his work in fifth-century B.C. Athens; Ruth Downie and Jane Finnis, each of whom sets her work in Roman Britain; and Roz Southey, whose protagonist is an eighteenth-century musician. Moderator was Edward Marston, whose sets work in several historical periods.

Finnis spoke of a character scarred by war, and of the difficulties writing about such a character without the psychological vocabulary that would be anachronistic to the first-century Roman world. The character suffered from what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Finnis noted, but she could of course not use that term. Nor could she offer the insight that this is what happens to people exposed for a long period to war: "It just had to be left to the reader to make that deduction."

My question to Southey won me another bag of books, or would have had not a fellow attendee pointed out that I'd already won one. I was thus deprived of the opportunity to make a magnanimous gesture and voluntarily surrender the second bag.

The panel on "The Lost Weekend: Eric Ambler and Who? — Forgotten Authors" could keep me talking and reading for months, and I'll likely read and post about some of these authors. Superbly moderated by Martin Edwards, the discussion also included Mary Andrea Clarke, Barry Forshaw, Declan Hughes and Sarah Rayne.

The current authors praised their predecessors for streaks of humor and for gorgeous prose style, two elements I love that are rare these days. Hughes said of Margaret Millar that "She's also, sentence-by-sentence, I think, one of the crime writers who can write. ... She's a great plotter without smacking the least of the Golden Age."

My question about why forgotten books are such a popular topic these days sparked a lively discussion among the panelists about nostalgia. Alas, I won no bag.

Next: The pub quiz. As my teammate Ali Karim would say, "Mental!!!"

=============

NEWS FLASH: Pub-quiz result: A tie for second place. The prize: A bag of books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009