Bouchercon 2016, Part II: One book, lots of pictures

French Quarter, New Orleans. Photos by Peter Rozovsky
for Detectives Beyond Borders.

I rarely find time to read at Bouchercon because I'm too busy doing other things, and that was about five times truer for New Orleans than it was for the previous eight cities where I'd attended the annual world mystery and crime fiction convention.

Photo not by
Peter Rozovsky

The first acquisition that I've dipped into is Harold Q. Masur's novel Bury Me Deep, published in 1947 (despite Google's assertion that it first appeared in 1924). I bought this one on the advice of J. Kingston Pierce, part of a coterie of wise men who know a lot more about vintage paperbacks than I do and who were frequently hovering around the old paperbacks at Mystery Mike's table in the Bouchercon book room. (The other members of the triumvirate were Bill Crider and Rick Ollerman. Only the best can tell me how to spend my money.)

A baby alligator and its admirers in the bayou country.

Masur builds his story to a tight, efficient climax in the early chapters, something like how David Swinson does in his fine novel The Second Girl. Done well, that sort of thing knocks me off-balance in the best possible way and leaves me eager to find out what happens next--not that the stories degenerate into a string of cliffhangers, either. I think of it as a narrative apéritif that whets the appetite for the story to come. Or maybe it's more like an operatic overture, offering clues to the themes that will follow. Whatever your preferred metaphor, Masur pulls it off.

Nanci Kalanta, known on
Facebook as Mountain Jane
Laurel. I'm a gentleman, and
when a lady says, "Do me in
black and white," I smile
and oblige.

The pre-, post-, and para-Bouchercon activities were the most unusual and entertaining I'd enjoyed, and for whatever reason, it seemed that a larger group of folks from various circles of my friends and acquaintances than ever before mingled and intersected in a giant Venn diagram of gin, powdered sugar, and po'boys. What a city!

Garden District, New Orleans.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Mike Stotter, Sara Paretsky, Ali Karim.

In the bayou country.

Terrence McCauley

Alison Gaylin, Ali Karim

Jay Stringer, Eric Beetner

Christa Faust

Suzanne Solomon

Joe Lansdale

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Charles Williams: Out of luck because he wrote too well?

Why is Charles Williams not better known? Could it be that his writing was too good?

Anthony Boucher wrote that Williams'

"striking suspense technique ... may remind you of [Cornell] Woolrich; the basic story, with its bitter blend of sex and criminality, may recall James M. Cain. But Mr. Williams is individually himself in his sharp but unmannered prose style and in his refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises."

"Sharp but unmannered." Williams' novels don't abound in quotable lines (there are no bad lines, either, at least in the eleven of Williams' twenty-two novels that I've read), but he knew that a writer's job is to write good books, not good sentences. His novels lack the political pandering that found its way into books by, say, Mickey Spillane and Stephen Marlowe, and he didn't write from hell, the way Jim Thompson or David Goodis or Harry Whittington (sometimes) did. His protagonists are more or less regular guys, physically strong, good at working with their hands, but they don't hit you over the head with what regular guys or what brutes they are, either. Williams' books are full of good jokes without ever patting themselves on the back for their wit, and they show no signs of the haste that sometimes appears in even the best books from other terrific Gold Medal authors.

Williams wrote suspense with an edge hard enough to make himself a star at Gold Medal books, and he wrote fluently, cleanly, and well enough to have written for the slick magazines. It's hard to imagine any of the other Gold Medal authors, with the possible exception of John D. MacDonald, writing books as good, as convincing, and as far from their authors' normal hard-boiled style as Williams' The Diamond Bikini and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls.

The Wikipedia entry on Williams is notable for who talks about Williams and what they say. And Bill Crider is right that "there’s no such thing as a bad Charles Williams novel."

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Eric Beetner will offer some remarks about Charles Williams n as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Harry Whittington, Part I

Bill Crider, who knows Harry Whittington's work a lot better than I do, calls A Night for Screaming "probably my favorite" of Whittington's novels.  He doesn't call it the best, though, which is good, because I read it and Whittington A Ticket to Hell this week, and I thought the latter a much stronger book.

Crider rightly highlights Screaming's skillful plotting, especially Whittington's practice of making things as bad as possible for his protagonist, and then building suspense by making them worse.  But a sameness of descriptions makes me suspect the prolific Whittington dashed this one off even faster than usual. A few examples, emphasis mine:

"He winced, turning his head quickly as if he was afraid I’d see the sickness in his face."

"There was a sickness in his face."

"Evans grinned at me, even through the gray sickness in his own face."

"I paced the floor in my room. The sickness was worse than ever."

"I felt nothing except the sickness, the emptiness."

"I brought the gun up, held it where he could see it. His face showed his sickness."

That's a lot of sicknesses in a lot of faces for a novel about 150 pages long, and that's not even all of them. Funny thing is, A Night For Screaming's opening chapter includes this terrific bit of description:

"You have to see these rich, young, small-town dames to know what she was really like. They might have come out of a family of migrant workers subsistence farmers , or maybe the bankers’ home. They went to school in these small burgs, growing into something so lush, so luscious that every woman hated them and every man coveted them. They had everything they could ever want long before they were ripe. It made them hard and demanding, and looking for the big take. They had love when they were thirteen, and now they wanted everything their beauty would buy. And when they got their hooks in the richest man in the area, they truly began to live. Shopping trips west to Denver, east to Kansas City and St. Louis, and at least twice a year into New York and Chicago to see the shows. They believed their beauty indestructible, the fun was going to last forever. Only it didn’t work that way. The oldest saw was the truest: when you’ve seen one circus, you’ve seen them all."

The novel reads as if Whittington wrote a intricately plotted first draft, polished the first chapter, then submitted the manuscript. I noticed no such thinness of description in Whittington's A Ticket to Hell. That novel appeared in 1959 from Gold Medal; A Night for Screaming appeared the next year from Ace. Could the change in publishers have something to do with the change in style? Comments from Whittingtonians and other readers of paperback originals welcome.

In the meantime, watch Bill Crider's slide show of Whittington covers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Donald Hamilton, Line of Fire

I'm in that happy after-vacation state where I have recovered both from post-travel disorientation and from the giddy panic over which book to read from among the many I bought or otherwise acquired at Bouchercon and after.

This year's first post-Bouchercon reading, Donald Hamilton's 1955 novel Line of Fire, is an adventure story, a love story, a mob story, a political story, a revenge tale, and a buddy story at the same time, with a fair amount of dry, dry wit.

I'm still a novice when it comes to mid-twentieth-century paperback originals, but I'm guessing there may have been a school of writers back then who wrote crime/adventure stories narrated in a deadpan style without, however, going over the edge into comic crime. Hamilton did so in Line of Fire, and Richard Powell did it in Say It With Bullets, republished a few years ago by Hard Case Crime.

Line of Fire is a beautiful piece of storytelling, its central conflicts laid out early, but their origins revealed only gradually. Another writer may have foamed and salivated over those origins and turned the protagonist, a gunsmith named Paul Nyquist, into a bloodthirsty killer. Hamilton makes of Nyquist a amiable, if serious sort who shoots only when he has to, and not always for reasons the reader might expect.

The novel is driven to an unusual extent by the revelations alluded to above, so I'll shut up on the subject of plot, for fear of introducing spoilers. The novel's low-key wit that manages always to remain hard-boiled as jell.  is easier to discuss, and there's plenty of it. Here are some examples:

"There were a couple of jerks in the outer office. There were always a couple of jerks in the outer office."

"It was a good face except for the mouth ... under other circumstances I suppose I'd have had no complaints about the mouth, either.  The weakness it betrayed--the slight, moist fullness to the lower lip that any man would recognize--was not, I was aware, considered a handicap in the circles in which she moved. It was all in the point of view."

This, as Nyquist enumerated the types one is likely to find at a hunting lodge: "There'll be the get-away-form-it-all boys who simply want to commune with nature for a couple of weeks each year--I don't know why this always involved leaving the razor at home."

"Being surprised at Marge is always a waste of time"

Read Bill Crider's review of Line of Fire. Read John Fraser's "Writer at Work: Donald Hamilton" at http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_writ1.html and a shorter piece at http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_quik1.html#DonaldHamilton

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Milton K. Ozaki, plus a few more night shots

My street, tinkered with so it looks contemporaneous with the
paperback originals I've been reading from the 1950s and '60s.
(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Milton K. Ozaki is the only crime writer I know of who was also a reporter, a hair dresser, and, according to at least one source, a tax lawyer, as well.  A private note from a prominent student of American crime fiction recently called Ozaki "possibly the most bizarre writer of the '50s pulps."

Ozaki's entertaining 1954 novel Dressed to Kill got me thinking more than I have before about the role formula played in what readers and publishers expected — and circumstances demanded — of writers in the paperback original and pulp eras, from the 1930s through the 1960s.   

The Lit Brothers Building, Philadelphia.

Ozaki, for example, seems to have been particularly fascinated by grapes, making of them a stock device to which he could turn when in need of a vivid or odd metaphor, as in:

"The bright yellow of the Caddy made it stand out like a banana in a bowl of grapes."

or

"His pale eyes, excited by the anticipated kill, had the translucent quality of seedless grapes, yet seemed more shiny, as if oiled by hate."

From my newspaper's office
looking across Market Street,
Philadelphia.

Have you ever compared anyone's eyes to a seedless grape? Neither have I.  Ozaki probably hit on phrases and situations readers liked, and made a game of seeing how far he could stretch the metaphors without snapping them entirely. My preliminary assessment, based on just the one novel, is that Ozaki sits somewhere between the hyperventilating extravagance of Robert Leslie Bellem and the calmer atmospherics of, say, Helen Nielsen.

Bill Crider notes the extravagance and the occasional repetition in Ozaki's work, which I'm guessing are results of having to turn out so much work so fast. At the same time, I especially like this observation of Crider's, which fills me with respect for talented writers who worked under difficult conditions:

"You can almost see the improvement happening in Ozaki’s steady progression up the ladder of paperback publishers. He started at the bottom with Phantom and Handi-Books, moved to Graphic, then to Ace, and finally to Gold Medal."

And now I'm off to learn more about the pulps and hacks who wrote for them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

McBain around the world

I speculated idly four years ago that Ed McBain might be the most influential crime writer ever. I thought of that post again last month when preparing for Bouchercon 2011.

I'd read David Hewson's The Fallen Angel, then gone back to earlier books in the series and was surprised to see the nine books referred to as "the Costa series," after the young Roman police officer Nic Costa. The Fallen Angel is very much an ensemble piece starring Costa but also his colleagues on the Questura. "Almost like an Ed McBain novel," I said during my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon, of which Hewson was a member. Yes, Hewson acknowledged, McBain was very much on his mind when he wrote the book.

Ken Bruen has one of his characters not just read McBain novels but try to write one, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson pays tribute as well. Bill Crider's books work in mentions of McBain.  Anyone else?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011