Meet the man behind crime fiction's most despicable character

Some good miscellaneous material in recent days, including this video interview that Roger Smith did with the man he says inspired the character Piper in Smith's novel Wake Up Dead.

Piper is the worst fictional human being I have met, a killer, a rapist, an utterly callous gang leader, and a perpetrator of the most despicable acts.

He does most of his fictional thing in Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison, as close to an earthly hell as anything in crime fiction. And the man whose prison tales inspired his creation, who says he committed in real life acts as horrific as the fictional Piper's, looks and sounds like the kindliest old man you'd ever want to meet.

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From Bob Cornwell comes word that Crime Scene: Italy is now available, following on similar comprehensive portraits of the crime fiction scenes in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. These are thorough and compact packages, covering authors, publishers, magazines, Web sites, bookstores and history. And all are available free to view online or download as pdf files.

High fives to Cornwell and the International Association of Crime Writers. They deserve a public service award of some kind.

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And, from Jeff VanderMeer, a proposal for funding translation of “non-realist" fiction into English — "non-realist or whatever term denotes the totality of fantasy/SF/horror/surrealism/magic realism/etc. without dividing things into the false camps of genre and literary."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010