Michael Stanley and the crime-fiction trinity

I roll my eyes when I see a crime novel called "plot-driven" or "character-driven." Plot, character, and setting are co-equal, consubstantial, and probably co-eternal as well. You wouldn't ask which of a three-legged table's legs was most important, would you? Lose one, any one, and there goes the good china.

I thought these elevated thoughts after reading Death of the Mantis, third and most recent of Michael Stanley's Detective Kubu mysteries. David "Kubu" Bengu, a police detective whose name means hippopotamus in the Setswana language of Botswana, is the star of the book. Deprived of interesting physical and human settings that include the Kalahari desert, however, Kubu might be nothing but an annoyingly cute collection of endearing traits. Without a compelling mystery (and Death of the Mantis had the "So that's why!"s bursting in my head for a good while after I finished reading), the book would be a travelogue with worthwhile bits, incapable, however, of sustaining its length.

So, yes, I enjoyed the Death of the Mantis, and I'm looking forward to having one of its authors on the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon next month.  Among the novel's attractions is a note that explains, among other things, why the authors chose to use the term Bushmen for the indigenous people of southern Africa who figure prominently in the novel. Another is an excellent Alexander McCall Smith joke toward book's end.

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Stanley Trollip is, with Michael Sears, the writing team of Michael Stanley. Trollip will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. Stop in and say hi on your way to the West Side Market.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Books received and a question for readers

Among the books to cross my desk recently at Detectives Beyond Borders are A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley and a new edition of Derek Raymond's How the Dead Live.

The former is of interest here for at least two reasons: its setting (Botswana) and its title, which comes from The Merchant of Venice. This adds Stanley, who are really the team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, to that roster of crime writers who take titles or other cues from Shakespeare, a subject of occasional interest in this space.

How the Dead Live is part of a recent noirish turn to my crime-fiction experience. First came the delightful whirl of NoirCon 2008, and then came this new edition of Raymond's book, courtesy of Serpent's Tail. Raymond is revered as among the darkest of dark British crime writers, and the novel's opening plays nicely into a subject about which I've been thinking recently: humor in noir. Here's that opening:

"`The most extraordinary feature that psychopaths present,' the Home Office lecturer was saying, `is the painstaking effort they make to copy normal people.' He looked happily at us. `They make a close study of us — you realize that.'"

I suspect more than one reader will smile at that "He looked happily at us."

How about you, readers? Tell me about some of the grimmer or at least more unexpected places where you've found humor in your crime reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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