A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015, reissue department: GBH

The toughest parts of Ted Lewis' 1980 novel GBH make Jim Thompson look like a bit of a wuss, yet the book is filled with the same sort of mordant, observational humor that marks Lewis' other crime classic, Get Carter (Jack's Return Home).

That Lewis maintains the humor through the novel's horrific events, building tension, and explosive conclusion is the book's most distinctive feature; call it the Ted Lewis touch.

The novel's short chapters alternate between the narrative present and the recent past; George Fowler, a ruthless gangster who makes his money from pornography, narrates both. In the "past" chapters. Fowler and his diminishing band of minions in London are desperate to find out who is betraying Fowler. In the present, Fowler has gone  to ground under an assumed name in an English seaside town. And that's where the cutting comedy comes in. Lewis is no likelier to have been hired to promote Grimsby or Mablethorpe than he would have been to tout Scunthorpe or Newcastle.

That Lewis is able to induce a certain pity or sympathy for what has to be to be the most morally bankrupt gang of characters ever assembled between covers is not the least of his magic. (In Get Carter, for example, Jack Carter is activated by the noble passions of avenging his dead brother and saving his niece, who may in fact be his daughter.  George Fowler, by contrast, wants nothing more than to save himself, no matter how many of his subordinates he has to have tortured or killed to do so.) And that's why GBH is a Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015/

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Jordan Foster discussed Ted Lewis as part of a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015: Nathan Ward on how Hammett became Hammett

Nathan Ward's book The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett proposes that Hammett's experience as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency was a formative influence on his writing.

Ward is not the first Hammett scholar/researcher to make the connection; Richard Layman titled his 1981 Hammett biography Shadow Man. Ward, too, notes Hammett's writing about being a good shadow man — that is, being good at tailing someone without himself being detected.  One key, Hammett wrote, is to note the quarry's physical attitude. The way a person moves or wears clothes can be vastly more important in identifying one's quarry than can his or her face.

Commentary on Hammett's work as a detective generally suggests that the experience lent his stories verisimilitude, that he could write more convincingly about fictional detectives because he had been a real one.  Ward is the first Hammett scholar I can remember who suggests that the most valuable lesson Hammett learned was concision. He and other Pinkertons had to be brief and no-nonsense in their reports for the agency, a contention supported by Ward's research in Pinkerton archives, and this, Ward says, helped form Hammett as a writer.

Good prose style has never been valued less than it is now, and it does not figure prominently in discussions of authors. If you have even a passing familiarity with themes in Hammett biography and criticism, you'll know that scholars have focused on his politics, his love life, and his drinking. Ward's book is not, as reviewers and others have maintained, a biography. (Layman, on our Hammett panel at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, recognized this.) Rather, it is something rarer: A book about a writer that concentrates on writing. And that's why it's a Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015.

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Fresh off reading Ward's book, I picked up The Maltese Falcon again, to find Hammett turning his detective's eye on Sam Spade.:

"The steep rounded slope of his shoulders made his body seem almost conical—no broader than it was thick—and kept his freshly pressed grey coat from fitting very well."

You'd know that man if you saw him again* and, having shown than he can do it, Hammett puts description to brilliant thematic use right from the start. But that's a subject for a future post.

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* Hammett's Spade is blond and "quite six feet tall." He looks, that is, about as far from Humphrey Bogart as it is possible for a human being to look.
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon, Part IV: My first panel

Laura Lippman

I moderated one panel and one special-event discussion at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  which seems long ago but from which I only returned on Tuesday. Here's the first part of what it was like.

Kevin Burton Smith

"Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald" was a reprise of last year's similarly titled panel in which authors, editors, and other crime fiction experts talked about their favorite lesser-known crime writers of the past.  This year's panelists included Laura Lippman (above right) on the YA author Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Kevin Burton "Thrilling Detective Web Site" Smith (left) on Norbert Davis, Sarah Weinman (below right) on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Jordan Foster, who scarpered before I could snap her picture, on Ted Lewis.

Sarah Weinman

All four panelists were eloquent, illuminating, and entertaining, and, more to the point, they chose their subjects well. Lippman taught the gratifyingly packed room that an author who wrote fantasy for children could fill her stories with hard-boiled and even noir tropes.   Smith opened audience eyes to an author who proved that superb writing and hard-boiled toughness are compatible with slapstick comedy.

Weinman talked about Holding, writer of superbly tuned domestic suspense (and, I would argue, noir), and one of the best of the mid-twentieth-century female crime writers Weinman is doing so much to bring back into circulation. And Foster? She spoke comprehensively about Lewis, known for the novel now called Get Carter, but author of at least two other crime fiction classics, and one of the toughest of all crime writers, who combined sharp observational humor with Jim Thompson-like nightmare intensity.

I like to think the panel expanded the audience's idea of what crime fiction can accomplish as much as it expanded mine, because that's exactly what I set out to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon, Part III: Guilty white liberals

John Farrow

I learned at Bouchercon 2015 that Canada has identity-mongering guilty white liberals, just as the United States does. Saturday's panel on Canadian crime writing at Bouchercon 2015, included a complaint from Trevor Ferguson, a.k..a, John Farrow, about people who say that he, a white man, should not write about members of ethnic groups other than his own.

He grew up in Montreal's Park Extension neighborhood, he said, in the only non-immigrant family on the street, so "Who else am I going to write about?" if not members of other cultures.

And I neglected to include in Tuesday's post on Bouchercon bar conversations a number 7: Stuart Neville on crime fiction festivals and the possibility thereof in Northern Ireland.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon, Part II

I ate five meals here.

I'll organize this year's Bouchercon 2015 posts thematically, beginning with out-of-panel conversations, mostly from the bars at the Marriott and Sheraton hotels. The interlocutors and their subjects included:

Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block

Megan Abbott

Michael Sears, one half
of the team that writes
as Michael Stanley

1) Hillary Davidson on digestive syndromes and international travel
2) Her husband, Dan, on New York bagels and where to find them
3) My second-generation homie Alexandra Sokoloff on Jewish migration from everywhere
4) Sam Wiebe on books and authors, though I can't remember which ones
5) Wallace Stroby on Dashiell Hammett
6) Suzanne Solomon on Israel and writers named Roth 

And thanks to Eryk Pruitt for staging an entertaining and atmospheric Noir at the Bar in Raleigh and for posting the following. And yes, I know that probably should be "bill" rather than "beak," but I don't edit the past:

Noir at the Bar MC
Tracey Coppedge

Eryk Pruitt

Eryk Pruitt:@reverenderyk 14m 14 minutes ago Many great quotes at ‪#Bcon2015. Among them: "Daffy Duck is like David Goodis, but with a beak."--@DBeyondBorders (Peter Rozovsky)

Bill Crider

John McFetridge

Eryk is a good sort, and he was gracious enough to give me a shout-out for inventing Noir at the Bar and staging the first ones. So Detectives Beyond Borders likes him.

Annamaria Alfieri, Terrence McCauley, Rita Ramirez McCauley, Dana King 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon 2015 in a few pictures

Christa Faust and your humble blogkeeper

Kenneth Wishnia, Robert LoPresti, Jason Starr

Lawrence Block

Bill Crider, Karin Slaughter, Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block

Richard Layman and Julie
Rivett after appearing on my
Dashiell Hammett panel

Christa Faust

Allan Guthrie, Caro Ramsay

Stuart Neville

Your humble blogkeeper with Sarah Byrne

Ali Karim, J. Kingston Pierce

Tracey Coppedge

Laura Lippman turned a
bunch of people on to YA
 author Zilpha Keatley
Snyder on the "Beyond
Hammett, Chandler,
Macdonald, and Spillane"
  panel, a highlight of my
career as a moderator.

Kevin Burton Smith discussed
 Norbert Davis as a member
 of "Beyond Hammett,
 Chandler, Spillane, and
Macdonald."

Sarah Weinman talked
about Elisabeth Sanxay
Holding during the same
session

Angel Colón, Johnny Shaw, Jay Stringer, Eryk Pruitt

The Bottles' Flabby Road at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. From left, me, Dennis Pozzessere, J. Kingston Pierce, Kevin Burton Smith. Photo by Ali Karim

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

I shoot and read at Noir at the Bar

Sarah Weinman

Nothing like a Noir at the Bar to get ready for Bouchercon. This Noir at the Bar happened in Washington at the Wonderland Ballroom, and no Noir at the Bar has ever taken place at a venue with a more evocative name. Here are photos of all the readers except me, because I was taking the pictures.

David Swinson

Art Taylor

Nik Korpon

Austin S. Camacho

Ed Aymar

Dana King

Jen Conley

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Mr. Beyond Borders goes to Washington for a Noir at the Bar this Saturday

Joaquin permitting, I'll read Saturday evening at Washington, D.C.'s second Noir at Bar.  The fun happens starting 7 p.m. at the wonderfully named Wonderland Ballroom, 1101 Kenyon St., NW.

Ed Aymar hosts a program that also includes Austin Camacho, Jen Conley, Dana King, Nik Korpon, David Swinson, Art Taylor, and Sarah Weinman, warming up for her stint on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., later in the week.

So let's hope Joaquin amounts to no more than a few flooded basements and a flurry of hyperventilating news stories. See you Saturday.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Norbert Davis and Max Latin

With Bouchercon 2015 just over a week away, here's a post from this blog's Paleolithic Era about an author will be a subject of one two panels I'll moderate:

I admit it: Norbert Davis was American. But he qualifies for this blog on two counts: He had a sense of humor, and Max Latin, just one of his creations in a short but busy career writing for American pulp magazines in the 1930s and '40s, had an interesting profession: He owned a restaurant.

Here's the opening of "Watch Me Kill You!", the first of five novellas collected in The Adventures of Max Latin:

"Guiterrez came out of the kitchen in a cloud of steam and slapped the heavy metal swing door violently shut behind him. He was a tall man with a dark, bitterly disillusioned face. He was wearing a white jacket and a white apron, and he had a chef's hat crushed down over his right ear. There was a towel wrapped around his neck, and he wiped his forehead with its frayed end, glaring at Latin.

"`What was the matter with it?' he demanded."

You're a sterner reader than I if you can resist that.

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Mr. Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith,  will discuss Norbert Davis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007, 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Max Allan Collins on Jack Carter's Law

How tough and convincingly authentic is Ted Lewis' 1974 novel Jack Carter's Law?  Here's what Max Allan Collins had to say in his introduction to Syndicate Books' recent reissue of the novel:

"Spillane's fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis's London, and while [Mike] Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods."

Maybe that bleakness, that deadpan is what makes so many of Carter's observations so unsettling and so funny at the same time, including this, about the two gangster bosses for whom he is an enforcer and planner:

"The room I am in is all Swedish.  It's a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they'd let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees ... the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple's closing-down sale."

Jack Carter's Law is bleaker and wittier than the just about anything in the great Richard Stark's bleak and witty Parker novels. And it has the style that modern-day makers of gangster movies such as Guy Ritchie can only dream about.

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Jordan Foster will discuss Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Vera Caspary, and mysteries within mysteries

"(S)he was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about murders, she had said. They're presented as a problem, m'dear, her father said. What's more, they generally show the murdered person as someone you can't waste any pity on. I'm sorry for them, she said. I hate it when they're found with daggers sticking in them and their eyes all staring from poison and things like that."

That's from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel The Blank Wall, included in the new collection Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels in the 1940s and '50s, edited by Sarah Weinman for the Library of America.  That paragraph will catch the eye of readers today, I suspect, and it makes a good starting point for discussion of the entire collection. What makes these eight writers different from their predecessors? From their successors? From their male contemporaries?  What traits do the eight share with all those groups? It might also make for interesting comparison with Raymond Chandler's famous assessment of Dashiell Hammett's contribution to crime writing in "The Simple Art of Murder."

But it's not the funniest meditation on mystery stories in Women Crime Writers. That honor goes to Waldo Lydecker's narration in Chapter II of Vera Caspary's Laura:

"I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less than modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay `Of Sound and Fury' is reprinted here:

"`When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.'"

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Sarah Weinman will discuss Elisabeth Sanxay Holding on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., in (yikes) two weeks. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and it happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015