The English, they are a funny race

I've been reading three Englishmen in recent days, and, without purporting to analyze English character, I will say that each of these examples shows considerable wit, and that the wit cuts deeper than mere jokes.

The first is from a short story by Michael Gilbert:

"Mr. Behrens said, raising his voice a little, `If I were to lift my right hand a very well-trained dog, who has been approaching you quietly from the rear while we were talking, would have jumped for your throat.' 

 "The colonel smiled. `Your imagination does you credit. What happens if you lift your left hand? Does a genie appear from a bottle and carry me off?' 

"`If I raise my left hand,' said Mr. Behrens, `you will be shot dead.'  

 "And so saying, he raised it."

— "The Road to Damascus" 

The second is from a novel by John Lawton:

 "Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago. ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’” 

— Bluffing Mr. Churchill 

The third is from a poem by Philip Larkin:

"Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:"

— "Toads" 

Aren't those fun?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The decline of civilization

A blurb from the Times Literary Supplement included with my edition of Hare Sitting Up calls author Michael Innes "the acknowledged grand master of that civilized entertainment, the donnish detective story."

Page 62 of the novel begins thus:

"Judith Appleby, as it happened, had heard of Splaine Croft. Two of her friends had sent sons there, and had reported with satisfaction that it seemed a fairly civilized place. It was funny how, as civilization seeped away, the idea of civilization became all the go."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Michael Innes: Apocalypse then

Michael Innes' 1959 novel Hare Sitting Up feels oddly contemporary and queerly nostalgic at the same time.

It's contemporary because of the stunning immediacy of the opening chapter's six-way colloquy about nuclear and biological apocalypse. It's nostalgic because the fear of apocalypse seems so 1980s, if not positively Cold War. These days, our collective fears are less about the end of humanity than about wars that will never end.

Anyhow, here's a bit about Innes, real name J.I.M. Stewart. Here's a bit about his protagonist, Inspector John Appleby. Stewart was a Scottish-born academic who taught at Leeds, Adelaide and Belfast before settling in at Christ Church, Oxford.

This is the first novel I remember reading whose author was a don, and the donnishness comes through in two ways so far, both positive. Stewart taught English literature, and he took his title from Women in Love: "(D)on't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass and a hare sitting up?" That's an appropriate thought for musings upon the end of the world.

But the chat about apocalypse is the real tour de force. Five of the talkers are new Oxford graduates, full of the brashness of youth. The sixth is a schoolmaster: "Juniper found himself taking a deep breath. He hadn't much cared for the conference; he wasn't in very good spirits; he was fifty-two."

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I'm not sure academic mysteries are as much in favor as they once were, and I think they were always more an English than an American phenomenon (though Amanda Cross wrote marvelously barbed academic mysteries set at a prestigious New York university). Still, I'll toss it over to you and ask what's your favorite academic mystery?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Savage morning after: Allan Guthrie's Killing Mum

When we left our friends at the end of Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, the prospects for some were uncertain. Guthrie's new novella, Killing Mum, finds a career for one of that book's peripheral characters and looks more closely at the career of another, one work assignment in particular. Here they are, preparing to torch a van to dispose of evidence and hoping to disguise the blaze as joyriders' vandalism:

"When he'd finished, he walked over to watch Jordan's handiwork. Jordan had written FIREMEN on the side of the van and was standing staring at it.

"He noticed the beam of Carlos's torch, stepped back. I'm stuck.

"`Suck,' Carlos said, around the torch.

"No, stuck.

"Carlos took the torch out of his mouth. `Suck,' he said. `Add "suck."'

"Okay. Jordan shook the can, sprayed out the word. `Firemen suck.' Sounds a bit lame.

"`Cock,' Carlos said. `Add "cock."'

"Nice."

Guthrie has moved into darker territory with his latest novel, Slammer, but I'd like to think of Hard Man, Savage Night and Killing Mum as a fictional universe, a ****ed-up, affecting, funny, murderous family saga that does a bit of genre-jumping in the bargain.

Guthrie's Web site links to a purchase page for Killing Mum that quotes reviews of his other work. One blurb seems especially pertinent: “Guthrie’s control of this dark material is sheer wizardry.” Killing Mum contains a lot of twists for a book of about ninety pages, and they're good twists, throwing the plot in unexpected directions without seeming manipulative.

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N.B.: Killing Mum is part of a series of novellas called Crime Express from Five Leaves Publishing. Hat tip to Donna Moore's Big Beat From Badsville blog for heaping well-deserved praise on these slim, inexpensive, tough-as-nails books. And kudos to Five Leaves, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Allan Guthrie: Family guy

I've just spent a long mid-week holiday break playing miniature golf and filling trash bags full of old shingles and insulation. This cut into my reading time, but I shall be back up to speed tomorrow. When I return, I'll have another post about Colin Cotterill's spirit explorations in Curse of the Pogo Stick, which I've just finished, and a remark or two about Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, which took up a nice chunk of my train ride back from the mini-golf and shingle-schlepping.

For now, a couple of thoughts on the Guthrie:

1) The man could write a mean sitcom or screwball comedy if he set his mind to it. I'd like to see him write a script for The New My Three Sons.

2) Page 157 contains the funniest line I have read about that staple of 21st-century crime writing, the changing urban landscape.

3) That line is not as funny as two on Page 160:

"Not that they were in a hurry, but still. Effie had a new respect for butchers."

and

"They'd all sat around drinking. Took awkward sips and smiled sadly at each other. Dad kept saying, `I can't believe he's dead,' till Effie told him to shut up."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part II: Bill James on dialogue, gleeful savagery, and crime fiction vs. detective fiction

In Part II of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about dialogue, jokes, crime writing versus detective writing, and a parallel that a fellow writer drew between his books and Jacobean drama. He also makes a surprising choice for the Harpur & Iles character with whom he identifies most closely.

Click here for a Bill James bibliography, including non-Harpur & Iles books. Click here for books he has written under the name David Craig. Under his own name — James Tucker — Bill James wrote a study of the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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Q: Ken Bruen told an interviewer in 2004 that “I abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent.” Peter Temple called you “a star.” John Harvey and Val McDermid are just two more crime writers who have rhapsodized about your work. What in your writing so attracts your fellow writers?

A: I don’t know why these writers think well of my books, except where they’ve published their comments. But I’m very grateful. I’d like to think it’s the jokes, two or three of which during the twenty-five novels are original. Well, two. John Harvey in the Guardian said the novels had a Jacobean drama feel to them. A sort of gleeful savagery, I think he meant.

It’s not all praise from other authors. Someone said the books were lightweight. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment, though it could be a half-compliment. After all, what’s the opposite: deadweight, overweight? Another writer-reviewer said, `Not much detection here.' Guilty, my lord. I think I’m a crime writer, not a detective novelist, although my two principal characters are detectives. They have other things to do.

Q: Panicking Ralph Ember is a drug dealer. He is at various times a coward, a blowhard, and a cheater on his wife. He also vies with Iles as the most memorable character in the series, and he is pretty likable, even charming for all his faults. Tell me about the genesis of Panicking Ralph. Why does he work as a character? And what makes him so lovable?

A: Ralph has pathetically and comically unachievable ambitions, like most of us: he hopes to change his lowlife club into the Athenaeum. He takes fright easily, as do many of us. He strives to keep up appearances, as do many of us. A French interviewer asked me if I was Colin Harpur. I said, no, I’m Panicking Ralph. Perhaps readers also feel an affinity.

Q: One distinctive feature of your dialogue is the elliptical cross-talk mainly between Harpur and Iles, but also between Harpur and other characters. They talk around each other, answering questions the other did not ask, ignoring ones that are asked. Talk about this technique, your models (if any) for it, and what it adds to the characters and the books.

A: I tend to get bored reading books where the dialogue is very sequential and reasonable. I like the talk to obscure at least as much as it tells. I don’t want the reader dozing off, so I introduce the seeming breaks from sense. Sub-Pinter? Again, guilty, my lord. Opaque dialogue can be an avoidance of a troublesome topic. The reader would spot that it’s troublesome, which means the dialogue is doing its job while appearing not to. People may be obsessed with their own concerns and will try to dominate the conversation to get these across, despite the other person’s probable wish to do the same. We get a nice helping of chaos, evasion, dead-ends, just like at home.

Q: You’ve said that you wrote the first book, You’d Better Believe It, without planning to write a series. What got you thinking about a series?

A: The first book got very few reviews and they came late. I’d already started another, The Lolita Man. The title rang literary bells. The critics woke up. It had a bucketful of good notices. Iles had appeared and seemed ready for development. Even then, I certainly wouldn’t have expected the books to go to number twenty-six (this autumn – Hotbed).

Q: The most recent Harpur and Iles novel introduces a new character and omits a familiar one. Why the changes? Was it a stroke of mischief to write a book in which Harpur does not appear and call that book In the Absence of Iles?

A: Yes, I suppose a kind of mischief. I’d introduced a new detective in a book called Tip Top, written under another of my pen names, David Craig. This is Esther Davidson. I wanted to give her another outing, and brought her over to the Bill James stable. She features in another book due out in Britain in September, Full Of Money.

Incidentally, you mention Anthony Powell. In Full Of Money a couple of crooks are big Powell fans. One of the baddies has done a lot of jail and needed a long novel for distraction. Powell`s twelve-volume work, A Dance to the Music of Time, suited. He refers to it as A Dance to the Music of Doing Time.

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(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part I: Detectives Beyond Borders talks with Bill James

Some of us remember where we were when John F. Kennedy was shot or World War II ended; I remember where I was when I first read Bill James. I was having coffee and a scone and passing the time of day at my local secondhand bookshop when the owner said, "Hey, you might like this" and handed me Roses, Roses, tenth novel in James' Harpur & Iles series.

Two pages in, I was Siddhartha Gautama under the bodhi tree. I was Hugh Hefner at that magical moment when his mother said, "Hugh! Stop studying so much. Go find a nice girl." I read a third of the book, brushed the crumbs from my upper lip, and said: "I'll take it."

James' world of cops and criminals is rich, dark and often very funny. And it offers some of the most gorgeous prose ever set to paper in crime or any other kind of fiction:

"If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."

or

"To her, garrotting looked a sinister, damnable skill; in fact a kind of art, a kind of filthy art, and Iles had about him much of the good third/fourth-rate artist: arrogance, contempt for usual social and possibly legal standards, some flair, some posturing, some taste, some vision, and the irresistible impulse to create, or its complementary and sometimes necessary opposite, to wipe out."

Hotbed, twenty-sixth novel in the series, will appear this fall. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about his rich, dark world, the people who populate it, and why he chose two high-ranking police officers as his protagonists rather than the more conventional workaday cops.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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Q: The first Colin Harpur novel appeared in 1985, and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles came along a bit later. What else was going on in British crime fiction at the time? What did you set out to do differently? Other than Anthony Powell, what writers haunted your imagination?

A: Most crime fiction deals with police at low or middling rank. I aimed to show two very highly placed officers who are committed to fighting crime, unbribable, but very fallible morally and socially. The books aim to shock and amuse by featuring two men who virtually run a police force but also conduct personal relationships in very unconventional, even dubious, ways.

I’ve said it boringly often, but the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation.

Q: Iles is cruel to his chief, Mark Lane; fiercely protective of his own daughter; lecherous toward young women; yet he ultimately rejects The Girl with the Long Back. Tell me about the genesis of this complex, appalling and attractive character and how he made his way into a co-lead role in the series after not being around at the start.

A: Many detectives in fiction are portrayed as having personality faults, their creators knowing that otherwise their leading characters would be saintly and non-credible. But the faults tend to be forgivable and often part of macho-ness. Drinking too much because of job stress is a favourite failing; one I’ve used myself. I came to feel this kind of ploy was a sentimental cop(!)-out. I decided it would be interesting to see how readers reacted to someone with rather more off-putting (realistic?) flaws.

Also I tried to understand the psyche of a born second-in-command — someone who had a big job, but not the biggest. Iles will never make it to chief constable. What kind of personality does this produce? Answer: not eternally sweet; sometimes manic.

Q: Families have loomed large in the Harpur & Iles books at least since Protection, when a fellow crook kidnaps “Tenderness” Mellick’s son. Why the emphasis on families, particularly criminals’ families?

A: I like the whole organisational bit. A police force is an organisation, so is a crooked firm, so is a family. I try to put all three alongside one another and examine the friction.

Q: A related question: One motif of the series is the strange ways people build families in changing times: Harpur with his daughters and his young girlfriend. Panicking Ralph, comically overprotective of his own daughters. Iles, his wayward wife, and their baby girl. What attracted you to families as a vehicle for social comedy? For that matter, why daughters rather than sons?

A: This is part answered in 3. Daughters are more markedly outside the cop-crook scene. Sons might inherit a criminal empire. Girls probably wouldn't. I solicit their detached view, which can be funny and sharp. (Not all readers like Harpur's daughters, though. Too flip and know-all?)

Q: Families are not the only recurring motif. There are the hypersensitivity about sending officers undercover, and the persistent girlfriend who presses Harpur and Iles to probe the case of her weak, hapless criminal mate. Among other things, these create continuity. Talk about these recurring themes, why you keep coming back to them. Feel free to name any that I missed.

A: I’m a bit wary of pointing out recurring themes. They might look like repetition. However, undercover is an obsession of mine. Possibly it’s the influence of spy novels – le Carré etc. I’ve written spy novels myself and occasionally do one now: in fact, I currently have one on offer to a publisher, and the signs are promising. Secrecy, cover-ups, play-acting fascinate me. Harpur and Iles have to rehouse and hide a former super-grass in Wolves of Memory. Undercover gives great openings for dramatic irony — that is, where the reader know more than some of the characters. This can give an added complexity and shiftiness to dialogue.

I find the tensions and moral/legal/ethical problems of undercover work a very useful story source. For example, how far in criminality should an undercover officer go to convince a crooked gang he’s a genuine member? Think of the undercover officer in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. I won't describe the tricky points there, in case it gives away the surprise, for someone who hasn’t seen the film, but they are very tricky.

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(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Gwendoline Butler, or Calling all fans of historical mysteries

I've just finished Gwendoline Butler's short story "Bloody Windsor" in The Oxford Book of Detective Stories: An International Selection. It's a stunner, and, with its clipped prose and elliptical narrative, surprisingly modern in tone for a writer described as "Britain's finest practitioner of the traditional mystery." It's also set in late-eighteenth-century England. Here's its opening:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

"In Paris the tricolor flew, and the crowds sat watching Madame Guillotine receive her passing guests.

"In Windsor all was normal except for a few apprentices and mechanics who held a meeting in Thames Street but were soon dispersed, one or two to the hulks and then on to Australia. The navy was offered as an alternative but few chose it and rightly so, Denny thought ... "

Look what Butler does: She lets the reader know when the story takes place, she makes the reader smile with the allusion to A Tale of Two Cities, and she gets us right into the mind of one of her two protagonists.

I'm most impressed with the first of those achievements. Having set the period scene with such force right at the start, Butler averts the necessity of cluttering the body of the story with period detail. That sort of clutter and constant scene-setting has put me off historical mysteries in the past. I may make another try with Butler's historical novels, which include The King Cried Murder!.

Here are my questions for readers of historical mysteries: Is Gwendoline Butler regarded as an innovator in historical crime fiction? Do my observations about her short story make sense to you? Do they hold true for her novels?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The humorous afterlife of the English country-house mystery

The jacket matter on my newly arrived copy of Going to the Dogs attests to the lingering attraction of the English country-house mystery in an age that had left gentility behind:

"A body has been found in the library. A body in the library? That sounds familiar. But ... this is not the world of Agatha Christie and genteel murder among the cucumber sandwiches. Dan Kavanagh's thriller is firmly set in the on-the-make Britain of the 1980's, where new money talks loud, old vices flourish, and the people you run into during a country-house weekend are the sort you might very well not want to ask home to meet your mother."

On the smart-alecky side? Sure, but that's just the front-jacket blurb. I'm more interested in the suggestion that Kavanagh (Julian Barnes), like Colin Watson, may have found the English mystery tradition irresistible even as he delighted in poking fun at its outdated pretensions.
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The above excerpt was from the front flap; the back flap offers a send-up of the bio-blurb that seeks to impress the reader with the gritty, globe-hopping and numerous jobs the author has held. Typical jobs include bartender and taxi driver (preferably in New York), with an occasional excursion into loan-shark collection agent for truly edgy authors. Here, on the other hand, is the pseudonymous Kavanagh's job history:

"He has been an entertainment officer on a Japanese super-tanker, a waiter on roller skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He boasts of having flown light planes on the Colombian cocaine route, but all that is known for certain is that he was once a baggage handler at Toronto International Airport."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Britons are from Christie, Americans are from Chandler?

In my opening post, I praised Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops novels while acknowledging that they may be stronger on character than on plot. A British reader responded that she was no big fan of the one book in the series she had read, and she said she valued good plots over good characters and was a big fan of puzzle mysteries. That plays into the old commonplace of British readers preferring the classic, elaborately plotted whodunnit, (North) Americans the atmospheric urban P.I. story. So, here's my question for the day: Does that distinction retain any validity in these violent and hilarious days of Bill James, Ian Rankin and Charlie Williams? Do British readers and writers tend to value a well-plotted fair-play story more than their American counterparts?

Here's another question of the day: Who are the European (or Asian, African, South American or Australian) counterparts of the American "regular guy" (or regular girl) detectives? I mean American series characters such as Les Roberts' Milan Jacovich, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, and Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter. The first is a divorced father, the second a zany single woman, the third a gay man, but they share a number of characteristics: They have quirks, but not pathologies. They worry, but they don't brood. There's not an alcoholic or a psychological cripple in the bunch. And add Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman to the list. He has family problems, but the man is happily married.

The only comparable European character I can think of -- a character whose personal life is an important part of the story and who is still sane and balanced -- is Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Can you think of any others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2006