Tommy Red and Charlie Stella

New Jersey's own Charlie Stella holds unsound views about bagels, but he writes good books.

His latest, Tommy Red, is a bit more somber than his previous eight novels, but that only adds to the impression that Stella's low- to mid-level gangsters and cops are people, too, worried about their families, about the future, about the jobs they have to do.

Charlie Stella. Photo by
Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond Borders.
=================

By no means, though, is Stella any kind of a believer in moral equivalence. His anger against law enforcement use of informants is an undertone throughout his books, sometimes boiling over into righteous explosions.

But the situational jokes outnumber the explosions. I've written about all his novels; read my blog posts here. Then read the books and enjoy the jokes. And pity their author, who has yet to taste a Montreal bagel.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Noir at the Bar NYC with a (new) story by me

Juliet Fletcher, Charlie Stella, Rory Costello
(Photos by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders)

Even more fun than usual was had at Sunday evening's Noir at the Bar at Shade Bar in New York. Why? Because I:

1) Met a couple of folks whom I had previously known only through social media and e-mail, notably Charlie Stella.

2) Met some new folks from the United States and elsewhere.

3) Had enjoyable reunions with all kinds of crime fiction folks and my favorite bartender in New York.

4) Stayed late, by Noir at the Bar standards, and still managed to make my bus back to Philadelphia.

and

Scott Adlerberg and Jen Conley,
the evening's hosts.

5) Read a story that I had assembled for the occasion, because Jen Conley invited me to read, and it would not have done to show up with an old story, would it?

The story—the opening section of a story, really—is a distillation of some fragments that I wrote years ago and that finally may come together as a coherent whole. Here we meet the characters and set the stage for the  main action.

Before we go, thanks to Jen for inviting me to read and to Scott Adlerberg for MCing the event with her.

Oh, the story's title. West Fourth Street is the nearest subway stop to Shade. Beyond that, if you don't recognize the allusion, you've got a a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.

===============

 Negatively Fourth Street

by Peter Rozovsky 

Fifteen miles outside NEWark, Delaware, the woman next to me started crying into her phone. I commiserated, I kept silent. Then I slammed my book down and headed for the café car.

On my way back, the train took a curve. I bobbled my coffee and sandwich, and the heavy metal doors between the cars clanked open. From in front came the last voice I wanted to hear. From behind, a voice I wanted to hear even less.

Suzanne Solomon

The train pulled out of NEWark with a long, shrill whistle. I rolled down the grass embankment, mopped the coffee stains and tuna flecks from my shirt, and watched the train disappear.

*

Blake wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. He hunched forward, hands jammed in his pockets, and he moved fast. Fetch held a rolled-up Rangers jacket in the crook of one elbow, a Tim Horton's bag half falling out of one pocket. He ambled and shambled, but he still kept up with his friend somehow. He put a hand on Blake's shoulder, and they stopped.

Fetch indicated a door, and Blake shook his head. Fetch held up one finger and ducked into the doorway. Blake shrugged, leaned against a pillar, and lit a cigarette.

*

Terrence McCauley

Kasey Thompson's voice told a smoky tale of cigarettes and whiskey, but it lied. She never touched either.

"Think I'd be able to do this if I wasted my time in bars?"  She whacked the speed bag and made me feel sorry for the leather. Chin tucked, knees flexed, back straight. Elbows in, her back heel lifting slightly each time she struck. Her two fists became four, then six. Her breath came in short, spitting wheezes with each punch. I got tired watching her.

But she did waste time in bars, and I wanted to know why. "What's with the gym stuff?" I said. "You don't fight."

She stopped punching, and she smiled as she blew a wisp of platinum hair from her left eye. "Would you want to be whipped by a fat dominatrix?"

*

I jabbed the .45 at the base of Fetch's skull, and I cackled as his eyes grew wide.

"Out of the car. And leave the boxes."

I jerked the gun to the right as Blake went for his jacket. "Hold it right there, Tiger."

"The fuck?"

"What am I going to call you? Paddy? Mick? Now, out of the car, Celtic, and keep your hands away from your — "

"From my Marlboros, you gobshite. All right, I'm getting out."

I waved out the window of Fetch's black 2008 Lexus as I pulled away.

"See you later, gents. Put this in your books."

*

Albert Tucher

Two nights later I'm shouting to be heard over the crowd at the Grand Hyatt.  We're hooting and cheering as a small, curvy woman dressed in black lifts her blouse to reveal her tattoos: Kasey Thompson. The crowd pushes in around her, all except two guys looking the other way, toward the door.

The snake tattoo is flicking its tongue at Kasey Thompson's scapula, but I've got one eye on the two guys.

One of them says: "I'M OUT OF HERE FOR SOME CIGARETTES."

His friend, a husky, saltish-pepperish dude with a Rangers jacket and a Tim Horton's bag, shrugs, and they head my way.  Shit. Fetch and Blake.

============================

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

"Fuck, it was cheese": Dietrich Kalteis' The Deadbeat Club

I'm not as high on Elmore Leonard as some crime fiction readers are, and my misgivings about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle verge on heresy, according to at least one highly partisan commenter on this blog.Yet some of my favorite crime novels of recent years—by John McFetridge, Declan Burke, Charlie Stella, Garbhan Downey—are of the Higgins/Leonard school, with its humor; its ensemble casts and multiple points of view; its wry views of men and women at work; and equal measures of sympathy, understanding, and careful observation granted to cops and criminals alike.

The latest entry is Dietrich Kalteis' second novel, The Deadbeat Club, about the complications unleashed by a drug war in southern British Columbia, a war with at least five sides and ensuing complications of which Kalteis good narrative advantage.

Throw in fast action, an interesting observation about Canada and the United States as settings for crime*, and a use of cheese that you've likely never seen before in a crime novel, and you've got a few hours of heartwarming and violent fun on the way.

===================

* "His baby face defied his age, hair as wild as Tanner himself. Plenty of practice with Russian AKs, Tanner did a stint in the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Left a body count up and down the Congo, hunted Al Qaeda and Islamics, popped off insurgents in Iraq, Darfur, more in the Gaza and Georgia. Now there was talk of North Korea. All the same to Tanner. A resume that had the military contractors drooling.

"North of the border things were different, no military contractors up here. Tanner lying low and getting high, starting to feel bored. So when he heard Travis wanted guns, sending his boys to the shipyard, he offered to throw in, not worried what the gig paid."

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My third and fourth book covers as a photographer: The Year of the Orca

Linda L. Richards' novel When Blood Lies sees the light of day in April (but is available for preorder now), with a cover photograph by me.

From left: Me, Linda L. Richards.

The publishers are the good people at Orca Books, who have also just brought out Reed Farrel Coleman's Love and Fear, with a cover photograph by me. 2016: Feel the Orca.

Linda and Reed join Ed Gorman and Charlie Stella on the select but growing list of authors for whose books I have shot covers. That's a good bunch, and you should be reading all of them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Peter Rozovsky is a fictional character

John McFetridge's new novel and a galley of Charlie Stella's next one arrived this week, so you know I'll be reading lots of low-key humor the next few days, lots of gorgeous transitions between small jokes and big drama that make both hit even harder.

Here's one example from the McFetridge book, A Little More Free, the scene the aftermath of a fatal fire, relatives learning that their loved ones have died:

"There were other people inside. It was quiet for a minute and then Dougherty heard the crying."

*

"`Sixty-five cents for a pint? We should arrest you.'"

Another plus: Unless McFetridge or his publisher, ECW Press, made changes between unbound galley and finished book, the police photographer Rozovsky, a sidekick in McFetridge's Black Rock, gets a first name this time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

What do history and crime mean to you?

I've taken a break from crime to read some history, here's an old post about history and crime.

=====

The Charlie Stella interview to which I linked on Thursday is full of references to history.

"I prefer reading history-based novels (crime or otherwise), which is why Craig McDonald’s Lassister series strikes such a terrific chord with me," for example, or this:

" I’ll read pretty much anything that presents a past I see slipping away, but the new stuff that seems to top the bestseller lists I find mostly boring horseshit.

"That’s not to say the writing is bad. I’m sure some of it is wonderful, but if there is no or little basis in reality or some sense of history (i.e., the first three George V. Higgins novels – The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Digger’s Game and Cogan’s Trade – and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid)."

The comments hit home, not least because the books he names are not generally considered historical fiction, and because Higgins set his books, at least The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in his own time. So, what does history mean? A sense of time and a sense of place and a wide streak of romance as an optional extra.

Stella's comments neatly take in the attractions of one crime novel that I've read recently, one I'm reading now, and another I expect to read soon. Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground plunked me right into the middle of Belfast and environs at the time of the hunger strikes. Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang is doing something similar for St. Petersburg in 1914, and I have every hope that Donald Westlake's The Comedy is Finished will do the same for the late 1970s in the U.S.

What do those books have in common, other than gifted authors? Turbulent historical periods. Narration that enhances the personal aspects of the story (first-person in the McKinty and the Bennett, free indirect speech that's as personal as first-person in the Westlake.) An eye for what's particular to the period that never degenerates into mere sightseeing or detail mongering.

What does history mean to you when it comes to fiction? Stella talks about "history-based novels;" What do you think he means by that? Are "history-based novels" different from historical fiction? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

My second book cover as a photographer!

I received the excellent news yesterday from the excellent J.T. Lindroos that one of my photos will be used for the cover of Famous Blue Raincoat, by Ed Gorman, a story collection that has one hell of a title. (I found out after posting the news on social media that the title is taken from a song by my landsman Leonard Cohen. Oy, am I proud!)

I shot the cover during some bad weather back home, unlike my cover for Charlie Stella's Eddie's World, which I shot during some good weather back home for Black Gat Books, a new imprint from the good and discerning people at Stark House Press. And yep, I'm excited.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My first book cover as a photographer!

Stark House Press, that terrific publisher of crime classics and crime originals, has a new mass-market crime line called Black Gat Books. The imprint's first three offerings include work by suck authors and photographers as Harry Whittington, Leigh Brackett, Charlie Stella, and me.

Yep, I shot the cover for Black Gat's edition of Stella's novel Eddie's World, and I could not be more chuffed. Stella is one of my favorite crime writers, a hell of a guy, a loyal family man and sports fan, and a passionate, entertaining social commentator whose only flaw is that he wouldn't know a good bagel if it bit him on his Buffalo Bills-loving rear end. Here's what I wrote about Stella in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Much of a crime novel's texture comes from the bits between the main action, and no one writes those bits better than New Jersey's Charlie Stella. If you like Elmore Leonard, you'll love this guy and his funny, unsparing yet sympathetic looks at mid-, high-, and low-level mobsters, hangers-on, and cops."

Judge the book by its cover, or the cover by its book. In this case, it really is all good.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Why George V. Higgins but not Ross Thomas?

Crime writers and readers revere George V. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but we don’t talk much about Ross Thomas these days. This puzzles me, since Thomas was better than Higgins at some of the things Higgins is celebrated for: gritty looks at men at work, including criminals, and razor-sharp dialogue cleverly contrived to convey character and create the illusion that this is how people really speak.

 I base these remarks on Thomas' Missionary Stew, which appeared in 1983, thirteen years after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that's where the caveat comes in. Though an experienced novelist by the time ... Eddie Coyle appeared, could Thomas have been influenced by the younger writer, the way the similarly older, more experienced Elmore Leonard was?

I ask because the three previous Thomas novels I had read (Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw, and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side) either predate The Friends of Eddie Coyle or appeared the same year, and I don't remember those books bringing Higgins or Leonard to mind.

Though I don't get the esteem in which Higgins was held, I have no desire to knock him. But I would like to see a revival of interest in Thomas, and not just because he wrote with such wit about politics.

==========================

A wise commenter on my skeptical 2009 post about Eddie Coyle wrote: "I think it's comparatively rare for pioneering texts to stand up in the long term." Maybe Higgins is an example of that pioneer phenomenon, surpassed by his followers. I should like the guy, because I enjoy authors who look up to him and whose works is often compared to his: Bill James, Garbhan Downey, Dana King, Charlie Stella.

I'd hate to think that readers and critics might be scared off by Thomas because he wrote about politics. Don't be; he makes his subject real and funny/
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Throwback Thursday at the Movies

In about twenty years, I'll be a few years short of joining the 21st century in movies. Until then ...

I watched Donnie Brasco for the first time this week, and I liked the bits of comic misunderstanding sprinkled throughout the dialogue ("What's fugazi?") I also realized that that sort of thing is more enjoyable on the page, where one can savor it. So if you like Donnie Brasco, you'll love Charlie Stella and Dana King.

Now I'm watching The Usual Suspects. On the one hand, its narrative is convoluted, so it must be a writer or director's movie. On the other, its stars feign speech impediments (Benicio del Toro), bad accents (Gabriel Byrne), and visible physical and, occasionally, verbal and mental handicaps (Kevin Spacey). That makes it an actor's movie. OK, those of you who have seen it, which is more overdone: This movie's direction, or its acting?

Goodnight for now, and I'll get back to you once I've seen Gone With the Wind.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The Man Without Qualities visits a newspaper

After an excursion into crime fiction in the mild forms of Derek Raymond, Garbhan Downey, and Charlie Stella, I'm back with more from The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, if you prefer the original German), by my man Robert Musil.

Unlike some of the bits I've quoted from this supremely entertaining novel, these latest have nothing to do with crime fiction. One, however, does contain some telling and entertaining reflections on newspapers (and, by extension, media that did not exist when Musil worked on the novel from 1930 to 1942):

"`His Grace believes that we must take our direction from the land and the times,' he explained gravely. `Believe me, it comes naturally of owning land.'"

and

"If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with about a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out for its content of reason and reality. [ed. note: Ha!] ... The moment his return has ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little piece on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section..." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Charlie Stella is righteous

I read the last two-thirds of Charlie Stella's Mafiya last night, and if roosters crowed in South Philadelphia, I'd have heard them greet the new day.

Among my observations on the latter part of the book are that the humor picks up slightly when Stella introduces a few Italian cops and agents, and that one example of Stella's sympathy for working men and women struck a chord with me even though my collar would be decidedly white if I didn't wear T-shirts or sweaters to work most days.

First, the humor, a special agent comparing traditional Italian mobsters and the new Russian crime gangs from which Mafiya takes its title:

"Of course the risks are real. Worse that can happen to me watching wise guys I get a gravy stain on my shirt. The redfellas will kill you to test a new gun they bought off the street."

The personal chord came in a scene of police interviewing an embittered ex-convict hard at work at one of his two jobs who faces the prospect of raising two children alone now that his hooker/escort wife has been murdered (she was hooking to earn the kids' private-school tuition.):

"I'm out just a few months and working here mostly. I also pump gas closer to where I live. For Indians, you can believe it.' 

"`It's a job,' Moss said. 

"`Yeah, so I shouldn't complain.'"

It's hard to miss the mockery and the bitter humor in that statement, the bitterness of a man told too many times that silence, humility, and gratitude that one is not even worse off are the proper responses to adversity.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

More Charlie Stella, and a bit of stupidity is turned to good account

I was told I could expect my copy of The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2 to arrive this morning, but when I arrived at the store around 5 p.m., I was told the day's delivery had not yet arrived.

I enjoyed the succession of grimaces and furrowed brows from the store employee who looked up my order even though I was sure all the facial gymnastics meant no good news. Sure enough, she told me the book would now arrive Friday. Then, while I was browsing elsewhere in the store, another employee walked over to tell me that my order had never gone in after all and would now take about a week.

"No thanks," I said, similarly declining her offer for help with anything else. I'd been helped quite enough already, I told her.

But all was for the best, since it transpires that the e-book edition of The Man Without Qualities I'd read included just half of the novel's first volume. So I walked to another store and bought Volume I, and I now have fifty-one chapters and 390 pages to read before I need Volume 2, and by that time the order-challenged folks at the first store may able to come up with a copy.


I took my new purchase to hot dog restaurant, intending to have a bite and some coffee while I typed this post. The two workers in the place said yes, it was a WiFi hot spot, but they did not know the password. Was my chain being yanked, or are the folks who run the place really that lackadaisical and incompetent?

*

I've spent part of the rest of the day reading Mafiya, sixth of Charlie Stella's eight novels. It's a bit different from the other seven through its first hundred pages, with less humor and characters more savage and vicious. But the same multiple viewpoints he uses in the other books — Stella loves to show men and women at work, out, and at home, doing what they do in their daily lives — here make the vicious Russian gangsters even more chilling.

As much as I enjoyed Stella's first five novels, Books Six through Eight — Mafiya, Johnny Porno, and Rough Riders — are my favorites. Stella gets better and better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charlie Stella, Christy Mathewson, and me

One way I keep sane amid my current wave of side projects is to read for work during the day, for pleasure at night. That way I do what needs doing, and I send myself to sleep on a wave of good thoughts, work the farthest thing from my mind.

My most recent pleasure reading was Charlie Stella's Rough Riders, and man, this guy keeps getting better and better. He sets this novel, his eighth, in and around Minot, North Dakota, where he went to college. A killer from his 2001 book Eddie’s World has entered the federal Witness Protection Program and wound up in North Dakota, working a sting for the feds and also a side project of his own: a murder for hire in return for a share of a heroin stash into which a crooked Air Force physician has stumbled by accident. But a New York detective wants the killer also and tails him across the country to get him.

The plot, needless to say, is complex but not obtrusively so. Nor is Stella condescending in the least toward the characters and the landscape so different from those of his previous books. And he handles the clash between local cops and the FBI, a feature of approximately every American police novel or television show of the last twenty years, with great understatement and, hence, believability.

The jokes are fewer than in Stella’s previous books but the conversational byplay is just as bracing. And that tells me that Stella knows how to write believable human interaction and not just jokes.

Here are my previous posts about Stella (click the link, then scroll down), whom I recently proclaimed my favorite American crime writer.

And here, for the first time before the crime reading public, is the first of those side projects I keep going on about: my piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a century-old baseball book by that remarkable character (and great player) Christy Mathewson that's as fresh as today’s headlines.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dana King and I

Dana King has long been a friend of Detectives Beyond Borders, a loyal reader and occasional commenter I've known since he was still in short pants at his first Bouchercon in 2008. Back in 2009, he even interviewed me on his blog, One Bite at a Time.

These days he's a two-time novelist, and I'm happy to report that his Wild Bill is the most fun I've had with a mob story since I last read Charlie Stella.  The link is apt; Stella has nice things to say about King's work, and King thanks Stella in the acknowledgments to his other book, Worst Enemies.

If you like Stella's writing, as I do, you'll likely like King's. Each writes books that follow parallel groups of characters, mob and police/FBI. Each uses multiple viewpoints, creating sympathy for characters good and bad. King's fiction is slightly more violent than Stella's; Stella's offers slightly more humor. But really, each is great fun, and I can picture the two writers as older and younger brothers, each slapping the other in the head as he tries to negotiate a forkful of steaming pasta.

Here's a brief example from Wild Bill, beguiling in its straightforward simplicity:

"You can't call someone who might put an ice pick in your ear a friend."

Can't argue with that. Now, goodnight. I have some reading to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Why Charlie Stella is my favorite American crime writer, Part I

Charlie Stella is an author who he writes something, I read it. Why? In part because of sequences like this, from Shakedown:

"`Let's go,' DeNafria said. `Maybe I can get him to spill something on his expensive threads.' ...

"It took a few minutes before Quastifarre was holding onto a frankfurter loaded with onions and mustard. DeNafria called to him just before the gangster took a bite.

 "`Hey, Joe Quack!' he yelled. `Joe!'

 "Quastifarre turned too quickly and spilled a combination of mustard and onions onto his shirt. He slapped at it with his free hand and wound up smearing some onto the waist of his pants.

"`Motherfucker!' he said through clenched teeth."

A good part of the texture of a novel comes from the bits between the main action, and no one does those bits better than Charlie Stella; the man is a fine comic writer.

But Shakedown, perhaps more than the five novels of Stella's I'd read previously, is a serious look at character and characters in the low- and mid-level mob world. Think Stella mines violence for cheap, morally objectionable laughs? Follow the character arc of mob hangaround John Forzino through Shakedown.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charlie Stella's polemical porno pizzazz and a handful of Holt

I've finished Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella and started 1222 by Anne Holt, the latter because it's up for a best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America on Thursday night, and the former because no one in crime fiction is more fun to read than Charlie Stella.

With Stella the fun starts before the novels proper do; how can you not smile at an author's note that addresses readers as amici (friends)? The note that follows is a zesty polemic on the historical moment in which the novel is set: 1973, after a New York judge ruled Deep Throat obscene.

"As films go," Stella writes, "one has to acknowledge Deep Throat was nothing more than a campy, cheaply made porno that showcased the `sexual talent' of a young woman stage-named Linda Lovelace. With a soundtrack comprised of silly parodies and jingles and a plot born of male fantasy, the movie might well have come and gone without the slightest notice had the government ignored it. Instead, political directives from the White House launching a moral crusade that had much more to do with distracting the public from the war in Southeast Asia and an ever growing Watergate scandal guaranteed the film’s iconic success. What it also did was provide organized crime with a new way to make a fast buck. It is fittingly ironic that the name given to the secret informant (FBI agent William Mark Felt) who provided information that would eventually take down the Nixon White House itself shared the name of the film."

That polemical thread runs judiciously through the novel that follows, adding social and historical oomph to Stella's cast of hard-working guys, reluctant gangsters, cops, bookies, wives, girlfriends, and families, almost all of whom the author means us to view with a sympathetic eye.

***

1222 is the first novel of Holt's that I've read (she's published about sixteen), and I'm impressed because she has given herself the challenge of taking a well-worn crime-story set-up (group of people trapped by a snowstorm in an isolated hotel; one of them is found dead) and making it fresh. She has succeeded so far, in part by making the narrator/protagonist not especially likable, in part by doling out information about her characters only gradually.

1222 is one of at least six novels by a non-American author up for an Edgar (Holt is from Norway) and, based on what I've read of it so far, I won't complain if it wins.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Elmore Leonard's first-person in disguise

An interviewer once noted Elmore Leonard's tendency to get inside his characters' heads without, however, resorting to first-person narration:

"So, when you say it’s character-driven," the interviewer [Martin Amis] asked, "do you mean you’re thinking, `How would this character see this scene?' Because you’re usually third-person. You don’t directly speak through your characters, but there is a kind of third-person that is a first-person in disguise."

Leonard replied that: "it takes on somewhat of a first-person sound, but not really. Because I like third-person. I don’t want to be stuck with one character’s viewpoint, because there are too many viewpoints."

Here's an example from Riding the Rap (1995), the second book to feature U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens:

"He was a rangy kid with the build of a college athlete, bigger than this marshal in his blue suit and cowboy boots—the marshal calm though, not appearing to be the least apprehensive. He said the West Palm strike team was shorthanded at the moment, the reason he was alone, but believed he would manage."

That's a decent bit of description — until it becomes something more in the highlighted portion. Leonard beautifully conjures the flavor of how Raylan Givens would speak and think but without dialogue. That has to be what Martin Amis meant by first-person in disguise. It also achieves the high comic goal of not just saying funny things (that is, cracking a joke), but saying things funny.

That, I think, is a big part what of what readers mean when they talk about Leonard's humor. His books may not about in slapstick, laugh-out-loud moments, but they sure do say lots of things funny. [Disclosure: I'd read just three Leonard novels and one short story before Riding the Rap: Be Cool, The Hot Kid, Pronto (the first Raylan Givens novel), and "3:10 to Yuma," so I don't know how pertinent this post is to his work as a whole. Comment from Leonardians is welcome.]

*** 

Leonard's influence is international. Among writers discussed here at Detectives Beyond Borders, the work of Ireland's Declan Burke, Canada's John McFetridge, and New Jersey's Charlie Stella bears an unmistakable and oft-noted Leonard stamp.

Who else has Elmore Leonard influenced? (Here's a post from the paleolithic age of Detectives Beyond Borders that asked "Who is the most influential crime writer ever?")

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A bit of reading while you wait

That outside commitment is cutting into my blogging again. In the meantime, here's an interview with Charlie Stella, who offers blunt assessments of American society, current crime writing, and himself.

And here's a link you might like if you've wondered where to start with Scandinavian crime fiction.

Finally, one of this blog's favorite commenters finds herself in some exciting company.

(Just opened my copy, and it appears she's not the only friend of DBB who had a share in this project. Patti Abbott, Loren Eaton, BV Lawson, Sean Patrick Reardon and Sandra Seamans, who has posted a kind word or two at Detectives Beyond Borders, contributed stories as well. Congratulations, gang! I look forward to reading your work.)

And, since this site is about writing by DBB commenters, Dana King's Wild Bill is now available.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011