Bouchercon panels are up!

Panel schedules for Bouchercon 2017 have been posted, and I'll take part in two sessions, including my first as a panelist rather than a moderator.

On Thursday, Oct. 12, at 11:30 a.m., Sarah Weinman will lead me, Margaret Cannon, Martin Edwards, Alex Gray, and David A. Poulsen in a session called "History of the Genre: Covering decades of good mysteries and its subgenres." Sarah is the North American Martin Edwards, and Martin is the British Sarah Weinman. No sharper and more knowledgeable crime fiction minds exist on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Margaret is crime fiction critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, and Alex and David are two authors new to me, which is one of the pleasures of Bouchercon panels.

On Friday at 5 p.m., I resume the moderator's role, talking crime fiction in Norway, Thailand, Cambodia, Iceland, Ecuador, and Italy, Thomas Enger, Christopher G. Moore, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Leonardo Wild, and Timothy Williams. The panel is called "Across the Ponds," I've already begun assembling my questions,  and I'll see you there.

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

Follow these links for the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday schedules.

Detectives Beyond Borders on stage in Bangkok

Christopher G. Moore was the inquisitor, Edwin van Doorn captured it on video, and I answered the questions, talking about international crime fiction as my shirt exuded a weird purply glow at Check Inn 99 in Bangkok. See the interview here.

Bangkok Noir interview with Peter Rozovsky

In Bangkok at the CheckInn99 on Sunday 15 November 2015 A special inaugural meet up of Bangkok Noir community was hosted by Christopher G. Moore and featured...

YOUTUBE.COM

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, and what one can learn from crime novels

Christopher G. Moore's novel Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, written based on travel to Cambodia during that country's administration by the United Nations in 1992 and 1993, is full of didactic and journalistic passages:

“`So I’m going to fill in a gap in your knowledge. We French have been here since the last century. We imported the Vietnamese to run the civil administration of the colony."

“`The French were in Cambodia for fifty years before they built the first school,'” said Calvino."

*

Photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky
except for the one obviously by someone else.

"This was Ratana’s Thai way of not just showing loyalty for her boss but taking a much larger step, bringing him into the kinship fold—where family looked after family, checking and double-checking on their safety, consulting with other family members."

*

"Cambodia in the 90s was a second chance, a new frontier, a new gold rush. And guys like Hatch and Patten weren’t going to miss out this time around."

*

"These strongmen had the unquestioned right over the peasant population. Who among them would have cared about the fate of one such girl? Hundreds of Khmers were stepping on land mines every day of every week, and it looked like that would keep on happening for the indefinite future."

Me and Christoper G. Moore
at Bangkok's Check Inn 99.

I would not like that sort of thing in most crime novels; I'll read a history book instead. But Moore has two things going for him: Cambodia is, in fact, a mystery to many, if not most, Western readers, who could use a bit of background, and he is forthright about his role as a cultural explorer or rather a cultural detective, to borrow the title he used for his book of reflections about life as a writer in Southeast Asia (a book to which I was honored to write the introduction).

So the didactic moments are pretty easy to get used to. Even if you disagree, you might like Moore's borrowings, of which one, when the protagonist, Vincent Calvino, finds a naked news reporter in his bed, is this:

 "She giggled. `You’re cute.'"

That just might remind you of Philip Marlowe and Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Who, what, when, where, and wai: Detectives Beyond Borders to talk crime fiction in Bangkok

If you happen to be in Bangkok on Nov. 15, I'll be appearing at a pretty special event there that evening.  The handbill for the event (above/right), to be held at Check Inn 99, says Christopher G. Moore will interview me, but I'll probably ask more questions than I'll answer.

Sunday 15 Nov 6-9pm. A special inaugural meetup hosted by Christopher G. Moore featuring Peter Rozovsky the man behind Detective Beyond Borders. Peter is a well known Crime Fiction Critic whose blog is read internationally.
 
A relaxed and informal atmosphere to hear about trends in international Noir hardboiled mystery novels and how the community of writers in South East Asia fit into this genre. This will be a chance to join others who share similar interests and to meet locally based Crime and Fiction Authors, ask questions and otherwise enjoy yourselves. This will follow on from the popular Sunday afternoon Jazz Jam at Checkinn99. Entertainment after from Music of the Heart Band. More details on https://www.facebook.com/bangkoknoirauthors.

** Reserve a table now **

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

If you're in the area, Check Inn 99 is at 97 Sukhumvit Road, right across from the Landmark Hotel. See you there.  

Read about the Bangkok Noir short story collection at http://www.heavenlakepress.com/books/BangkokNoir.htm

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

On writing crime fiction in Southeast Asia

The last time I took a break from crime fiction to read Fernand Braudel, the first Detectives Beyond Borders interview resulted. (I interviewed the late, great French historian's English translator, who also translates Fred Vargas.) This time I'm reading Braudel's A History of Civilizations and, while the crime connection is less direct, one section called to mind a number of crime writers I've discussed here:

"Since the development of Greek thought, however, the tendency of Western civilization has been towards rationalism and hence away from religious life. ... With very few exceptions ... no such marked turning away from religion is to be found in the history of the world outside the West. Almost all civilizations are pervaded or submerged by religion, by the supernatural, and by magic: they have always been steeped in it, and they draw from it the most powerful motives in their particular psychology."

Each of the crime writers this reminded me of is of European descent. Each has lived among and writes with respect about a non-European culture, sometimes about spiritual matters not normally accessible to persons of the mental framework Braudel discussed.

The writers are Colin Cotterill and his series about Dr. Siri Paiboun of Vientiane, Laos; Christopher G. Moore and his "cultural detective," Vincent Calvino of Bangkok; and Adrian Hyland and his half-Aboriginal, half-white, half-amateur sleuth Emily Tempest.

A passage in Cotterill's The Curse of the Pogo Stick, I wrote:

"nicely captures the simultaneous irreverence and respect with which Cotterill portrays the worlds of the supernatural and of those who believe in it. Dr. Siri is both a scientist – the chief and only coroner in post-Communist-revolution Laos – and a shaman, an unwilling conduit to the spirit world. Does he believe in the spirits with which he comes into contact and which sometimes help him solve mysteries? He has no choice."

Moore says Vincent Calvino "sifts through the evidence in a way that makes sense of the location and people living in Southeast Asia." Hyland said of his first novel, Diamond Dove (Moonlight Downs in the U.S.), that "I suspect one could do more for Aboriginal people by portraying them as a living, loveable people, rather than as a broken museum display which is going to have us all running for the confessional."

And Hyland's second novel, Gunshot Road, opens with a beautiful version of an Aboriginal initiation rite.

In each case the author is an outsider, not pretending to be anything else, keeping an open mind and an open eye. Do that well, and you give the readers one of the special joys of reading international crime fiction. What crime writers do it for you? Who does a good job portraying a culture other than his or her own?

(I'll start you off with an honorable mention for Timothy Hallinan, whose protagonist, Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty, is constantly amazed that his Thai girlfriend loves Nescafe.)

P.S. Here's Hallinan on Rafferty from my interview with the author in 2008:

"(H)e suddenly found himself in a culture to which he actually wanted to belong.

"But the important thing, from a writing standpoint, was that he didn't belong, and because he didn't belong, he didn't have to understand everything; he could make mistakes about the people and the lives they live. And he spoke only elementary Thai. Those things were very liberating for me. I'd been nervous about writing about Thailand because I knew there was so much I didn't understand. Suddenly, I didn't have to be the guy who could write the Wikipedia entry on Thailand. My character was just another clown trying to find his way in. He was going to get things wrong from time to time."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Cambodia, crime, and history

Andrew Nette (right) with your humble blogkeeper
at Philadelphia's Noircon convention in 2014

I've been so immersed in such a welter of Cambodian history and crime fiction that I can't remember just which book is the basis for each of the following observations.

First, the books on which the observations are based:
1) Phnom Penh Noir, edited by Christopher G. Moore
2) A History of Cambodia, by David Chandler
3)  Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short
4) Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette
5) The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan

For one, at least two of the stories appear to include allusions, conscious or otherwise, to Casablanca. This makes sense; Casablanca was a refuge or a last stop for dubious sorts with agendas of their own from all over the world. So was Phnom Penh after Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Among the dubious sorts in Phnom Penh, living high amid the local squalor, were workers from non-governmental aid organizations. This is the heart of the first story in Phnom Penh Noir, by Roland Joffé. who directed The Killing Fields.

Second, orientation by landmark is less frequent than I expected in the stories set in Cambodia and written by foreigners, but it is nonetheless present. Without descending into travelogism, the stories will situate places in the story by their relation to major landmarks in a way I suspect native writers would not.

Third, the mutual enmity of Cambodians and Vietnamese, whose best-known manifestation in recent decades is probably Vietnam's 1979 invasion, may have its roots in conflict of countries that fell under the sway of Asia's two great ancient civilizations of India (Cambodia) and China (Vietnam).

Finally, to scramble the notions of native and foreigner, came "Broken Chains," a selection of rap poetry interspersed with biographical snippets in Phnom Penh Noir by Kosal Khiev, born in a Thai refugee camp, migrated to the United States as an infant, convicted of attempted murder, jailed for 14 years, then deported to Cambodia. Where does he belong?

While you ponder that question, here's Andrew Nette on Phnom Penh Noir and writing noir in Asia. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

សូមស្វាគមន៍មកកាន់ប្រទេសកម្ពុជា

I'm off to Cambodia in a few weeks, so first a shout-out to crime writers who live in Southeast Asia, set their novels there, or both: Christopher G. Moore, Tim Hallinan, John Burdett, Colin Cotterill, and others. Those are the writers I know; I hope to meet more when I take a short side trip to Bangkok.

My guidebook to Cambodia includes a list of suggested reading, and two of the fiction titles are or include crime stories. This raises once again that question of why authors find crime fiction a window through which to view a country other than their own.
 
And how is an author to approach a country that has known such terror as Cambodia so recently has? As soon as I booked my trip, I visited my native informant — a Cambodian-born, French-trained baker and pastry maker in South Philadelphia.  Yes, he talked about Khmer Rouge torture techniques, but he also offered acerbic comments on the technological backwardness that opened his native country to exploitation and on the superiority of the British to the French as colonizers. And there was an element of shocked humor to his discussion of Pol Pot, who spoke impeccable French, yet was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of foreigners as head of the Khmer Rouge. (A Wikipedia article on Pol Pot says he was forced to return to Cambodia after failing his exams three years in a row. So yes, while hallucinogenic, nightmare horror is appropriate to the story of Cambodia after World War II. there's a place for grim comedy, too. How is a writer to handle this?)

And then there's the woman in the bakery — I'm unsure if she was a worker or a customer — who said matter-of-factly that she had lost three relatives to the Khmer Rouge, but also that she wanted to take her children to Cambodia one day so they could see their ancestral country.  How is an author to portray this complexity of attitudes and reactions?  I'll tell you next month.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Writers who set books away from home — and why they do it

I started Detectives Beyond Borders in 2006 with a wariness of crime writers who set books in countries other than their own or where they did not live. They must be arrivistes, I suspected, tourists in search of tax write-offs who had no more understanding of local conditions and attitudes than does CNN. Americans (or Brits) parachuting in to tell the locals how to solve their problems.

Over the years I've asked such authors what they see in their chosen settings that a local might miss, or what they might miss that locals take for granted, and I wrote the introduction to a book of essays on the subject (Christopher G. Moore's The Cultural Detective). But not until last night did I think to ask such a writer why she had chosen the country she did.

Turns out that Cara Black, currently in Philadelphia for an American Library Association convention, has ties to France that long predate her Aimée Leduc novels. Her father introduced her to Jacques Tati movies. An uncle had literary ties to the country. Nuns from the Society of the Sacred Heart taught her a mildly archaic French that would later bemuse the children of her hosts on visits to France. There's more to her attraction to Paris, that is, than the Eiffel Tower and bargains on designer clothes.

So now I'll assume that every such writer has stories of his or her own, that there is a reason he or she writes about the Greek islands rather than the south of France, or Italy rather than Spain, or vice versa.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Bouchercon panel waiting to happen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Christopher G. Moore's dissipated Scheherazade

Trapped between post-vacation exhaustion and the sheer joy of being back in the daily routine I love so well, I haven't been reading much.

But this passage, from the first page of Christopher G. Moore's 2003 novel Waiting for the Lady, caught my attention for some reason:

"In the ten years I had known Hart, I felt that each year he lost a bit more faith in himself and lost even more faith in the motives and desires of others. That was another way saying that Hart had lost his youth like a bloated giant star that had lost its nuclear fusion just before collapsing in on itself."

The lady of the title is Aung San Suu Kyi, and the book tells the story of the protagonists' quest to meet her. Here's a review of the novel by Kevin Burton Smith (like Moore and me an expatriate Canadian) that calls the book's narrator "a dissipated Scheherazade, prone to self-pity [with] an over-inflated view of his own worth." I hope you find the phrase "dissipated Scheherazade" as beguiling as I do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The secret life of traffic jams

Here are two more bits from Christopher G. Moore's Zero Hour in Phnom Penh that give a fair picture of how Phnom Penh must have looked to an outsider in the 1990s:

“Winded, she explained to Ratana, Calvino’s secretary, that she had been delayed in a massive traffic jam on Sukhumvit and then got lost. The traffic jam was the big, easy lie everyone used and just about no one ever got called on. The lie that allowed a couple of hours for a busy executive to spend with his mia noi while assured that his major wife wouldn’t question the heavy traffic excuse. No one with a mistress in Bangkok ever wanted the city’s traffic jams fixed.”

and

“Singh was no more than in his early 40s; he had been assigned from his unit—the New Delhi Anti-Terrorist Squad—to UNTAC Civ Pol and found himself in charge of the seven police districts in Phnom Penh. ...  `How much does a Cambodian cop make a month?' [Calvino] asked.

"Det. Supt. Singh glanced over at Calvino.

“`Nine dollars a month. When they get paid,' he replied.

“`And how much does an UNTAC cop make?'

“`One-hundred-thirty a day. Rain or shine' smiled Det. Supt. Singh. `Who said that life was always fair? It wasn’t an Indian or a Khmer.'”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

“Time walks fast”

Here's a bit from Christoper G. Moore's novel Zero Hour in Phnom Penh or, more precisely, from the author's introduction to a 2005 reissue of the book, which had first appeared in 1994.

Moore calls the introduction "Genocide to Latte," the jarring contrast meant to suggest the jarring strangeness of his return to a country once ruled by terror and human extermination, then by a nervous, edgy post-war sense that anything could happen, and now by tourists in expensive hotels and Cambodians hungry to rejoin the world:

“`Time walks fast,' said the young Khmer woman DJ with a breezy California accent. She might have been in a shopping center in Los Angeles. But she had never been outside of Cambodia. And she was young, broadcasting in English to the generation of Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated. `Time walks fast,' she said again.”

and

“On the 7-dollar ride from the airport, the driver had tuned to an English language station in Phnom Penh. He understood English. The whole country was studying the English language. The bookshops stocked Madonna, An Intimate Biography and John Grisham’s Summons. How to do tapes for Chinese, French, and Japanese were displayed on the shelf. A little more than a generation earlier the Khmer Rouge had been killing anyone who spoke a foreign language or read foreign books. Now the streets were filled with students in their white shirts and black trousers carrying books and dreaming of riches.”

That's a nice portrait of post-war strangeness. How does one capture in words the strangeness of seeing frenzied consumer-fueled optimism in a land that had only recently known the horror of mass murder? How does one mind encompass both? How does one who knows the first look upon the second without experiencing a queasy sense of unreality? Damned if I know, but Moore makes a nice start.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

From the city of angels: Bangkok Noir

If you happen to be near the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand on April 2, why not drop in on a book signing for Bangkok Noir from Heaven Lake Press?

The collection's twelve short stories include contributions from John Burdett, Colin Cotterill, Timothy Hallinan, Pico Iyer and others, Thai and non-Thai. (See the complete contents here.)

Here are some excerpts from Christopher G. Moore's introduction:

"The potential list of subjects is long, but the stories in this collection will give more than a few insights into the Thai noir world. The idea of the national sport, Muay Thai — a combination of ballet, boxing, kicking and kneeing — is pure noir." [Take note, Christa Faust.]

"If noir is looking a little tired in the West, in Thailand it has all the energy and courage of a kid from upcountry who thinks the Khmer tattoos on his body will stop bullets."

"[A] stab in the heart of noir darkness suggests that while many Thais embrace the materialistic aspects of modern Western life, the spiritual and sacred side draws upon Thai myths, legends and customs, and remains resistant to the imported mythology of the West. In the tension between the show of gold, the Benz, the foreign trips and designer clothes, and the underlying belief system creates an atmosphere that stretches people between opposite poles."

======

Here's my interview with Timothy Hallinan. Christopher G. Moore needs no introduction, but I wrote one anyway, for his most recent book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

They won me in a book!

Christopher G. Moore has lived in and written about Thailand for more than twenty years. His new book of essays reveals what he has learned about the country, about writing, and about writing about the country.

What's the book about? Here are the titles of its four sections:

• "Perspectives on crime fiction writing"
• "Clues to solving cultural mysteries"
• "Observations from the frontlines"
• "Outside the Southeast Asia comfort zone," in which Moore leaves Thailand for odd adventures in India

The book's introduction is called "Introduction." I wrote it, and you can read it, along with the rest of the book, in your own free copy. Just be one of the first three people to answer this skill-testing question correctly:

Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun. Korea is the Land of the Morning Calm. What is Thailand's amiable nickname?

***

Readers in England, Oregon and Australia knew that Thailand is nicknamed "The Land of Smiles." Copies of The Cultural Detective will soon he headed their way. Congratulations, and enjoy the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Detectives Beyond Borders in a book, Part II

I like The Cultural Detective: Reflections on the Writing Life in Thailand by Christopher G. Moore for its street-level yet outsider's view of Bangkok, for its unsentimental takes on Moore's craft and country, and for the contents and titles of its essays. (My favorite is “The Culture of Complaining.”)

I'm especially attached to this item from its table of contents, though:

Introduction by Peter Rozovsky ... vii

Moore, author of the Vincent Calvino crime novels about an American P.I. in Bangkok, probing commentator on and questioner of his adopted country, and member of one of my panels at Bouchercon 2010, has given me my second appearance between covers, following on Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction.

Here's a recent bit of Moore's writing to give you an idea of what you'll find in the book.

Here's a bit of my introduction:

“I once was a prisoner in the cult of authenticity, skeptical of crime writers who wrote about countries other than their own. (Tourist that I am, I sneered at tourists.)

“Christopher G. Moore plugs that attitude between the eyes early in the collection of essays you’re about to read. `There is a tradition of pundits saying foreigners can’t understand how Thais think,' he tells us. `That is in itself an interesting theory of mind, suggesting that non-Thais are basically rendered autistic when it comes to understanding how Thais form intentions and the true nature of their beliefs.'

“That’s a neat trick, isn’t it? With a few taps on his keyboard, Moore demonstrates that authenticity snobs of the kind I once was are nothing more than upscale propagandists for the old belief that Orientals are inscrutable.”

Here's some info on ordering the book. Stay tuned for your chance to win a copy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Two crime writers on corruption and cultural misunderstanding

Christopher G. Moore, crime novelist and student of cultural differences between East and West, wrote once that in Thailand

"The gift giving which flows as a tangible sign of respect is the slippery slope that descends easily into corruption. It becomes the basis of patronage and the client/patron relationship."

Elsewhere he has enumerated the right to ignore traffic laws as an unearned privilege that accrues to the Thai elite.

I expect that he'd approve of the following passage from Charlotte Jay's The Yellow Turban in which a character looks back at his arrival in Pakistan:

"If the doctor had offered me his bribe a month or so later after I had contracted a few of the local money-getting habits, I might not have been so overwhelmed with indignation. But I was new to the land. I obeyed the signals of traffic police without thinking and was shocked when Iqubal had slipped past them. I queued up at the post office for stamps, instead of thrusting my way through the grubby peons gathered round the window and slamming my money on the desk, as I was to do a month later. And the taking of a bribe was neatly labelled in my mind as antisocial—even criminal perhaps."

and this:

"Naturally he had heard of the corruption of the East but he had, I think, believed that this was largely a charge manufactured by certain Europeans to explain their own failure to understand the Oriental, and that with the departure of the British such evils would simply and automatically cease. And he was too honest and naïve to stand up to the collapse of his ideals."

Jay, an Australian, lived in Thailand when the novel, published in 1955, was released, according to a blurb for my edition. I'd guess from the two passages I cite here that she, like Moore, thought with considerable insight about what happens when Westerners try — and, in the second case, fail — to adjust to Eastern notions of conduct and ethics.

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

Read more from Christopher G. Moore on East, West and the places where they meet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Late-breaking convention pictures

Here are me and my "Stamp of Death Panel" at Bouchercon 2010.

From top left: your humble blog keeper; Christopher G. Moore; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, known to readers as Michael Stanley.

At left are me and my man Bill James at Crimefest 2010. At right, it's me at the same festival with Ali Karim, who kindly provided these photos and is here pictured for the first time ever without a gin and tonic in his hand.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 5: A preliminary wrap-up

Eddie Muller was the #Bcon2010 toastmaster. He's also a native San Franciscan and was a member of Friday's "San Francisco noir" panel. He had this to say about the city as a breeding ground for noir after someone said people come there to reinvent themselves:

"We breed people who exploit those people when they come to San Francisco. ... There are people who are waiting here to exploit those who come here to find themselves."

***

Three authors who impressed me with their intelligence, humor, critical acuity, willingness to stake out provocative positions, or some combination of these: John Connolly, Denise Mina, Val McDermid.

***

Three of my panelists whom I enjoyed listening to as they talked about their native country of South Africa at the bar: Jassy Mackenzie, Michael Sears, Stanley Trollip.

***

Two panelists with whom I ate dim sum in Chinatown on Sunday: Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Christopher G. Moore. (Their spouses were there, too, and I'm happy to have them as panelists-in-law.)

***

Panelists who were exceedingly pleasant to work and spend time with: the lot of them. Really.

One hears whispered tales of difficult panelists, but none was mine. The aforementioned plus James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang and Stuart Neville were good company, and concise, entertaining and informative in their answers. I enjoyed our discussions on stage and off. Thanks, guys.

***

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Blogs beyond borders

The titles of the panels I'll moderate at Bouchercon next week, combined with their geographically diverse makeup, leave me with the obvious choice of talking about setting, about a sense of place and how authors create it.

Fortunately, five of the ten writers on the two panels already do that regularly in group blogs with fellow crime authors. Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley, contribute to the Murder Is Everywhere blog, as do Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Cara Black. Christopher G. Moore is part of International Crime Authors Reality Check.

The first thing to know is that these are not authors' promotional Web sites. You'll find no book excerpts here, no blurbs, no fancy pop-ups and graphics. Instead, the authors write seriously, and sometimes whimsically, about the countries where they live, write, and set their books.

Thus Yrsa shares thoughts on the pronunciation of her name and the difficulty of rendering that pronunciation in a post that expands to take in Icelandic phonetics, conventions of naming, and mythology.

Or Cara Black, whose most recent novel, Murder in the Palais Royal, takes us briefly underground, spends a bit more quality subterranean time in a post that probes Paris' medieval past as well as her own literary history.

Sears writes about South Africa's pride in the success of soccer's World Cup. Moore explains that "In Thailand, highchairs illustrate the great urban and rural cultural divide."

So check out their posts for informative and informal lessons and stories on France, Iceland, South Africa and Thailand. And if you like the blogs, check out the books.

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

(Michael Sears, Stanley Trolli, Christopher G. Moore and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be members of my "Stamp of Death" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. Cara Black will be on my "Flags of Terror" panel Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Spirit houses and other houses in crime fiction

Christopher G. Moore's crime fiction is not generally suffused with nostalgia, but Spirit House, his first novel featuring P.I. Vincent Calvino, does include a kind of elegy for Bangkok's traditional buildings:

"The main house was inside a high-walled compound. ... It looked like the kind of place you could paint with brown, yellow, and black. This was old-style Bangkok before the property developers tore down the traditional Thai houses with sweeping verandas and painted wood shutters. Behind the white wood-framed main house Isan workers in bamboo hats and scarves wrapped around their faces dotted a crazy-quilt of makeshift scaffolding stuck to the side of a twenty-story construction site. More real-estate developers, like the Finns who owned his office building, were looking to make a killing units to rich foreign buyers from Japan and Korea."

I once posted a comment about the evocative descriptions of Shanghai's shikumen houses in Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine and the kholis of Bombay in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.

What are your favorite descriptions of homes, houses or other buildings in crime fiction?

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

(Christoper G. Moore will be part of my "Stamp of Death" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Any more panels, and I'll be able to furnish a rec room

I'm moderating two panels at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Oct. 14-17. "The Stamp of Death" happens Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. (The panel's title is a tribute to the host city's crime-drama tradition.)

Panelists are Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Christopher G. Moore, with yours truly lending an unobtrusive guiding hand.

"Flags of Terror" (whose title has a similar origin) on Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m., brings together James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang, Jassy Mackenzie and Stuart Neville for an hour or so of civilized discussion, with your humble blogkeeper again asking the questions and frisking the participants for weapons.

The authors on these panels take readers to Iceland, Botswana, China, South Africa, Thailand, Northern Ireland, England, France, and what may be the setting richest with possibility, New York's Chinatown. And you're invited along for the ride, whether at the convention or by reading, reading and reading.

I'll see you at Bouchercon. And remember: If you're baking in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flour in your hair.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010