Crimefest 3: Denise Mina and the concomitant wank

Everything's coming up roses

Speaking on Crimefest 2013's third day, French crime writer Pierre Lemaître called the relationship between author and reader a contract.

What, I asked, does the reader owe the author in such a contract?

"Suspension of disbelief," Lemaître said.

What do you think? After a reader has plunked down the price of a book, what does he or she owe the author?

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Saturday's Books to Die For panel had Declan Burke quizzing four of the authors who contributed essays to Burke and John Connolly's Books to Die For. Two of the panelists offered insight into why they began writing. Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, who started her writing career as an author of children's books, said she did so because:

"This was a time when children's books had to teach you something. The parents were alcoholic or they wouldn't let you have a birthday party. They were so depressing."

And Northern Ireland's Colin Bateman talked about an animus against Northern Irish writing that seeped into his early aspirations:

"I think it's that if you grew up in Northern Ireland, you're ashamed of it. I didn't want to write the great Northern Ireland novel, I wanted to write the great American novel, because I thought everything in America was better."

Finally, Denise Mina, asked by interviewer Jake Kerridge to explain her early admiration for fellow interviewee William McIlvanney, said: "I used to work in the pub where he drank." When she decided to be a writer, Mina said:

 "I didn't want to do the concomitant wank, and William was a normal person."

Another remark of Mina's formed a nice elaboration of her discussion of the working class and writing at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco. I'll tell you about it after breakfast.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Rev. Derek Coates does not believe in transubstantiation! or, what's your favorite graffiti?

Two good bits from books I've started this week:

"In the bed-and-breakfast ghetto the shutters squeaked and banged and a chill low-season wind blew old newspapers down the road."

— Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango in Aberystwyth

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And here's Colin Bateman's Mystery Man on a graffiti vandal's trail in Mystery Man:

"A footpath on the Malone Road bore the legend Alan McEvoy beats dogs; a gable wall on the Andersontown Road had Seamus O'Hare plays away from home; on Palestine Street the front door of a student flat had been daubed with the words Coke dealers live here and a parish house in Sydenham decorated with Rev. Derek Coates does not believe in transubstantiation."

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What's your favorite graffito ever? I saw my two in neat, bold, large letters in Boston's Charlestown section more than twenty years ago:

Eat shrimp for better function!

and

Kevin has his priorities

I wonder to this day if demolition of an adjacent building robbed the second of a punch line we shall sadly never know.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More "Violence"

Here's a bit more of Colin Bateman's view of the fictional Northern Ireland town of Crossmaheart in his early novel Cycle of Violence:

"When you live on the First World poverty line — you can only afford to hire out two video cassettes each week and you take your summer holidays within a hundred miles of home — looting is less of a crime and more of a signal from God that he's busy elsewhere but here's an early Christmas present just to keep your interest."

"First World poverty line" is brilliant. The next bit ("you can only afford...") might seem condescending, but the rest of the sentence dissipates that possibility in a burst of japery. Sympathetic? Satirical? Reader, you decide.

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And who is Bateman's target here, republican terrorists or their nationalist counterparts?:

"A car was hijacked in Belfast, repainted, number plates changed, new documentation acquired, fluffy dice attached. It was driven to Meadow Way, parked in a garage, and the bomb loaded. Five hundred pounds' worth. A few pounds of Semtex might have done the same trick, but the UVF didn't have access to international markets. Fertilizer, chemicals, batteries, wire, a detonator, a clock."

(Read more about Cycle of Violence.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Cycle of Violence

I'm going to quote at even greater length than usual from Colin Bateman's early novel Cycle of Violence because this bit is funny and, in its way, touching:

"Crossmaheart still had a Cripples Institute. There were no special people in Crossmaheart. There were no intellectually or physically challenged people. There were mentals and cripples. There were no single-parent families, there were bastards and sluts. There were natural-born mentals and mental cases, nuts who had made themselves crazy through wielding a gun in the name of one military faction or another. There were natural-born cripples and those who had brought it on themselves, gunmen who had been shot, gunmen who had shot themselves, bombers who had blown their hands off, thieves who had been shot in the legs by terrorists because they (the thieves) were a menace to society, and you could see them hopping down the streets, wearing their disability with pride like it was some red badge of courage."

Crossmaheart is the town to which the protagonist, a reporter and newspaper columnist named Miller, has been exiled, and that passage gives a vivid picture of just what kind of a town it is. It also uses parentheses to good effect.

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I have read that a collection of Bateman's early newspaper columns was published under the title Bar Stool Boy. I bow in awe.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What's so unfunny about crime fiction, and why?

Colin Bateman holds forth on the Guardian book blog about why crime writing lost its sense of humor. Apart from oddly including Ireland's Declan Burke on a list of British crime writers, he has much of interest to say.

Bateman, a longtime writer of comic crime novels himself, notes the sly humor of British Golden Age writers and the one-liners of their hard-boiled American counterparts. These degenerated into formula and parody, he says, and "crime fiction was forced to reinvent itself. ... Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs and Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem became super sellers 20 years ago – laughs were out, torture porn was in."

The way back out, he suggests, is humor. Robert Lewis, Charlie Williams, Malcolm Pryce, Chris Ewan, Len Tyler and the non-British Burke "are at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works."

Now, humor in crime fiction is a frequent topic here at Detectives Beyond Borders, but I'd never thought of the stuff as a wedge for the avant garde.

What do you think of Bateman's thesis, particularly that graphic violence forced humor out? Is humor really the future of crime fiction? And who else belongs on Bateman's list?

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From Declan Burke: "I think Bateman is talking about books that are equally crime and comedy/humour, as opposed to crime novels with comic flourishes."

Again, what do you think?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Belfast's and Bateman's little shop of crime

The estimable Gerard Brennan of Crime Scene NI gives a thumbs-up to Colin Bateman's upcoming novel Mystery Man:

"There’s a new PI in Belfast. His qualifications? He owns No Alibis, a bookshop specialising in crime fiction. Is he a fast-talking, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing tough guy? Um, no. Not at all, really. He’s a bit ... well, he’s cut from a different cloth. Oh, and he most definitely is not David Torrans."

Now, Mr. Brennan is always worth a listen when the subject is Irish crime fiction, but that's not why I bring the matter up. No, I mention Mystery Man because I have not only visited No Alibis (may its sales increase!), but I have met its real-life owner, the same David Torrans on whom the protagonist of Mystery Man is definitely not based. I offer photographic evidence here. I'm the one with the beard (I looked so much older then. I'm younger than that now.)

(Read the first two chapters of Mystery Man here, and learn what a good author can do with a pair of leather women's trousers.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009