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

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

"We're not prudes, we're gynecologists": More palaver from Crimefest panels

Monument
to thousands
of Chouans
who landed
at Carnac
in 1795. 

Here are a few more thought-provoking remarks from panelists at last week's Crimefest in Bristol. Stick with me long enough, and I may tell you what thoughts they provoked.

• "He helped other writers also. He put out the Saint magazine."
Zoe Sharp on the literary philanthropy of Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint.
• "In the cast of cities, bars are closing. The rents are too expensive. ... When streets get too expensive, the first things to close is bars, where people used to meet."
Antonin Varenne
• "The nice thing about writing about Laos is that they've had forty years of civil war, and they can still sit down at the end of the day and have drinks and make jokes."
Colin Cotterill
• "We're not prudes, we're gynecologists."
Lindsey Davis, quoting a regret-filled letter from two fans explaining the offense they took at sexual language in one of her novels.
• "In Glasgow everyone pretends to be working class. It's a kind of reverse snobbery."
Denise Mina on working-class chic in her city

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Delta force and other stray crime-fiction thoughts

Clearing my mental warehouse to make way for new ideas. Everything must go!!!

1) I asked Eoin Colfer at Bouchercon 2011 why the characters in his "young adult" Artemis Fowl books, even the non-human characters, were achievers — rich geniuses, elite police officers, and so on  — while the characters in his "adult" crime fiction — the story "Taking on P.J.," the new novel Plugged — are lower on the social ladder: bouncers, shady doctors, low-level hoods. Simple, Colfer said: The Fowl stories are fantasy, the crime stories meant to be believable. What do you think of his answer? Are gritty characters synonymous with greater believability?

2) Colin Cotterill, a fellow member with Colfer of my “WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel at Bouchercon, mentioned off-stage that he'd been part of a crime-fiction event in Germany staged in an operating theater — appropriate for the author of a series whose protagonist is the chief and only coroner in Laos. What's the oddest setting for a reading or lecture that you know of?

3) Mickey Spillane's 2007 novel Dead Street, discussed here yesterday, is full of amusing references to the sexual, social, and political mores of Spillane's 1950s:

"Bettie just stood there smiling in her see-through nightie, her untrimmed delta a refreshing pleasure in these days of bizarre pubic buzz cuts."

Who but Spillane could make pubic hair an object of nostalgia?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011 highlights

But first say hello to two friends I met (left and right) at the St. Louis Art Museum after Bouchercon. And now, further highlights of my favorite edition to date of the world's biggest mystery and crime fiction convention:

1) The restaurant near the convention hotel that delighted my three English lunch companions by serving corned-beef bollicks (sic).

2) Quaffing a Schlafly Oktoberfest or two at the hotel bar with Eric Stone, an author new to me whose books I will begin reading once I get done with Bouchercon posts.

3) Trying to keep up with Eoin Colfer and Colin Cotterill during Saturday's “CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel.

4) The waitress who yelled at Jon Jordan and who, having no truck with tagliatelle, served me instead a plate of "tailgate pasta."

5) St. Louis' Walk of Fame, along Delmar Boulevard in the Loop. Many cities have Walks of Fame, but how many include Betty Grable, Bob Gibson, William S. Burroughs, and Phyllis Diller — on the same block?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bad manners and Colin Cotterill: Whom would you kill?

Colin Cotterill has, like me, fantasized about killing off people with bad manners. In my case, the victims include the slouching youth who blasts music in the subway and the self-important lawyer bellowing into his cell phone on the Paoli local to the Main Line. Here's a post I made in 2009 about Cotterill's Aging Disgracefully, along with a question to readers.

***

"Hilda knew the lass would be making people's lives a misery when she was sixty. She'd decided then and there to make an example of her."

The perp/protagonist of "Gran Larceny" is a senior citizen, which is the point of Colin Cotterill's Ageing Disgracefully, a collection of short stories about "murderers, bank robbers, practical jokers, serial killers, perverts and just plain liars, all of whom are old enough to know better."

She also shares a trait with the killer in Ken Bruen's Calibre: She targets people with bad manners.

(It is just coincidence that I am trapped in the Pen & Pencil Club with a roomful of a) flacks and political operatives who [though it's redundant to say so] are b) unnecessarily loud and are also listening to c) reggae.)

Who would you bump off, rob or set up because of their rudeness, thoughtlessness, lack of consideration and other offensive carrying on? How would you do it?

***

Colin Cotterill will be part of my “CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 11:30 a.m.-12:30, at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Win Colin Cotterill's new book

Colin Cotterill, author of the Dr. Siri  Paiboun mysteries about the aging chief (and only) coroner in post-revoltionary Laos and his odd cast of helpers, has begun a new series about an eccentric family in Thailand.

The series opens thus: "Old Mel hired one of Da's nephews — the slow-witted one with the dent in his forehead — to sink a well in his back acre."

That's typical Cotterill in form and substance, and if you shudder a politically correct shudder at slow-witted, don't. Cotterill is the most human, compassionate and generous of authors in his depictions of the elderly and of a character with Down syndrome in his Dr. Siri books. I'm confident he won't make cruel or gratuitous fun of anyone here.

But why trust me? One lucky reader in the U.S. only can win a copy of the book, Killed at the Whim of a Hat, courtesy of the good people at Minotaur Books, and judge for her or himself.  All you have to do is answer the following skill-testing question.

Cotterill's novel The Coroner's Lunch tells us a bit about Dr. Siri's reading habits:

"During his stay in Paris decades before, he'd taken his delight in the weekly serializations of one Monsieur Sim in the l'Oeuvre newspaper ... Siri had been able to solve most of the mysteries long before the inspector had a handle on them."

Who is Monsieur Sim?

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

   Liz from Maryland knew that "Monsieur Sim" was Georges Simenon. He used the alias early in his career, and Liz wins a copy of Killed at the Whim of a Hat. Congratulations, and thanks to Liz and to Minotaur Books. 

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

 (Read Colin Cotterill's blog for information about his books and samples of his cartoons. Watch an entertaining interview with Cotterill here, and read my previous posts about Cotterill; just click the link, and scroll down,)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

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

More great first lines

Two days ago I wrote about my haul of five books at Murder by the Book in Houston (since augmented by four more titles).

I've been flipping through my new acquisitions feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. The first three of them reminded me how important it is to grab the reader from the start, whether with the title, the opening line, or both -- and how thrilling it is to be so grabbed.

Colin Cotterill's Aging Disgracefully is subtitled "Short Stories About Atrocious Old People." Know that, and you'll love the title of the first story: "Gran Larceny."

Bill James' Off-Street Parking pulled me right in by addressing and challenging me directly: "I'd like to put you right on something. OK?"

Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, offers two grabber opening lines, the first to a short prologue, the second to the novel proper:

"Griffin coughed blood into my face when I made to slip the chains under his shoulders."

and

"`He beats me.'"

What are your favorite openings? How did they pull you into the story? Why did you like them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Meet your CWA Dagger winners, plus a question for readers

The Crime Writers' Association in the UK presented its International Dagger, Short Story Dagger, Dagger in the Library and Debut Dagger awards tonight in London. (See information on the short-listed titles at the CWA Web site.) The CWA was also to announce its short lists for the Gold (the big prize), John Creasey (New Blood) and Ian Fleming Steel Daggers, about which more later.

Up for the International Dagger for best crime, thriller, suspense or spy novel translated into English for UK publication were:

• Karin Alvtegen, Shadow, translated by McKinley Burnett
• Arnaldur Indriðason, The Arctic Chill, translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Crib
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, translated by Reg Keeland
• Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer, translated by Don Bartlett
• Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead, translated by Marlaine Delargy
• Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man, translated by Siân Reynolds

Other short-listed authors whose names have popped up at Detectives Beyond Borders include Sean Chercover, Colin Cotterill, R.J. Ellory, Ariana Franklin and Peter James.

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

• Colin Cotterill wins the Dagger in the Library award.
• Catherine O'Keefe wins the Debut Dagger for The Pathologist.
• A big huzzah to Short Story Dagger winner Sean Chercover, who becomes the first Noir at the Bar guest to win a Dagger.
• And finally, Fred Vargas and translator Sian Reynolds (a previous Detectives Beyond Borders interview subject) win their third International Dagger in four years for The Chalk Circle Man.

Congratulations to the winners, thanks to Ali Karim for his live Twitter updates, and, on a personal note, an expression of amazement at how quickly the presentations went. At the Oscars, the winner for sound engineering in a short foreign-language animated film would be still be thanking his wife, his producers, God, and the good people of his hometown.

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

And now, your opinions, please. What was the biggest Dagger surprise? That five of the six short-listed International Dagger books were from Nordic countries? That the one non-Nordic entrant won? That French novels have won every International Dagger? That three of those have gone to a woman named Fred?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A new blog about international crime fiction from folks who write the stuff

It's International Crime Authors Reality Check, a cooperative effort from Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill, Matt Beynon Reese and Barbara Nadel, each of whom plans one post a week.

The opening lineup includes How the Devil Lost its Vagina from Cotterill, Quick, woman, go and get the Koran! from Rees, The Elements of Crime Fiction in Foreign Settings from Moore, and a modest greeting from Nadel.

The site also includes short biographies, information about the authors' books, and news links. I've written about three of the authors here on Detectives Beyond Borders, most recently about Cotterill's Curse of the Pogo Stick last week, and I'll look forward to adding Nadel to the list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More on Colin Cotterill's spirits

Colin Cotterill is the supernaturalist's answer to readers who don't like the supernatural in their crime stories. Here's a bit more from Curse of the Pogo Stick, fifth novel in Cotterill's series about Dr. Siri Paiboun of Vientiane, Laos:

"These small bamboo structures were miniature reconstructions of actual bridges but in this case they had no water to cross. They traditionally offered a shortcut for lost souls to return to their host. One was customary. Four suggested a hell of a lot of souls had gone missing from this particular house."

"A hell of a lot of souls" is wonderful, resonant, funny and unexpected. It 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:

"My biggest problem as a practicing cynic, however, is that I'm aligned, against my will and better judgment, to another world. ... I don't know how it's possible, but damn it, it's there. So I resort to the rules of the supernatural. I begin by seeing whether the incredible can be explained through their rules. And when that world tells me something is off-kilter and implausible, I know I have to think as a human. I have to use logic. My visit to the Otherwold told me I had to look for earthly solutions to this mystery."

That's one of the nicer accounts by a fictional detective of his own methods. Among the books' achievements, in addition to their engaging, sympathetic characters, their compassion, and their jabs at Communist bureaucracy, is that they invite respectful consideration, without dogma, mumbo-jumbo or embarrassment and with good humor, of the spiritual world and its role in human lives.

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

The illustration of Curse of the Pogo Stick's UK cover comes from the author's own Web site, one of the cleverer and more amusing of its kind. Take a look.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Colin Cotterill has fun with the spirits

In previous books Colin Cotterill invoked the recent history and the spiritual traditions of Laos. In the early pages of Curse of the Pogo Stick, he has similar respectful fun with ancient history and spirits.

After narrating how the Hmong people lost their earliest written records, Cotterill offers this:

"The spirit of the first-ever Hmong shaman, See Yee, looked up from the Otherworld and was mightily pissed that his people could be so careless."

Good fun, I'd say though, on the evidence of my previous reading of Cotterill, not at all out of character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Hear Colin Cotterill speak

I've just found this video interview with Colin Cotterill on Krimi-Couch ("Denn lesen ist spannender") under the title "Wo in Afrika liegt Laos?" ("Where in Africa is Laos?").

Cotterill is the author of six novels about Dr. Siri Paiboun, the oldest and only coroner in Laos after the communist takeover in the 1970s. He talks about crime fiction and his reasons for writing it, about why he chose a protagonist in his seventies, and about war, politics and life in Laos, among other interesting subjects.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

One more post about “Thirty-Three Teeth”

A few months ago, I invoked D.H. Lawrence’s poem “A Sane Revolution” when posting about Colin Cotterill's novel Anarchy and Old Dogs. The poem begins "If you make a revolution, make it for fun," and I thought it captured nicely the political attitudes of Cotterill and his protagonst, Dr. Siri Paiboun.

Now I'm reading Cotterill's Thirty-Three Teeth, and I thought of Lawrence's poem once more when I came to the following:

"Haeng ... let loose with one of his renowned maxims.

"`That's the spirit, Siri. It's moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the party.'

"If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he'd often seen on the faces of so many Party members."

If there's a better writer of gently humorous, satirically tinged, politically edged, occasionally spiritual, exotically set crime novels than Colin Cotterill, I can't think of who it might be.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Politically disillusioned crime-fiction good guys

A humorous passage in Thirty-Three Teeth plus a comment from Matt Rees in an interview here last week got me thinking about disillusioned crime-fiction characters whose disillusionement is political. Here’s the passage:

“`All right, then. Let's see if we can get any information from the information department.' ...

"[Siri] was a remarkably patient man, but he had no time for incompetence in the government sector. He and Boua had fought for most of their lives to end corrupt systems and he had no intention of being part of one. In his most officious voice, he belted out: `Good god, man! What do you think you're doing? This is a government department, not a rest home. What if there was some sporting emergency or something?'"

Here's the comment, about a character named Khamis Zeydan, police chief of Bethlehem:

"He's typical of high-level Palestinian military men – though not those with the absolute top jobs. Most of them are very disillusioned. They thought they'd come back from exile to be policemen, and suddenly young gunmen took over the streets and they weren't allowed to do anything about it. Khamis Zeydan is based on a friend of mine who introduced me to many of his colleagues in this discontented echelon of the Palestinian military."

The characters, one a protagonist, the other a protagonist's dangerous friend, are both disillusioned revolutionaries who have not let their disillusionment carry them over to the dark side, at least not entirely. That old formula about walking the mean streets who are not themselves mean proves adaptable to cultural and political circumstances different from Raymond Chandler's.

That's two disillusioned revolutionaries who nonetheless stayed on the good side. Can you think of any more crime-fiction heroes or helpers whose disillusionment was political?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Matt Rees

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your protagonist

Colin Cotterill’s novel Thirty-Three Teeth gives its hero a deliciously unheroic entrance:

“On his way to the back, [Civilai] passed a small room where piles of clothes told him he was nearing a primitive life form. In the back yard, he discovered it. Dr. Siri Paiboun, reluctant national coroner, confused psychic, disheartened communist, swung gently on a hammock strung between two jackfruit saplings. A larger man would have brought them both down.”

That beautiful little piece of writing ought to make any reader smile. It’s also wonderfully efficient, telling us everything we need to know about Dr. Siri’s profession, his attitudes, his mental state, and even his size.

And now, readers, how about you? What are your favorite first glimpses of an important character in crime fiction? What does the author do in just a few words to make you feel you know well a character you may never have met before?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Older protagonists

Back when I posted about the humor and fun in Colin Cotterill's Anarchy and Old Dogs, I neglected to mention two salient facts about the protagonist, Dr. Siri Paiboun: He's seventy-three years old, and age and experience have brought him wisdom and perspective:

"Inspired by the industry of his colleagues, Siri went directly to the ward of private rooms, found one empty, and lay back on the starched sheet for a brief rest. He woke four hours later. He considered this his contribution to the project. A team needs an alert, conscious leader. To make himself even more qualified for the job, he stopped off at the canteen for noodles. These were the leadership qualities he most admired in himself."

Closer to home than Siri's Laos, this year's Bouchercon in Alaska included a panel on geezer noir, and Busted Flush Press published Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir, to which Cotterill contributed a story. (You'll find a review of the collection at Crime Spree if you scroll down to the sixth page.)

Your questions, readers, are this: What older crime-fiction protagonists can you think of? What role does their age play in the stories in which they appear?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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If you make a revolution, make it for fun

There’s plenty of humor in The Coroner’s Lunch, Colin Cotterill’s first novel about Dr. Siri Paiboun, sole coroner in Laos. Some of the broadest jokes are at the expense of communist officials and functionaries. There’s plenty of humor in the fourth Siri novel, Anarchy and Old Dogs, as well, but the humor is directed more at politics than politicians and thus dugs deeper.

Some examples:

In this idealistic state, Civilai had chosen to ignore that absence in Laos of one of the fundamental components for a successful communist revolution. There was no rebellious Lao proletariat. There were no factories in which to organize unions, and hardly any working class. ... But by the time the two young men arrived back in Asia in 1929, the seeds of revolt had been planted in their fertile minds. Communism would save their repressed countrymen whether they liked it or not.

and

Haeng held out the book.

“What is it?”

“It’s Chairman Mao’s `Little Red Book.’ We’ve had it translated into Lao.”

“What on earth for?”

and

“A good socialist is not a dustbin, with a closed lid. He is a letter box, always open to receive news.”

“Well, that explains everything. I’ll do my best to keep my slot open.”

That’s all delightful, I think, and it edges Anarchy and Old Dogs closer to satire than the earlier book.

What other crime fiction does this? What other crime writers are satirical, aiming at serious targets, while retaining their sense of humor?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Disjointed (me, not Colin Cotterill’s book)

I’m reading three or four or five books, including non-crime, so posting may be less cohesive than unusual the next few days. Feel free to respond coherently if you’d like to, though.

First, I may have to retract some of the spleen I vented this week at self-reference in crime fiction. The cause is an exchange from Colin Cotterill’s Anarchy and Old Dogs that includes the following:

“`Very well. In that case, I suspect what we have here is a message written in invisible ink.’

“Phosy raised one eyebrow. `And how would an old bush surgeon know a thing like that?’

“`Inspector Phosy, allow me to reintroduce you to Inspector Maigret of the Palais de Justice. I became very involved in a number of his cases as they were outlined in the pages of l’Oeuvre while I was in France. Unlike ourselves, Inspector Maigret has the very good sense to be fictional, and thus can dispense with such human annoyances as inefficiency and budget restraints… ’

“`I’m impressed. And all this time I thought there was nothing positive to be gained from reading mysteries.’

“`You’d be surprised.’”

Why does it work? The exchange is almost a full page long, which helps. The conversation is believable, and it’s allowed to develop, as a real conversation would; why shouldn’t two colleagues chat about mysteries?

Further, I suspect that many readers are complicit in the sentiment that Cotterill’s Dr. Siri expresses. We indulge his gentle acknowledgment that Maigret is not quite real because it accounts for our love of Maigret. (And that in itself is nice work on Cotterill’s part. Attempts to explain author Georges Simenon’s fantastic popularity are generally far weightier than Cotterill’s sensible observation.)

Third, the exchange is nicely paced, a gentle comedy sketch in miniature, a little story, and not a string of annoyingly self-referential quips.

Fourth, some of the lines are funny – gently so, of course.

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

I hinted strongly at incoherence, so here's a non-crime-fiction note: In a possible first in its years-long history, the comic strip Sally Forth was mildly amusing yesterday.

End of note.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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