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.

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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

It's noir, but is it always Dublin?

It's an odd collection so far, its oddity not entirely explained by Ken Bruen's introduction: "At first, it was straightforward — Dublin authors to write on their city ... Then we turned the concept on its head, as you do in noir. The Irish are fascinated by how we appear to the world, so let's have a look, we thought, at how this city appears from the outside."

The result is an odd assortment of stories from American, British, Irish and Canadian writers, Eoin Colfer, Laura Lippman, Jim Fusilli, Olen Steinhauer, Reed Farrel Coleman and Bruen himself among them. Why odd? Because there are some terrific stories here, only some left me wondering what they had to do with Dublin or Ireland. With others, the connection was there, but self-conscious and seemingly grafted on as an afterthought. In one or two, the dialect and pronunciation were grating. Bruen writes that "You won't find many leprechauns or bodhráns here — and not one top o' the mornin'." Fair enough, but a pack of writers who make their characters say "feckin' this" and "feckin' that" all the time can be just as bad.

What binds the collection, then? Well, a number of men wind up bound, to chairs or to beds, victims or potential victims of revenge. Two of the collection’s best stories are revenge tales, from Craig McDonald and Laura Lippman, McDonald’s because of a clever twist and Lippman’s, noirest of noir, true to the bleak spirit of the genre but new all the same, with a punch-in-the-gut double twist. I also like Duane Swierczynski’s “Lonely and Gone,” dark as its title and with a canny use of untranslated Irish Gaelic that adds to the strange, buzzing, off-kilter atmosphere. And John Rickards appears to have torn up whatever guidelines he was given when he wrote his weird, paranoid, hilarious supernatural romp, "Wish."

Eoin Colfer’s “Taking on PJ” is another highlight. It takes a special kind of alchemy to mix violence with laugh-out-loud humor and make both work. No one does it better than Bruen himself, and Colfer is just about as good. It’s no wonder Bruen chose “Taking on PJ” to open the collection. With its accent and its attitude, there’s no mistaking where this one takes place.

(Click here for the complete table of contents of Dublin Noir.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Irish crime fiction
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