And another thing about Crimefest

On the eve of Crimefest 2013 (or, if you prefer, on the threshold or the cusp), here's a reminder from one of my previous trips to that festival that there's more than crime to this fest.

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  I've written about my trip to Bristol, England, for CrimeFest 2009. I failed to mention that Bristol is home to Aardman Animations, which means it's also home to those two lovable characters at left.

Unfortunately, though Wallace and Gromit are featured in a promotional poster for Bristol, our guide said Aardman offers no tours. Instead, then, why not hop over and catch the duo at their own Web site?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Nothing if not diacritical: More conventional wisdom

On the eve (or, if you prefer, the brink or the cusp) of Bouchercon 2009, here are some favorite things that fellow convention-goers have said or written at, about or after my three previous crime-fiction conventions:

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"Chubby Cambodian hotties."

— Christa Faust, Noircon 2008

"A KNOB is a COCK!"

— Ali Karim, Bouchercon 2008

"For years I wrote poems, nothing but poems, and all but about five of them were shite."

— Ken Bruen, Noircon 2008

"Tense vowels don't do a man's reputation any good."

— Don Bartlett, Crimefest 2009
(After I'd worried about pronouncing
Jo Nesbø's name correctly. If "Joe
Nesbow" is good enough for the man
who translates Nesbø's books into
English, at least when he's addressing
an English-speaking audience,
it's good enough for me.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Unconventional

I recently ran into a fellow who was in New York for BookExpo America as a fan. The man, whose professional affiliation is outside the book business, marvelled at fans' hesitation to mingle with authors outside scheduled events at book conventions. Those fans, he said, pass the evenings in their rooms among their newly acquired books, missing the chance to fraternize at the hotel bar with the people who wrote those books.

I mention this because next up on my list is a book by an author with whom I chatted while sipping dry sherry at CrimeFest 2009: Chris Ewan. Seems to me that sort of thing is part of what conventions are for.

So, here's a question for convention goers: What books have you read because you met the author or liked what he or she had to say at a convention, whether during a panel, afterward, at the bar, in the hotel lobby or otherwise?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thank you, driver, for getting me here

Two of my pleasant Bristol and CrimeFest memories involve buses. First was the tour guide, trapped by the demands of his profession on the open top level of a double-decker during a rainstorm while the rest of us fled to shelter below. There, we smiled sympathetically at his fretting and muttering over the still-operating public-address system. (My favorite bit: "[Bump, bump] Oh, heavens! My coffee's gone!")

The same day, a large concrete plaza opposite my hotel hosted a fair devoted to old buses, of which there are apparently lots of devotees in Southwest England. This meeting featured buses, models of buses, books about buses and plenty of gorgeous old photographs of buses. Some of these exhibits were beautiful examples of mid-twentieth-century industrial design, and it's easy to understand the affection one might feel for them.

It's a novel experience to see images so suffused at once with nostalgia and advanced design. One half-expects to see a long, thin tobacco pipe emerge from these buses, followed by the long, thin form of Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot.

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

The Hay-on-Wye literary mega-festival has just wrapped up. Once again, Rhian Davies of It's a Crime! (or a mystery...) was there, blogging for the BBC. Read her reports here. Go here for more BBC Hay fever.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Post-CrimeFest: The legal fight over the "Millennium Trilogy"

The Sunday Times offers this wrap-up of the legal wrangling over Stieg Larsson's literary estate. The article is worth reading despite its stupid headline.
© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day IV

Super moderator Martin Edwards acknowledged that the members of his "Edge of Doom: What Pushes Your Characters Over the Edge" panel were previously unfamiliar to him. This may have accounted for the general nature of some of the questions. And this, in turn, let some surprising answers shine through.

Caro Ramsay put a nice spin on the old idea of writers who say their characters are in charge. For her, writing a novel is a collaborative effort, "like writing a script and giving it to actors I know very well."

"The plot," said M.R. Hall, who brought television experience to his novel writing, "has to drive the character to the edge of destruction." To this, Ramsay replied that "Plot drives the writer to the edge of destruction."

Brian McGilloway cited Shakespeare among the writers he admires and made a good case for the Bard's crime-fiction chops. Shakespeare incorporated suspense, tight structure and, of especially timely interest to your humble blogkeeper, "gallows humor following a death." (At an earlier panel, I'd cited Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie for effective use of humor at dark moments. And Shakespeare and crime has been a recurrent interest here at Detectives Beyond Borders. I invite McGilloway and other readers to have a look.)

And I cheered when Steven Hague added prose style to plot and character as key constituent of crime writing.

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

Edwards then stepped across CrimeFest's suite of rooms and retained his title at the festival's "Crossfire: Criminal Mastermind" quiz. I was torn between casting my lot with him or with Simon Brett as my choice to win. I chose Brett. Had I chosen Edwards, I'd have won a free pass to the festival next year.

A short Saturday night bar chat with Brett was nonetheless one of my CrimeFest highlights. He was honored for his long and prolific crime-writing career, but he'd worked in radio before he began writing books and was the first producer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the acknowledgements to the book version of The Hitchhiker's Guide, author Douglas Adams thanks "Simon Brett, for starting the whole thing off." I enjoyed the radio broadcasts and the first few books, so it was a pleasure to enjoy a few minutes of Guide and Adams stories from Brett.

Finally, an apology to Rafe McGregor. He, too, was on the team that kicked my own Shots Detectives squad into second place in the pub quiz.

See the complete CrimeFest program here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day III, Part II: Appetizers, dinner and dessert

Donna Moore, Declan Burke, Cara Black and Paul Johnston's panel called "Natural-Born Killers: Maxim's Picks" (the name honored moderator Maxim Jakubowski) took meandering paths with brief stops at several interesting destinations.

Moore recalled her childhood admiration for the Nancy Drew books, for the heroine, her handsome boyfriend, her fun friends and young Nancy's car. But then, she said, "I actually read one a few years ago and decided Nancy Drew was a bit of a whiner, her boyfriend was pathetic, and her friends were neurotic. I still liked the car, though." Perhaps you won't be surprised that Moore's first novel, Go to Helena Handbasket, pokes fun at every crime-fiction cliche Moore could think of.

Burke's comment that "I'm fascinated by the power of the Internet and what it can do" sparked a discussion of that medium's potential, both good and bad, for writers and publishers. Burke works hard to exploit that potential, both in his own fiction and as keeper of the Crime Always Pays blog. If Ken Bruen and Colin Bateman are godfathers to the current wave of Irish crime fiction, Burke is the godfather of Irish crime blogging, so he knows what he's talking about. Still, the discussion was leavened by a bracing sense of dread and blissfully free of the wifty optimism (pure shite, really) that can infect discussions of consumer technology.

I also quite liked Johnston's comment on writing about a country where one lives but is not a native: "That book I wrote about terrorism in Greece, I don't think a Greek could have written."

=========

The baked cod at the gala dinner in the King's Room was more than acceptable, accompanied by waves of ecstatic verbiage to my left, and graceful acknowledgment to my right. The former came from Ali Karim, world's most voluble booster of Stieg Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire). The latter came from Reg Keeland, the books' English translator.

Each guest of honor (Simon Brett, Håkan Nesser, Andrew Taylor) gave a short, funny, speech, joyously irreverent of the proceedings. My favorite of the three was Taylor's deconstruction of the prizes he'd been given for each of his many Dagger awards from the Crime Writers' Association. Fook, the gent is twisted.

=========

As a rule, the reporters' notebooks shut when the hotel bar opens. Still, I can't resist mentioning Kevin Wignall's scintillating impersonation of Marlon Brando as the Godfather, cut short only when Wignall almost swallowed one of the napkins he'd stuffed in his cheeks.

As always, view the complete CrimeFest program here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day III, Part I: Interviews

Håkan Nesser, interviewed by Ann Cleeves, shed light on that recurrent question of Scandinavian gloom and Scandinavian authors. Scandinavians, he said, are dour; their authors are not: "I wanted [my protagonist] to be, at least to start with, depressed. ... Happy people don't need their humor."

Dour Swedes may be, Nesser said, but not cripplingly so: "We're not that depressed, but we don't talk a lot. That's good for a crime story. You keep things inside for thirty years," and then they just come out.

Ten of Nesser's twenty-two novels have featured Inspector Van Veeteren; four of these have been translated into English. The remaining six would likely change Nesser's image in the English-speaking world. The books translated thus far have featured villains with whom the reader may sympathize deeply. But that changed: "There are two really bad guys in numbers nine and ten." After the fifth in the series, Nesser said, Van Veeteren retires from the police and opens a bookstore instead.

Nesser also discussed his series about a character with the whimsical name of Gunnar Barbarotti, a series as yet untranslated into English, a series whose premise seems an odd mix of whimsy and Ingemar Bergman: "It's a thing between [Barbarotti] and God, and God has to prove he exists. ... If the prayer is fulfilled, God will get one point, or, in more important cases, one or two points."

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

Two interviews with authors I have not yet read offered insights I found especially pleasing. Andrew Taylor told Peter Guttridge that he loved Jane Austen, and Simon Brett told Gyles Brandreth that Austen was the one person he'd like to meet in Heaven, Taylor also cited P.G. Wodehouse as an early love.

So I'll take a tentative stab at charting some tendencies of British crime writers: They love Austen, they love Wodehouse, and they have a decided position, yes or no, on whether their novels have fundamentally moral concerns. At least this was true of some writers here, and the penchant for Austen and Wodehouse is by no means restricted to writers of what Americans call cozies or to any other type of mystery. Not should it be. Austen and Wodehouse are towering giants, a Hammett and a Chandler of English writing.

One remark was sufficient to get me interested in reading Taylor, who is English and this year's recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement: "Until ... 1934, it would have been utterly possible for us to slip gradually into being a Fascist state."

Oh, and he offered a valuable tip for beginning crime writers: "With the first novel, I had a corpse, and I went on from there. Corpses are good."

Click here for the full CrimeFest schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day II: The spirit is willing, and the flesh makes a pretty good go as well

My own highlight from Crimefest 2009, Day II? Perhaps it was Jo Nesbø's English translator, Don Bartlett, relieving me of anxieties about how to pronounce Nesbø's name. If "Joe Nesbow" is good enough for the man who translates his books, it's good enough for me.

Or maybe it was L.C. Tyler's professed admiration for Allan Guthrie. Tyler writes comic cozy mysteries; Guthrie's work is anything but cozy. One author's respect for another who writes fiction of a different type is one of those salutary, mind-opening reminders that make events like this a joy.

Another was Leighton Gage's answer that his books begin with plot. If my memory serves me well, he was the only one of eight writers on two panels who gave that answer to the "Plot or character?" question.

Stephen Booth offered the disarming admission that "I didn't want to write about middle-aged alcoholics because other people had done it better" and the warning that too faithful a portrayal of procedure can be deadly in a police procedural.

Ros Schwartz, Dagger-winning translator of Dominique Manotti, offered shocking assessments of the miserable working conditions of literary translators in much of Europe and contrasted these with the far better environment for translators in the Scandinavian countries.

Håkan Nesser, in answer to a question about Nordic authors' reputation for dourness, noted their penchant for social criticism: "If your mission is to criticize society, you can't be very comical." (Editor's note: Your humble blogkeeper is author of an article on humor in Nordic crime fiction, including Nesser's. I believe that the general seriousness of crime fiction from the Nordic countries throws such humor as there is into especially sharp relief.)

Declan Burke, Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall made up a panel on writing about villains. An observation of Mosby's neatly encapsulated the way the line between hero and villain can blur: "Every villain is the hero of his own story."

See the day's complete program here. And Burke discharged his bar debt in a prompt, gentlemanly manner.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest Day I: It's in the bag

The formal CrimeFest proceedings got off to a smashing start, with a panel on psychological thrillers moderated by Margaret Murphy and also including Jenni Mills, Steve Mosby, Sheila Quigley and Claire Seeber. One highlight might be useful to would-be authors: Each writer talked of an experience, small or large, that germinated into a book. In one case, it was repeated visits to a young relative in a mental hospital. In another, it was panic induced when confined in a narrow passage in a cave. Lesson: Use your imagination, and see where it takes you.

My question to Mosby about serial killers who act in the name of civilized virtues won me a bag of books for the cleverest question.

A panel on historical mysteries offered a practical answer to a question I'd only been able to formulate in theoretical terms: How does one remain faithful to one's historical setting while writing for an audience of one's own time? The panelists were Roger Hudson, who sets his work in fifth-century B.C. Athens; Ruth Downie and Jane Finnis, each of whom sets her work in Roman Britain; and Roz Southey, whose protagonist is an eighteenth-century musician. Moderator was Edward Marston, whose sets work in several historical periods.

Finnis spoke of a character scarred by war, and of the difficulties writing about such a character without the psychological vocabulary that would be anachronistic to the first-century Roman world. The character suffered from what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Finnis noted, but she could of course not use that term. Nor could she offer the insight that this is what happens to people exposed for a long period to war: "It just had to be left to the reader to make that deduction."

My question to Southey won me another bag of books, or would have had not a fellow attendee pointed out that I'd already won one. I was thus deprived of the opportunity to make a magnanimous gesture and voluntarily surrender the second bag.

The panel on "The Lost Weekend: Eric Ambler and Who? — Forgotten Authors" could keep me talking and reading for months, and I'll likely read and post about some of these authors. Superbly moderated by Martin Edwards, the discussion also included Mary Andrea Clarke, Barry Forshaw, Declan Hughes and Sarah Rayne.

The current authors praised their predecessors for streaks of humor and for gorgeous prose style, two elements I love that are rare these days. Hughes said of Margaret Millar that "She's also, sentence-by-sentence, I think, one of the crime writers who can write. ... She's a great plotter without smacking the least of the Golden Age."

My question about why forgotten books are such a popular topic these days sparked a lively discussion among the panelists about nostalgia. Alas, I won no bag.

Next: The pub quiz. As my teammate Ali Karim would say, "Mental!!!"

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

NEWS FLASH: Pub-quiz result: A tie for second place. The prize: A bag of books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pre-CrimeFest

(Photo by Mike Gove)

Your humble blogkeeper was too jet-lagged and congested to do much of anything today except take a desultory walk around Bristol with a brief stop to have lunch and watch cricket on television.

I did see enough to note that Bristol seems to have done much with its old waterfront. This has included glitzy projects with lots of shiny metal and the word millennium, but it also incorporates old trains, track and tow-boats, none decayed but some with just enough of the ramshackle about them to remind visitors what this city was built on and how distant that past has become.

These reminders take in a plaque that notes Bristol's role in the dreadful triangular trade: arms and other metal goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and raw goods such as sugar back to England. The whole reminds me a bit of Belfast, with its waterfront plans that include a museum around the slip where the Titanic was built, and the massive Harland and Wolff cranes.

Tomorrow: Crime time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest — and what I'll miss by being there

CrimeFest 2009 opens Thursday with an international galaxy of crime-fiction stars. I'll be there, too.

Among those stars is Leighton Gage, author of the Inspector Mario Silva series set in Brazil. I've just started Buried Strangers, the second in the series, but that's enough to report on the opening chapters' deftly executed hook.

Amid brief reintroductions of character conflicts from the first novel, Blood of the Wicked, Gage portrays discovery of what appears a crime horrendous in its scale and barbarity. Any number of authors might have given us pounding hearts, breathless adjectives and appalled attempts to come to grips with the enormity of— but you've read that all before.

I will say no more except to suggest that Gage's severely understated execution of the scenes is one hell of an attention grabber.

Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Leighton Gage here. And next year, read the third Mario Silva mystery, Dying Gasp.

======

As CrimeFest gets under way Thursday in Bristol, England, one of America's greatest crime writers, Elmore Leonard, will be reading from his new novel, answering questions and signing books at the Free Library back in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest IV: Gonzo publishing

(Here's the fourth in a series of posts about authors who'll be at CrimeFest 2009 in Bristol, England, this week. I'll be there, too, standing on my tip-toes in the back row of the group picture.)

Big O author Declan Burke, whose name you may know, has announced an experiment in publishing. My fellow CrimeFest attendee is seeking to make his novel A Gonzo Noir, circulated heretofore in the traditional Internet mode, available in print as well. Join me in wishing the book good luck in finding a publisher.

In the meantime, click on the Gonzo Noir link above and enjoy exchanges like this:

‘If you want my opinion,’ he says, ‘the conflicts that work best are between the reader and a character they like who’s doing stuff they wouldn’t generally tolerate. Your mistake was to make Karlsson a total wack-job. No one who wasn’t a complete fruit could like him.’

‘Okay, so we make you likeable. What then?’

‘We blow up the hospital.’

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest III: Interview with Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser will be a featured author at CrimeFest 2009. (I'll be there, too, as a humbly worshipful paying customer.) Nesser's appearance coincides with the publication of Woman With Birthmark, the fourth of his novels about Inspector Van Veeteren to be translated from Swedish into English. The original version won the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy's prize for best novel in 1996, the second of Nesser's three victories in that category.

In the third of a series of posts about CrimeFest authors, here's an interview I did with Nesser last spring, upon publication of the Van Veeteren novel Mind's Eye.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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

Readers of translated crime fiction know that series are often translated out of order. Håkan Nesser's is no different. The newly published Mind's Eye, third of Nesser's ten Van Veeteren novels to become available in English, after Borkmann's Point (second in the sequence) and The Return (third), is the first of the series, published in Swedish in 1993.

The novel tells the story of a high school teacher named Janek Mitter who wakes up hung over and finds his wife dead in the bathtub. He struggles to recover his memories of the fatal night, cracks jokes and makes a mockery of his trial, and finds himself confined to a mental institution. Then Mitter himself is murdered, and the investigation and mystery begin in earnest.

The book contains much that will be familiar to Nesser's readers: deadpan humor, sympathy even for unsympathetic characters, and delightfully true-to-life oddball observations. Since this was the first in the series, a reader might naturally wonder if the novel is more autobiographical than those that followed, in the proverbial manner of first novels everywhere. I did, so I asked Nesser a few questions.
===========================================

What have English readers missed by having only three of the Van Veeteren novels available in their language?

You’ve missed seven books, but hopefully Pantheon will make up for the loss. Next one is published next April. Woman with Birthmark (Kvinna med födelsemärke) got the award for best crime novel in Swedish 199-something. (Note to readers: The year was 1996, when Nesser beat a field that included Åke Edwardson and Henning Mankell.)

You were a teacher. To what extent does Elmer Suurna, the headmaster in Mind’s Eye whose only ambition was “to keep his handsome red-oak desktop clean and shiny,” reflect your own disillusionment with that profession?

My disillusionment is not that big. The main problem with Swedish schools is too much administration, too little money. Most headmasters are good. I have seen one or two like Suurna, though.

You named your protagonist, Van Veeteren, for Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier stories. What do you find attractive about Van de Wetering’s work? How is Grijpstra and De Gier’s world view similar to Van Veeteren’s?

Not sure. I enjoyed De Gier and Grijpstra a lot, of course, perhaps the way they sort of look in the wrong direction most of the time, not really concerned about their work. But perhaps Van Veeteren is different in this respect.

Minor characters in Mind’s Eye are named Joensuu, Mankel and Kellerman. Why those particular crime writers? And what other writers have I missed?

Well, most people like to have a name, and it doesn’t cost a lot to give knowledgeable readers some meaningless hints.

Both this book and The Return display strong sympathy with characters who have been in prison or otherwise institutionalized. What are the origins of this sympathy?

With different circumstances the good guy would have been the bad guy. It’s important to understand the motive, and to not demonize the criminal. Some murders are more understandable than others, and those are also more interesting to write about.

The great Swiss crime writer Friedrich Glauser also showed special sympathy for institutionalized or otherwise downtrodden characters. Do you know his books?

No, never read Glauser. Heard of him though.

What plans do your U.S., U.K. or Australian publishers have for issuing more English translations of your work?

See 1). Also I believe they’ve bought a fifth title from the series.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Hakan Nesser

CrimeFest blogfest II: What's traditional about a traditional mystery?

(Here's my second in a series of posts about authors who plan to attend CrimeFest 2009 in Bristol, England, next month. I'll be there, too, working when I should be having fun and having fun when I should be working.)

What's traditional about a traditional mystery? If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, I might have said traditional = cozy = prominent role for old dear = village or country-house setting = knitting = cute animals.

Then I read what Ruth Dudley Edwards had to say on the subject. In the United States, she writes on her Web site, "the distinction is made between cosies and hard-boiled, terms which are unknown here except to the cognoscenti. I am definitely in the cosy league – what Reg Hill, who is there too, calls ‘the Jane Austen end of the crime writing spectrum’."

One always knew that Britain had Christie and the U.S. had Chandler and that the dichotomy might have echoes to this day. Still, having just read Edwards' The English School of Murder, I was surprised to see the author place herself in the cozy league. The novel, after all, is set almost entirely in London, and it includes passing and not-so-passing references to drug use, homosexuality, menages-a-trois and any number of up-to-date political and cultural jabs and other references, not to mention the occasional four-letter word.

I've just opened Martin Edwards' Waterloo Sunset, and I've noticed reflections on urban growth and boosterism, not to mention a character who just might be disturbingly demented. I hadn't expected this from an author who has proclaimed his allegiance to traditional mysteries. Heck, the man even named his novel for a song by the Kinks.

I know something about what a traditional mystery isn't: full of explicit sex and wrenching violence. But sharpen my thinking, and tell me what a contemporary traditional mystery is.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives Beyond Borders' CrimeFest blogfest: Ruth Dudley Edwards

I'm off to Bristol for CrimeFest 2009 next month. Between now and then, I'll devote some posts to authors and others who'll join me there.

First up is Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose novel Murdering Americans won CrimeFest's Last Laugh Award 2008. That was the eleventh novel in her series about the splendidly named Robert Amiss; The English School of Murder is the third.

I may devote a post to Edwards' satire, but here it's humor's turn, specifically Edwards' talent for maintaining a tone through incidental action and description. This line, in the fourth chapter, without having any immediate bearing on the plot or anything to do with Edwards' targets, gives a fair idea:

"`Suspicious,' observed Amiss, who was losing interest rapidly."

The novel is set in an English-language school, and Dudley is not the only crime writer to find such a school fertile ground for a story of crime and corruption. The other half of the title's wordplay applies, too. Amiss' friend Ellis Pooley is a genial and wide-ranging connoisseur of crime novels.

A special treat for P.G. Wodehouse fans: Amiss' improvised effort to trap a recalcitrant cat in an early chapter is a tribute to "Jeeves and the Impending Doom," my favorite Wodehouse story and one of his best.

More to come, maybe.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009