Crimefest 2017, Part II: Savvy programming and more pictures

This year's Crimefest offered some clever programming, notably continued revision of the festival's final event. For years, that was a Criminal Mastermind quiz, which Martin Edwards won so many times that he was finally barred, and in which I finished second to Peter Guttridge in 2012 and would have won if the English could speak better English.

Barry Forshaw, Peter Guttridge, Mike Ripley

Last year's Sunday afternoon send-off pitted a team of three male crime writers against three female counterparts in a quiz that involved guns, wandering hands, and lots of salacious giggling. This year Barry Forshaw, author of the new book American Noir, faced Mike Ripley, author of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, about the Golden Age of the British thriller, in a quiz-cum-yukfest moderated by Guttridge. Once again, more good fun.

Steve Mosby, Kevin WIgnall

Earlier, Steve Mosby made a discerning and intelligent moderator of a panel on "Past And Present: Skipping Through Time To Create A Story," and I teased some good answers out of Parker Bilal and Katti Hiekkapelto in the question period that followed a panel on political crime fiction. And Kat Hall led Mario Giordano, Merle Kröger, Volker Kutscher, and Melanie Raabe through a discussion of German crime fiction that included brief readings in two languages. The authors read well.

Katti Hiekkapelto, Kjell Ola Dahl

And now, a few more photos from Crimefest 2017, by Peter Rozovsky on special assignment from Detectives Beyond Borders, except where noted.

Don Bartlett, Karen Sullivan

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Steve Cavanagh

Bristol Cathedral

Nadia Dalbuono

Me at a panel, courtesy Ali Karim

Ali Karim and your humble blogkeeper prior to
bolstering our strength with beer and fish at
Catch 22 in Bristol.

Me, Martyn Waites, Kevin Wignall, and Mike
Stotter looking like a bunch of guys named Bert,
courtesy Ali Karim.

Crimefest 2017, Part I

Another edition of this fine Bristol crime fiction convention has wrapped up, the most enjoyable of the seven Crimefests I've attended even though a seagull shit on my head the convention's first day. Details of the convention will follow over the next few days, minus the bird shit.

Martin Edwards

In the meantime, a few words about Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesey, as entertaining and informative a combination of interviewer/moderator and subject//panelist as has ever graced a crime festival stage. I've read just a few novels from Lovesey's extensive output, but they include one of the best of all angry-cop novels (The Last Detective) and the most virtuosic performance by a crime writer that I have ever been privileged to read (Bertie and the Seven Bodies). Lovesey was a guest of honor at this year's Crimefest, and it was a pleasure to see him interviewed on stage by Edwards, to hear him hold forth during a panel on short stories, and to offer my compliments on his work, to which he reacted with humility and good humo(u)r.

Peter Lovesey

Edwards has changed my ideas about traditional mysteries, served as a model of how to moderate a panel, and won a number of crime fiction quizzes in which I finished second several times and fifth once. He was also a member of a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, where we enjoyed a convivial pre-convention dinner discussing his subject for the panel (Michael Gilbert), the legal profession (Edwards is a lawyer), and the differences between the profession as practiced in the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Edwards and Lovesey obviously love the work they do, are good at it, and are engaging and entertaining when talking about their own writing and the history of crime fiction. Edwards often attends Bouchercons and Lovesey will be a guest of honor at Bouchercon 2019 in Dallas. You should see these guys on this side of the ocean or that.

Kati Hiekkapelto

Janet Laurence, Peter Lovesey

And now, some more photos of Crimefest by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Beyond Borders.

Parker Bilal, Steve Cavanagh

Paul Hardisty

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Before the gala dinner

Ali Karim in the gutter, Mike
Stotter's eyes on the stars

At the convention hotel

Why you should cop The Plea

Steve Cavanagh, seen previously in this space as author of the hyper-kinetic legal thriller The Defence (published in the U.S. as The Defense) and as an enthusiastic participant in highjinks at Crimefest, is back with The Plea, another legal thriller that is just as fast and just as much fun as both.

It's tempting to compare The Plea's construction to its protagonist's personality. That protagonist, Eddie Flynn, is a con man turned lawyer who makes good use of the tricks he learned in his former profession. Cavanagh loves to put Flynn in ticking-clock situations, making him work with a time bomb strapped to his chest in The Defence, or under the gun to avert a federal indictment hanging over his wife's head in The Plea.

Steve Cavanagh (right) in conversation with Ali Karim at Crimefest 2016. (Photo by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders)
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That means Flynn must do much of his legal work at the last minute and by the seat of his unpressed pants. Though he occasionally guesses wrong, Flynn is a brilliant lawyer and advocate. (Cavanagh is a lawyer in  his day job, albeit in Northern Ireland rather than in New York, where he sets the books. He knows how to convincingly capture the texture, the give and take, and the dilemmas of legal procedure.)

That's Eddie Flynn, the lawyer. Steve Cavanagh, the writer, plants twists and surprises at the end of almost every action-jammed chapter, ramping up the pressure on the characters and speeding the reader along like Eddie Flynn with a bomb on his bod. But, like Flynn, who almost always has a brilliant legal stroke lurking beneath the mayhem, Cavanagh plots his novels with great cunning, liberally sprinkling the story with small observations that bear narrative fruit many chapters later. He also knows just when to slow the action down for a bit of back story or exposition. 

Though The Plea is primarily a thriller, it has enough misdirection and wrong guesses to qualify as a mystery. More than most crime novels, it gives the lie to the silly distinction between plot-driven and character-driven.  Flynn, highly moral if ethically dubious, brilliant, subject to wrenching crises that, however, take place mainly off the page, is a lovable, admirable protagonist and pretty near an ideal hero. But the attributes would be nothing without the action, and the reverse is also true.

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In addition to The Defense and The Plea, Cavanagh has a fine story in Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville. His Eddie Flynn novella The Cross is available in the UK.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Anne Holt, or which crime writers should be in politics?

Anne Holt (Photo for Detectives 
Beyond Borders by Peter Rozovsky)

Kati Hiekkapelto said during a panel on Morality, Society And Justice In Crime Fiction at Crimefest 2016 in Bristol last week that laws were made for middle-class white people. Anne Holt disagreed, invoking the Ten Commandments in citing laws as setting standards toward which humans can aspire.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the two authors' résumés might expect as much: Hiekkapelto is an activist for immigrants' and refugees' rights when she's not writing her Anna Fekete crime novels, and Holt's CV includes a stint as Norway's minister of justice. It would be easy to tag Hiekkapelto as the rebel and Holt as the representative of the establishment, especially by the constricted standards of what passes for political discourse in the United States.

One could almost think that Fear Not, whose plot turns in part on an asylum seeker's death, is a Hiekkapelto novel. But it's not; Holt wrote it. Elsewhere during Crimefest, Holt said she bristled at descriptions of her as leftist. Instead, she said, her political passion is human rights.  That tells me that she's no doctrinaire politician, and Wikipedia describes her party, Norway's Labour Party, as social-democratic.

Wouldn't it be cool if Holt were American? She could run for office as a Democrat, and Republicans would find it difficult to attack a candidate who cited the Ten Commandments among the touchstones of her conception of the law.  Even a Republican Senate might be unable to stonewall her nomination forever. And wouldn't it be nice to have a crime writer in the cabinet or the White House?

I wrote after last month's Edgar Awards that Walter Mosley and Sara Paretsky might make a good president-vice president ticket. Anne Holt, provided she could get the citizenship thing straightened out, could be attorney general. What crime writers would you like to see as presidents, prime ministers, or heads of government departments? Call it the Shadow cabinet.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Some pictures from Crimefest 2016

From left: Ian Rankin, your humble blogkeeper, Ali Karim, 
Mike Stotter. This photo by our courteous, efficient, and aesthetically
sensitive waitress. All others by Peter Rozovsky

I'm back in London after the most enjoyable of the six Crimefest I've attended. Highlights included:

Anne Holt

1) Anne Holt's wisdom.

Gin and tonie

2) Hendrick's gin.

Crimefest T-shirts

3) Crimefest's T-shirts, and ...

Susan Moody, Laura Wilson,
Alison Bruce

Ali Karim, Steve Cavanagh

Alan Glynn

Kati Hiekkapelto, Ann Cleeves

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Thomas Mogford, Ian Rankin, Andrew Taylor

Alan Glynn and an inadvertent, unidentified woman

Albert the Gorilla

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Your humble blogkeeper swings like a pendulum do

Lisa Brackmann

Lisa Brackmann, author of, I think, five crime novels for Soho Press and an energetic and entertaining member of panels I've moderated at Bouchercon, put up a photo of Trafalgar Square on Facebook similar to one I had just posted.

"Are you also here in London?" I asked her in a comment. Turns out she was here to do some events, and I met her and some friends of hers for drinks, dinner, and a club Tuesday night--first time I had visited a club in years. It was an enjoyable and highly unexpected evening on the road to Crimefest, which starts Thursday.

You'll see Lisa in the first photo, but don't be alarmed by her bluish tinge; she's not dead. That was just the lighting at London's 229 club. (I don't have ID's for the musicians, but if anyone from the 229 would pass the information along, I'd be happy to add it.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Crimefest wrap-up, Part I: The real inspiration for the first Martin Beck novel

Over at the Rap Sheet, Ali Karim weighs in with a comprehensive report on Crimefest 2015 in Bristol. I note with complete agreement his praise for the convention's programming and panel moderators.  I spent more time attending panels than I generally do at conventions and less time resting between panels, and virtually all the moderators were concise, interested, and well-prepared. (None, that is, was like the moderator who inspired this post from Bouchercon a few years ago.) So, good job, Crimefest.

Ruth Dudley Edwards.
(All  photos by your
humble blogkeeper.)

Here are my previous posts about Crimefest 2015 (click on the link then scroll down.) And here's a bit more about this eighth edition of the excellent crime fiction festival:

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Barry Forshaw, noir

Friday's Audible: Crime Pays In Audio panel was packed with authors, voice actors, readers, and producers who gave the audience a real sense of what goes on in the studio, and of the logistical, legal, and ethical considerations that come into play when a book jumps media to audio.

A welcome addition to the Bristol scene.

The session was so informative that I regarded with indulgence moderator Steve Carsey's use of space where other people would say field, genre, environment, or nothing at all. ("The crime space," "the romance space,"  "the audio space," "the drama space," "the audio-book space.") Jargon usually drives me over the edge, the more voguish and more enthusiastically embraced, the further over. But Carsey was so knowledgeable, genial, and fluent a moderator that I did not mind in the least. (A hat tip to the non-crime friend who was the first to alert me to this use of space. She lives in the United States, but I can assure her that the United Kingdom has enthusiastically joined the space race, possibly even pulling ahead of America.)

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The notebook where I tried to figure out answers

to the anagrams portion of the Crimefest pub quiz.

I don't remember the context, but I quite liked Nev Fountain's remark during the Sex in Crime Fiction panel that "There are literally people who will have sex with anyone connected with a television series."

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Lee Child, Maj Sjöwall

Lee Child's interview with the festival's guess of honor, Maj Sjöwall (available as a series of clips at the Shots e-zone Web site), was full of entertaining and enlightening moments that disproved, if it still needs disproving, the notion that the Nordic countries lack a sense of humor. I had also not known that Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö intended to stop their Martin Beck series after ten novels even before Wahlöö died the year the tenth book, The Terrorists, appeared.

And I quite enjoyed Sjöwall's account of the genesis of the first Beck novel, Roseanna, which begins with the murder of an American tourist in Sweden (to appreciate the full flavor of the anecdote, it helps to know that Sjöwall and Wahlöö were husband and wife, albeit common-law). The two were on a ferry one day, and:

"There was this woman there, very beautiful, standing there watching the Swedish shoreline, and, of course, Per was standing there watching her. I said to Per, `Kill her.'"

The bar staff at the Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel just before last call,
except they call it "Last orders!" This seems to me better suited
to the solemnity of the occasion.

 Sjöwall and Child also discussed the Beck novels' employment of a group cast of central characters and to give those characters lives outside their police work (Ed McBain had done so first, though Sjöwall says she and Wahlöö did not know McBain's work early on, and only later read--and translated--McBain.)  Sjöwall's remarks on the roots of this plan may surprise those of us in America for whom leftist politics, empathy, and popular entertainment are inimical:

"We knew some officers in the Stockholm police and we tried to think the were human beings.  At that time we were criticized because it was not allowed for a police officer to have a private life."

"Everybody does it, and you started it," Child said.

"We didn't mean to do it," Sjöwall replied.

I also liked the attractive modesty of Sjöwall statement that "I don't think books change the world very much, but they can change thinking."

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More to come when I flip through my copy of the Crimefest program, where I took most of my notes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015