Keeping one's hair in Dublin, plus books I got at Crimefest

Left: Sculpture,
Archaeological Museum of
 Morbihan, Vannes, Brittany. 
Above: View from the rear
 of my guesthouse, Gardiner
Street Lower, Dublin. All photos
 by your humble blogkeeper.

I opened two packages of books yesterday that I'd shipped home from Crimefest, and I must be a nice guy because I sent myself some good stuff. Among the highlights:

1. Betrayal, by Giorgio Scerbanenco. This is a new translation of a novel by the master of Italian noir. Its previous English translation was released in the 1960s as Duca and the Milan Murders.
2. The Killing Way, by Anthony Hays. A mystery set in Arthurian Britain might not ordinarily be my cup of tea, but this looks low on sorcery and faux-Celtic wiftiness, and high on low-down, dirty political intrigue.
3. The Saint and Mr Teal, by Leslie Charteris, included in my book bag, talked up by panelist Zoë Sharp, and published in a handsome new trade paperback edition. Includes an entertaining tribute to P.G. Wodehouse in one character's name.

Because everyone else is doing it?

When the crew announced itself for my Aer Lingus flight from JFK to Dublin, I first produced my pistol, and I then produced my rapier. Then I realized that Farrell was not, in fact, the captain of the plane but merely a crew member, so I stowed my musical weapons under the seat in front of me and restored my seat back and tray table to their full upright and locked positions.

Muiredach's High Cross
(detail), Monasterboice,
County Louth, Ireland

Speaking of tunes one just might hear in Temple Bar of a Saturday or any other evening, I love the song, but, unless you're Luke Kelly reincarnated, could we vary the repertoire a bit, lads?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013


Neolithic
passage grave,
Loughcrew, County
Meath, Ireland

I got Screwed at Crimefest 2013, plus DBB goes to Ireland

Above, Muiredach's Cross, 
Monasterboice, County Louth,
 Ireland. Below/right, Ha'Penny
Bridge, Dublin. Photos by
your humble blogkeeper

Eoin Colfer's Screwed, the second "adult" crime novel by the author of the Artemis Fowl series, Half Moon Investigations, and other Y.A. big sellers, was a welcome find in my Crimefest 2013 book bag.

A few chapters into this joke-filled tale about a dodgy nightclub owner in New Jersey, I'm finding much to answer anyone who doubts that jokes and crime are incompatible.

For one, the novel bids fair to tug occasionally at the heartstrings. For another, Colfer manages to work into the story funny jabs at "cool" American speech quirks. He's already made fun of über, reboot, and you the man. Nothing yet about thank you so much, reach out, and reference as a verb, but then, I'm just thirty-six pages into the book.

Meanwhile, enjoy these views from Colfer's native land.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"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

Warships, megaliths, and why publishers should pay for authors' drinks

HMS Warrior, Portsmouth.
Photos by your humble
blogkeeper

Completed my first English Channel crossing this morning, though not on the vessel at left. The crossing was uneventful, the ferry comfortable, with all mod cons except WiFi, which, the ferry operator apparently having heard how much I enjoyed the occasional absence of phone and WiFi service at my hotel in Bristol, decided I could do without it on the water as well.

The crossing took me to Carnac in Brittany, which has the world's greatest concentration of Neolithic monuments. I began my explorations this afternoon and will continue them over the next few days, giving Detectives Beyond Borders readers the lowdown on my favorite megaliths.

But first a bit more about Crimefest 2013. Everyone who writes about crime fiction festivals will tell you that the socializing is at least as important as whatever business gets done there. But the two need not be mutually exclusive.

This year, for example, I chatted at the bar with an author named Adam Creed and his charming wife. Both are well-travelled, good conversationalists, with diverse and stimulating interests.  I had not heard of this author before, but I'm discussing him now and I may look into his books.

He probably thought he was passing a pleasant evening at the hotel bar, but he was really getting his name out before whatever forum Detectives Beyond Borders can provide. And that's why publishers should pay for their authors' drinks, and governments should make the expense tax-deductible. It makes good business sense, and it's the right thing to do.

Cheers!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crimefest 4: Stump the Irish criminal mastermind

 

I can now reveal my role in the just-concluded Crimefest 2013 in sunny Bristol, England, without contravening the Official Secrets Act: I wrote the questions with which contestant Declan Burke had to grapple in the expert-knowledge segment of the festival's Criminal Mastermind quiz. (I'd have won the competition myself last year if I'd had more sleep, less gin, and a sharper ear for the unaccountable way the English speak English.)

My chosen subject last year was Dashiell Hammett, in a quiz I lost on penalty kicks on Hammett's birthday. Declan this year picked Irish crime fiction, and, through the magic of technology, you can now match wits with him.  It's like experiencing the clanging church bells and midnight kebabs of Bristol in your very own home! Do well on this quiz, and you'll win my admiration and maybe a book. Your two minutes begin ... now.

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

1.  Which 2007 novel opens: "No offence, Taoiseach ... but you're talking out of your hole"? 
2.  Ronan Bennett’s fifth novel is Zugzwang. What is a zugzwang?  
3.  From which humorist did Ruth Dudley Edwards lift a scene in The English School of Murder, substituting a cat for a swan?  
4.  What was the purpose of Stonehenge, according to Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code?
5.  In which Irish novel is a character kidnapped, and “They made her perform Riverdance”?  
6.  Who said: “I think the great Troubles novel will be written by a woman”?
7. Which Irish crime protagonist’s name means the same thing as Sam Spade’s?
8. 
   Who is Fetch?
9. Who is Israel Armstrong?
10. What is LEPRECON?
11. Which novel headed Brian McGilloway’s 2009 list of “Top 10 Modern Irish Crime Novels”?
12. Which sectarian killer is the model for Victor Kelly in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man? 
13. Who calls the 1970s a golden age of paranoia?
14. Which novel includes the following line: “Unity was always McShiel's programme, because it did not necessitate taking sides on any definite question.”?



15. Which includes this: “Thing was, he did look like Mickey Rourke. But late-night Brixton, most do, even the women."?
16. Which two non-Irish crime writers did John Banville call “Two of the greatest writers of the 20th century”?
17. Which Irish short-story collection pays tribute in its title to Damon Runyon?
18. Which Irish author was movie director John Ford’s cousin? 
19. Which Irish crime writer is the son of the writer and critic Seamus Deane? 
20. Which Irish crime writer wrote three books with Jason Starr?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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?

***

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

Crimefest 2: Drop your pants, this is a fire drill

Thank heavens a fire drill emptied my hotel Friday afternoon just as I'd removed my pants preparatory to a refreshing nap. For a moment there  I was afraid I was going to get some rest and recover from my jet lag ...

... and, in retrospect, that turned out to be a relatively enjoyable parts of my day. I shall expose the institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that tried so hard to make my life a misery, but I'll wait until I'm safely home and out of their clutches.

Meanwhile, the Crimefest part of Crimefest makes me feel like Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former head of the International Olympic Committee who would inevitably declare each recently concluded Olympics "the best Games ever." This six-year-old festival keeps getting better and better. More snapshots from its first two days:

Ali Karim said: "America is mental."

William McIlvanney said: "Glasgow has an opinion about everything."  A hard city of hard men? said the father of tartan noir. "I don't think it's hard so much as confrontational."

Michael Sears, half of the writing team of Michael Stanley, suggested a reason police in southern Africa may be less than eager to investigate cases of humans killed and dismembered for use of their body parts in religious rituals:  "Partly because they're scared of the witch doctors, partly because they're scared of who might be paying the witch doctors."

McIlvanney again, on the impetus for his Laidlaw novels: "I wanted to acquaint straight society with its darker side, to introduce Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll."

Ruth Dudley Edwards, speaking during a panel on crime and humor, of herself and her Irish countryman Declan Burke: "We were both brought up in a society of performers."

Aly Monroe, an author new to me, on why she made the protagonist of her espionage series an economist: "Because the Cold War was all about money."

John Lawton, a fellow member of Monroe's panel on Cold War espionage fiction: "The thing about spies is that they can't wait to tell you things."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Convivial quayside kebab with Karim at Crimefest

Peter Guttridge (left) with crime critic/kebab eater Ali Karim.

When the pace slackens and the volume starts to die down at the Crimefest hotel bar, somebody says: "Hey, Ali! Let's go for a kebab!"

Only hours after the photo above was snapped, I joined Ali Karim and Mike Stotter for refreshment procured from a late-night kebabery and consumed on a quayside bench. By day, Bristol's quay bustles. By night, under the stars of a cool spring sky, it's a delightful place to recount the highlights of the festival's first day.

For me, these included:

1. Valerio Varesi's citation of Carlo Emilio Gadda as a forefather of Italian crime writing. I'd mentioned Giorgio Scerbanenco as one such but, since the introduction to my edition of Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana invokes such names as Robert Musil and James Joyce, I'd figured Italians might regard Gadda as a literary rather than a crime writer. Varesi thanked me for citing Scerbanenco, but he also said: "There's another great forerunner: Carlo Emilio Gadda."  Varesi also said, in response to a question from the floor about which countries' crime fiction each of the panel's authors liked to read, that he enjoyed French crime writing. This made sense to me, as his atmospheric fiction reminds me a bit of Georges Simenon, Fred Vargas, and Pierre Magnan.
2. Meeting up with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite John Lawton,  and buttonholing guest of honor William McIlvanney at the bar and finding that this author of the Laidlaw novels, revered by authors and readers as the father of Scottish crime writing, is a fine gentleman.
3. My pub quiz team's coming within a second tie-breaker question of being the first group or person ever to best Martin Edwards at anything at Crimefest.

On to Day 2, and the arrival of the Irish crime writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crimefest 2013: Youth serves, plus a question

As I prepare to his the road for Crimefest 2013, here's the last in a series of posts about past Crimefests or authors I met there. Today's featured author is the still-yourthful Chris Ewan.

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

Before I get back to Len Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice, one last remark about Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Paris, specifically, this bit of description toward the novel's end:

"The sky looked bleached, as though the colour had been drained from it. Shreds of cloud were being reflected over and over again in the windows of the arch; like a desktop image that had been endlessly repeated on a stack of computer monitors." (Emphasis mine.)

Elsewhere, Ewan uses impact as a verb a time or two without driving me nuts.

Why mention this? And what connection do the image and the impact have? Just this: I don't think an author much older than Ewan would have come up with the first or pulled off the second. Ewan is in his early thirties, according to his Web site, which means he's probably been around computers most of his life. They likely are a greater part of that stock of images, memories and concepts that form his world view, the familiar for which he reaches when he wants to describe something unfamiliar, than they would be for someone only a few years older.

Similarly, impact as a verb in the hands of younger writers like Ewan may be evolving from the horrible tool of obfuscation and self-importance that businessmen and politicians make of it into a more neutral synonym for affect. It may not be my favorite verb in English's rich lexicon, but it feels pretty natural in this book.

What quirks of style or vocabulary mark a writer as a member of a given age group or generation?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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.

 =================

  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

Off to Crimefest: Anne Zouroudi's languid island crime

I'm off to Crimefest 2013  in Bristol this week. While I pack my passport and toothbrush, I'm revisiting a few posts about some of the authors whom I'll join there. I might not have read Anne Zouroudi's Messenger of Athens had she not been on one of my panels at Bouchercon in 2011, but let me tell you: I'm glad Zouroudi made it to Bouchercon that year. She is a master of slow, languid pace, of lives stoically lived, and of wrongs righted without sentimentality. What a sense of phsyical and human place. For today's Crimefest blog post, give a big, fat γειά σου to Anne Zouroudi.

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

Anne Zouroudi reminds me of Pierre Magnan.  In Magnan's novels, I wrote:

"Consequences unfold slowly, if at all, and characters accept them stoically or with good-humored resignation or silent suffering or secret relief."

Magnan set his novels in rural France; Zouroudi sets The Messenger of Athens on a small Greek island. Her languid storytelling suggests a languid pace of rural life, with dark secrets emerging only slowly, and everyone getting the chance to relate events as he or she saw them.

Into this slow boil comes an investigator from Athens by the name of Hermes Diaktoros (the same name as the messenger of the Olympian gods), sent to investigate a death the locals insist was a suicide. The ancient Hermes was supernaturally strong and wore winged shoes; this one's epithet is "the fat man" and, though he stirs things up in ways some residents don't like, he's content to adopt the leisurely local pace, albeit with the occasional sly joke at which only he smiles.

I'll see how the mystery unfolds. In the meantime, I like this protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"Ah refuse tae be victimised": William McIlvanney and Glasgow patter

I'm off to Crimefest in Bristol next week, so I thought I'd revisit a post or two about some of the featured guests at this year's edition of this fine crime fiction festival in South West England.  Foremost among those guests is William McIlvanney, the father of tartan noir and the author of Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Strange Loyalties.

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

One often sees warnings against writing in dialect, but it works in passages like this, from William McIlvanney's 1977 novel Laidlaw:

"Ma lassie's missin'"

"We don't know that, Mr. Lawson. ... She could've missed a bus. She wouldn't be able to inform you. She could be staying with a friend."

"Whit freen'? Ah'd like tae see her try it?"

"She is an adult person, Mr. Lawson."

"Is she hell! She's eighteen. Ah'll tell her when she's an adult. That's the trouble nooadays. Auld men before their faythers. Ah stand for nothin' like that in ma hoose. Noo whit the hell are yese goin' to do aboot this?"

Here's how the narrator describes Mr. Lawson:

" ... his anger was displaced. It was in transit, like a lorry-load of iron, and he was looking for someone to dump it on. His jacket had been thrown on over an open-necked shirt. A Rangers football-scarf was spilling out from the lapels.

"Looking at him, Laidlaw saw one of life's vigilantes, a retribution-monger. For everything that happened there was somebody else to blame, and he was the very man to deal with them. Laidlaw was sure his anger didn't stop at people. He could imagine him shredding ties that wouldn't knot properly, stamping burst tubes of toothpaste into the floor. His face looked like an argument you couldn't win."

The dialect works because it's part of the whole package, and no easy, condescending shortcut. Or maybe it's just that Lawson's speech sounds vividly in my head because of my recent listening to this. (Read about Glasgow patter here and here.)

And maybe, just maybe, it's because McIlvanney gives Lawson a line whose psychobabblish content sits comically against its Glaswegian accent: "Ah refuse tae be victimized."

And now your thoughts, please, on dialect, when it works, when it doesn't, why and whether authors should be especially careful with it. Examples welcome.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Frederick Forsyth at Crimefest: Thirty-five Days of the Jackal

Crimefest 2013 in Bristol, England, is coming up next month, and I plan to make my fourth appearance in the festival's six years. So this is a good time to start reading a classic thriller that I first got excited about at Crimefest 2012.

The opening hundred or so pages of The Day of the Jackal offer measured, chilling background to fanaticism from two French sides in the Franco-Algerian War. (The Jackal is an assassin hired  by right-wing military figures to kill French President Charles de Gaulle, incensed by De Gaulle's grant of Algerian independence after having declared "Vive l'Algerie Francaise!" De Gaulle proclaimed "Long live French Algeria!" then granted the country its independence, and "Vive le Quebec libre!" or "Long live free Quebec!" without, however, wrenching my native province out of Canada--at least not yet. He had a bit of a problem with this liberation thing.)

Now, why not listen to some Franco-Algerian music, read about the real aborted Algerian military coup against De Gaulle, and join me in The Day of the Jackal?

 ===========================

 Thirty-five days. That's how long Crimefest 2012 honoree Frederick Forsyth said it took him to write his classic 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal. And he said the novel was published as he had written it, without changes.

This and the rapidity of the book's composition earned him the good-natured jealousy of Peter Guttridge, who quizzed Forsyth in the first of the festival's six guest-of-honor interviews.

I had seen and liked the 1973 film version of The Day of the Jackal, but I had not read a word of Forsyth's work before today. His interview turned me into a fan, though, and I bought the book. My favorite bit of the interview was probably Forsyth's response to Guttridge's question about whether the world had grown more complicated since the Jackal's Cold War days.

"Very much so," Forsyth replied. "Al-Qaeda is here, there, everywhere. ... It's a weird world. It's a dangerous world. It's a bewildering." (And yes, Forsyth's tendency to speak in threes lends his speech a pleasantly rhythmic effect.) He also, by his own account, has led a fortunate and engaging life, so yes, I'm a Forsyth fan starting today.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012. 2013