Alto Songo

Listening to this, can you believe that its lyrics mean this? (Here's another version, with vocal improvisations that wander from the song's narrative subject.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Who is reviewing the reviewers?

I am. So is Seana Graham. Declan Burke takes a peek, too, from time to time, and that's a good thing.

The occasion is a review in the Guardian of Adrian McKinty's novel Fifty Grand. I've always been partial to reviews that establish context, that show the reviewer knows his or her subject, that could interest even a reader unfamiliar with the matter at hand.

I like that the Guardian begins by invoking McKinty's "Dead" trilogy and goes on to find traits common to that superb series and the new book. This tells me that the reviewer, John O'Connell, prepared well, embraced his subject and took his job seriously. A reviewer owes his readers no less.

Seana Graham's Things You May Have Missed blog takes up this subject in a post aptly titled What the Guardian knows that The New York Times doesn't. And Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays is apt to snap its jaws at lazy reviewers' hindquarters when they deserve it.

With newspapers devoting less and less space to books coverage, the coverage that remains had better be good. Because we're watching.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

McKinty reads

In one more piece of evidence that Belfast is the center of the universe,

No Alibis invites you to an evening with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite

Adrian McKinty

to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, Fifty Grand,
on Wednesday, July 8, at 6 p.m.

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a ‘traitor’ who skipped free from Castro’s control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood Scientology set, where a façade of legality is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and laborers working for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Mercado Sr.’s dreams of fortune and freedom are shattered when he is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome, not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics at Oxford University, and after a failed legal career he moved to the US in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a school teacher. He now resides in Melbourne, Australia.

NO ALIBIS BOOKSTORE
83 BOTANIC AVENUE
BELFAST BT7 1JL
david@noalibis.com
ph. 02890-319601
========================================

Here's part of what I had to say about Fifty Grand:

"The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

"It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

"In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments."

McKinty flew all the way from Australia for this reading. Go hear him, buy a book, and stake him to a pint of correctly poured Guinness. It's the least you can do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Fifty Grand day

Today is release day for Fifty Grand by Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty. The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments:

`Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddamnit! Why don't you understand, what's the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?'

I do. It was my major.

When you're done reading the book and touting it on Amazon.com and elsewhere, try McKinty's splendid Michael Forsythe trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Politics sucks, Victoria": José Latour's Comrades in Miami

How's this for a simile to make the pulse quicken?:

"For the next fifty minutes, like a nearly invisible virus invading an organism several trillion times its size, the purring outboards slipped the cigarette in."

The place is a cigarette boat easing quietly into harbor near Key West, Florida, under cover of night. The cargo and crew are six Cuban defectors. The passage is from José Latour's Comrades in Miami, and I like it for several reasons.

The simile is striking, the ominous image of the virus bumping up against the soft, reassuring purr of the motor, the tiny virus making its quiet way into the unimaginably huge organism (When was the last time you read trillion outside a story about the U.S. budget?) But mostly the little bit of wonder is both magical and touchingly human, the sort of thing I could well imagine myself thinking in a similar situation.

Latour's compassionate humanity comes through as well in his choice of multiple points of view, which permits considerable sympathy even for the novel's worst, most unrelievedly evil character.

The book's political stance is decidedly anti-communist and anti-Castro. Still, Latour is probably not universally loved by the anti-Castroites who are the Cuban-American community's public face in the United States. Here's one of the defectors, a central figure in the novel:

"`But we've reflected on the excesses of democracy and the shortcomings of communism a hundred times. Are we going to do something about it? No, right? So leave it to the naive dissidents who risk their freedom, maybe even their lives. They haven't figured out that when communism falls, Cuban-Americans will give them a medal and a pension before rigging the elections and taking charge. Politics sucks, Victoria."

=========

In a news note relevant to a recurring motif in Comrades in Miami, President Barack Obama will allow Americans to make unlimited transfers of money and visits to relatives in Cuba.

Click here for two more novels unlikely to earn their authors tickets to a Fidel Castro celebrity roast.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

José Latour on Cuban policy and politics

A passage from José Latour's Comrades in Miami, a thriller about defection and disillusionment in Cuba:

"Although he never before had visited prosperous cities in the West, the database manager was not so much impacted by affluence as by freedom. It amazed him to watch newscasts in which Spanish parliamentarians from different political parties openly and respectfully disagreed about what was best for their country. Nobody called his opponent a traitor, a rat, or a worm just because the other was a Nationalist, a Socialist, a Christian Democrat, a Communist, or a Liberal. Legislative decisions were made by majority; unanimity was something had ever heard of."

But wait! There's more:

"Under capitalism, many nations had achieved what he had been led to believe only communist societies could: free education and health care."

You may not be surprised to learn that Latour has settled in Canada and not the United States since leaving Cuba.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

From Moore to Latour (Havana World Series)

I'm about halfway through this novel set in 1958 Havana. The big heist has taken place, and author José Latour has managed a beguiling combination of suspense and relaxed description, the latter often undercutting the former to humorous, gently mocking effect ("Wilbur `Lefty' Clark and his second-in-command, Tom Magenty, from Casino Parisien, drove down Paseo Avenue in a majestic '59 Cadillac De Ville at 11:29.")

Amused detachment comes through at unexpected moments and betrays a sense of leisurely wonder highly unexpected in a heist story. I don't how many readers will share my opinion, but I love this description of a killing:

"Grouse's Frankenstein didn't know a word of English, but having heard `No' twice, he made a sudden upward thrust. The bayonet went through skin, tongue, and the palatine and cranial cavities as if piercing a loaf of white bread. The left parietal bone finally stopped it. The hall supervisor hopped, his eyeballs bulged out, broken nerve connections lost control, sphincters yielded. Urine and excrement gushed freely, the body jerked convulsively, and life fled away in a whirlwind of contradictory impulses."

Read the first chapter of Havana World Series free at Latour's Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Cuba: Libre or not, here I come

Now that American newspapers are drastically cutting their coverage of foreign news, readers may have to turn elsewhere to gain perspective. They could do worse than crime fiction.

First assignment: Adrian McKinty's new Fifty Grand and Lawrence Block's old Killing Castro, reissued by Hard Case Crime. Block's book is about a Dirty Dozenish gang of assassins who come together to do just what you'd expect from the book's title, and it offers relatively early discussion (the book first appeared in 1961) of where Fidel Castro went wrong. McKinty's is about one person's suffering and manipulation at the hands of a range of antagonists that includes the Cuban government, and he saves his ire for Raul Castro. Neither book is likely to earn its author a friendly reception at a Castrista piss-up.

Read the books back to back, then prepare a book report on both. Samples of each are available by clicking on the titles in the preceding paragraph. And now maybe I'll go read some Leonardo Padura. (Nathan Cain of Independent Crime links to a list of Padura's favorite Cuban novels. The Old Man and the Sea makes the list.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A short review of Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand, incorporating the working girl's helicopter miscellany

I predict that Adrian McKinty won't be on Tom Cruise's Christmas list this year, probably not on Brad Pitt's either, and definitely not on Raul Castro's. I predict, too, that if the Boston Red Sox win the 2009 World Series, they will not vote McKinty a share of the winners' money.

Fifty Grand includes a gut-tightening prologue, a more nuanced view than you might expect of Mexican immigrant life in Colorado, and a refutation of Clive James's too-confident declaration that "In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.” And it includes revenge.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A thinking man's exploration

That's two critical clichés in one post title; I must be a weak-minded critic. Maybe the coincidence was too much: that two consecutive books on my crime-fiction list should each exemplify what I think reviewers mean when they use a particular critical trope.

The thinking man's crime novel in this case is Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand, for its nuanced view of migrant life in the United States and for its final pages. The novel offers a bang-up prologue of even higher tension than those to McKinty's Michael Forsythe books. Its final twist resembles those in Jean-Patrick Manchette's novels, in which the powerless are stripped by the powerful of almost everything that anchors them in this world.

In between, McKinty's first-person narrator/protagonist lives the life of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Colorado, a life replete with indignities, but also with astute observation and quiet moments of daily life and the odd behavior of one town's movie-star colony. The author is at least as interested in imagining his way into the lives of people different from himself as he is in telling a suspenseful story.

The exploration belongs to Bill James' In the Absence of Iles, twenty-fifth novel in the superlative Harpur and Iles series. The middle novels of the series especially, from Astride a Grave (1991) to Eton Crop (1999), are dark and humorous explorations of aspirations to respectability among the criminal classes and of the strange lives of odd, sometimes improvised families on both sides of the law.

Before that, James had written about a police undercover operation gone wrong, in the series' third book, The Halo Parade (1987). He returned to the theme several times in later novels, notably Kill Me (2000), in which an officer selected to infiltrate a criminal gang meets an exceedingly weird psychologist at a training course intended to prepare her for the operation.

Now, though, James explores the issue more thoroughly, concentrating and consolidating his fascination with police undercover work, its perils and its effects on those who send officers into harm's way.

Thus, an officer demonstrating for a gathering of police chiefs, particularly Assistant Chief Constable Esther Davidson, the skills required to work under cover:

"The cloth held to his shoulders in the affectionate, unruffled, congratulatory way a midwife might present a just-born baby to its mother. ... Not much of the waistcoat showed under his buttoned-up jacket, but Esther could tell it fitted right, and the pockets contained nothing bulky to destroy the general line. ...

"But then he turned his back for a moment and when he slowly spun and faced them once more seemed suddenly ... seemed suddenly what she'd originally expected: nervy and hesitant. ... His body signalled prodigious cringe now. ...

"Esther realized they were watching a performer who could have made it big in the theatre."

or

"Esther felt she had fallen into a sort of voodoo superstition, as if scared that to flout any part of the instructions from A and B and the rest of the Fieldfare performers would bring big punishment — big punishment signifying loss of the Out-located officer and failure of the operation."

James makes several interesting choices to narrow the focus on the officers who plan the undercover operation that drives the book, not all of which can be revealed without spoilers. One that can is that, shockingly for an author who has given crime fiction some of its funniest, grubbiest and most shabbily noble criminals, James gives no criminal anything more than a passing mention through the novel's first hundred or so pages.

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

More later, but for now, the novel's finest example yet of James' typical dark, wry humour, this from Officer B, the cool-headed counterpart to the flamboyant Officer A discussed above:

"Family enmities are generally more vicious than any others. Think of the punch-ups and knifings at typical weddings, christening parties and funerals."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008