More fun from Shane Maloney / Authors' previous jobs

Damien at Crime Down Under recently linked to this short profile of Shane Maloney, author of very funny novels about a Melbourne political minder named Murray Whelan who eventually wins election to parliament.

Two highlights: Maloney's biggest disappointment – “Missing out on the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature” – and the news that "employment is overrated. Unemployment meant I finally had the chance to do something that I'd had in the back of my mind for a while – to write a novel."

What stuck out for me, though, was the down-to-earthness of Maloney's work history. His career began:

“(O)nly after he lost his job as an adviser to Melbourne's bid for the 1996 Olympic Games. Before that he had a string of jobs, including general manager of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, arts administrator for the Melbourne City Council, the PR rep for the Boy Scouts Association and as a music promoter and band reviewer.”

That’s the kind of work that, well, that I could have wound up doing.

This made me feel at home with Maloney in a way I could not with ex-M16 or CIA types who write thrillers, on the one hand, and globe-trotting former roustabouts who would absolutely never, ever exaggerate the extent of their experience as bartenders, cab drivers or loan-shark collection agents in order to buffer their hard-boiled credentials on the other.

And now, a question for readers: What is the strangest, oddest, most exotic former job you have heard of any crime writer having ... or claiming to have had?
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I posted a few months back about Dan Kavanagh’s japes at the macho-job tradition on the jacket of his novel Going to the Dogs. Kavanagh, the jacket copy tells us:

“(H)as been an entertainment officer on a Japanese super-tanker, a waiter on roller skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He boasts of having flown light planes on the Colombian cocaine route, but all that is known for certain is that he was once a baggage handler at Toronto International Airport."

Can your favorite writer top that?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Shane Maloney
Australian crime fiction
comic crime fiction
Dan Kavanagh

The humorous afterlife of the English country-house mystery

The jacket matter on my newly arrived copy of Going to the Dogs attests to the lingering attraction of the English country-house mystery in an age that had left gentility behind:

"A body has been found in the library. A body in the library? That sounds familiar. But ... this is not the world of Agatha Christie and genteel murder among the cucumber sandwiches. Dan Kavanagh's thriller is firmly set in the on-the-make Britain of the 1980's, where new money talks loud, old vices flourish, and the people you run into during a country-house weekend are the sort you might very well not want to ask home to meet your mother."

On the smart-alecky side? Sure, but that's just the front-jacket blurb. I'm more interested in the suggestion that Kavanagh (Julian Barnes), like Colin Watson, may have found the English mystery tradition irresistible even as he delighted in poking fun at its outdated pretensions.
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The above excerpt was from the front flap; the back flap offers a send-up of the bio-blurb that seeks to impress the reader with the gritty, globe-hopping and numerous jobs the author has held. Typical jobs include bartender and taxi driver (preferably in New York), with an occasional excursion into loan-shark collection agent for truly edgy authors. Here, on the other hand, is the pseudonymous Kavanagh's job history:

"He has been an entertainment officer on a Japanese super-tanker, a waiter on roller skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He boasts of having flown light planes on the Colombian cocaine route, but all that is known for certain is that he was once a baggage handler at Toronto International Airport."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Julian Barnes
Dan Kavanagh