William Ard, James Ellroy, and elements of crime fiction style

"She said eight o'clock in the lobby. She said bring the hundred with me, in cash. She said good-bye."

*

"Clouds imploded. Buildings weaved. People blipped."

=======

One of those passages is from James Ellroy, the other is fifty years older, but the cadences are similar, and if you don't think cadence is important, you've never read Ellroy, at least not The Cold Six Thousand, from which the second of the passages is taken.

The first is from William Ard's 1952 novel The Perfect Frame and, two books into my career as an Ard man, I begin to realize that for all the trouble he had coming up with strong endings, the man had style. His ten hard-boiled novels about P.I. Timothy Dane appeared in the 1950s, the years when Ellroy was growing from toddlerhood into early adolescence and, while I have no idea whether Ellroy read Ard, I have no doubt that he imbibed something of the way people spoke and wrote back then.

Style is a funny thing; style to me can be mere showing off to you. And it's elusive. Dashiell Hammett was the greatest of all crime writers, but what constitutes the Hammett style? 

While you ponder that unanswerable question, try these easier ones: What is style? Is good prose style necessary to good writing? Are the two synonymous?  Who are the most distinctive stylists in crime fiction? What's distinctive about their style, and what does that style add to their stories?

(By coincidence, Dana King discusses style this week at his One Bite at a Time blog. Have a stylish day.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

I shoot and read at Noir at the Bar

Sarah Weinman

Nothing like a Noir at the Bar to get ready for Bouchercon. This Noir at the Bar happened in Washington at the Wonderland Ballroom, and no Noir at the Bar has ever taken place at a venue with a more evocative name. Here are photos of all the readers except me, because I was taking the pictures.

David Swinson

Art Taylor

Nik Korpon

Austin S. Camacho

Ed Aymar

Dana King

Jen Conley

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Mr. Beyond Borders goes to Washington for a Noir at the Bar this Saturday

Joaquin permitting, I'll read Saturday evening at Washington, D.C.'s second Noir at Bar.  The fun happens starting 7 p.m. at the wonderfully named Wonderland Ballroom, 1101 Kenyon St., NW.

Ed Aymar hosts a program that also includes Austin Camacho, Jen Conley, Dana King, Nik Korpon, David Swinson, Art Taylor, and Sarah Weinman, warming up for her stint on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., later in the week.

So let's hope Joaquin amounts to no more than a few flooded basements and a flurry of hyperventilating news stories. See you Saturday.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Dana King's Grind Joint again

Dana King

I won a pile of books at Sunday's Noir at the Bar in Baltimore that included Dana King's Grind Joint, which I am happy to report is just as good the second time around. So here's some of what I wrote about it the first time.  Here's Dana telling Patti Abbott the highly personal story of how he came to write the novel. Finally, here are all my posts about King (click on the link, then scroll down), whom I have known since he was still cutting his authorial teeth at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore.

 ======================

  I like Grind Joint for its local color; its humor; its lack of sentimentality about its decaying urban setting; its ending that comes out of nowhere, but in a good way; and its tribute to a late star of King's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

A teenager who figures peripherally in the story is given the name Wilver, and if that's not a tribute to Wilver Dornell "Willie" Stargell, I'll eat your silly vintage-style 1979 Pirates baseball hat. Stargell was a slugger who did not win most valuable player awards he arguably deserved in 1971 and 1973, and did win one he decidedly did not deserve in '79, when he became a much beloved leader of the World Series-winning "We Are Family" Pirates.

The novel's ending is harder to discuss because I don't want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that I did not see it coming, that it hits with a melancholy punch, that I'd have said, "Wow!" had anyone been around to hear me say it, and that it made perfect sense.

The lack of sentimentality:

"Doc was tired of hearing how many things couldn't be prevented, or even punished. ... He'd made peace with the idea that he was becoming less a cop than an urban hospice worker, easing the end of the transition from booming mill town to—to whatever happened to towns like this"

The humor:

"`Mr. Rollison, you're so good I could almost believe you, except my boss looks like he just farted in front of the pope.'"

and

"`I talk when I want. Who knows? In five minutes, maybe not want to. Better ask quick before I change my mind, police man. Someone tell me once I am volatile. I like that word. I am volatile."

"You are peckerhead, Doc thought, kept it to himself."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013, 2015

The faces of crime

Dana King

Nik Korpon

I got my crime in person rather than on the page this weekend. Here are some photos from Sunday's Noir at the Bar in Baltimore, hosted by Nik Korpon, along with others from my afternoon at the Baltimore Museum of Art. See if you can tell which are which.

Ed Aymar

J. David Osborne

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Why George V. Higgins but not Ross Thomas?

Crime writers and readers revere George V. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but we don’t talk much about Ross Thomas these days. This puzzles me, since Thomas was better than Higgins at some of the things Higgins is celebrated for: gritty looks at men at work, including criminals, and razor-sharp dialogue cleverly contrived to convey character and create the illusion that this is how people really speak.

 I base these remarks on Thomas' Missionary Stew, which appeared in 1983, thirteen years after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that's where the caveat comes in. Though an experienced novelist by the time ... Eddie Coyle appeared, could Thomas have been influenced by the younger writer, the way the similarly older, more experienced Elmore Leonard was?

I ask because the three previous Thomas novels I had read (Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw, and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side) either predate The Friends of Eddie Coyle or appeared the same year, and I don't remember those books bringing Higgins or Leonard to mind.

Though I don't get the esteem in which Higgins was held, I have no desire to knock him. But I would like to see a revival of interest in Thomas, and not just because he wrote with such wit about politics.

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

A wise commenter on my skeptical 2009 post about Eddie Coyle wrote: "I think it's comparatively rare for pioneering texts to stand up in the long term." Maybe Higgins is an example of that pioneer phenomenon, surpassed by his followers. I should like the guy, because I enjoy authors who look up to him and whose works is often compared to his: Bill James, Garbhan Downey, Dana King, Charlie Stella.

I'd hate to think that readers and critics might be scared off by Thomas because he wrote about politics. Don't be; he makes his subject real and funny/
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Dana King's Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Dana King, is a tribute to The Maltese Falcon through and through, from its title, to one of its plot strands, to explicit references to Hammett's novel and the Bogart-Astor movie version.

That's pretty high-concept, or at least it would be had King not made a compelling, even touching story out of it.  King obviously loves The Maltese Falcon (Raymond Chandler, too), mid-century hard-boiled stories, their moral urgency, and their cultural legacy, and there is nothing jokey or campy about the tributes. He doesn't hammer home the Falconisms, either, instead just bringing them in when they advance the story.

And the tributes themselves are delightful, and delightfully clever, going beyond obvious plot parallels, famous lines, and explicit mentions and extending to appropriation of speech patterns, in some cases. I'll refrain from giving examples, so you can have the pleasure of discovering them yourself.

It's a kind of authorial magic that The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of works as a tribute and as a story, and that neither aspect interferes in the least with the other.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What a free-King book deal!

Dana King is pleased to announce that his four novels will be available free on Kindle from June 25 – 29.

Detectives Beyond Borders is pleased to announce that the books are worth reading and that he does not at all regret having paid for them.  King writes hard-hitting, funny crime with a real sense of place and, now and then, a clever spin on an old crime fiction trope.

He is also an eloquent speaker about P.I. fiction and the importance of the Chandlerian hero; his talk on that subject was an unexpected highlight of Bouchercon 2013 in Albany. Here's a bit from a scene with a detective and a Russian mobster in Grind Joint.

"`I talk when I want. Who knows? In five minutes, maybe not want to. Better ask quick before I change my mind, police man. Someone tell me once I am volatile. I like that word. I am volatile."  

"You are peckerhead, Doc thought, kept it to himself."

Make this a Shamus Award-nominated Dana King summer!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Throwback Thursday at the Movies

In about twenty years, I'll be a few years short of joining the 21st century in movies. Until then ...

I watched Donnie Brasco for the first time this week, and I liked the bits of comic misunderstanding sprinkled throughout the dialogue ("What's fugazi?") I also realized that that sort of thing is more enjoyable on the page, where one can savor it. So if you like Donnie Brasco, you'll love Charlie Stella and Dana King.

Now I'm watching The Usual Suspects. On the one hand, its narrative is convoluted, so it must be a writer or director's movie. On the other, its stars feign speech impediments (Benicio del Toro), bad accents (Gabriel Byrne), and visible physical and, occasionally, verbal and mental handicaps (Kevin Spacey). That makes it an actor's movie. OK, those of you who have seen it, which is more overdone: This movie's direction, or its acting?

Goodnight for now, and I'll get back to you once I've seen Gone With the Wind.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

From Syria to Jalisco to Noir at the Bar in Baltimore

(Feasting Scene, Jalisco, Proto-
Classical 200 BC-AD 250. Earthen-
ware, red-slipped resist painting,
appliqué 20 1/4 x 19 3/4 x 17 in.
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.)

(Bearded Figure
With Necklace.
Syrian, 2400-
2000 BC. Terra-
cotta. H: 5 3/8
x W: 2 3/4 x
D: 1 5/16 in.
Walters Art
Museum, Baltimore.

Good fun Sunday at Noir at the Bar in Baltimore (That's a few of us at right, gathered around one of the evening's early readers.)

Some good stuff got read by Dennis Tafoya, Art Taylor, et al., not all of it unquotable on a family blog, but my favorite part was just hanging out and talking about writing and writers, notably with Dana King. Talk turned to James Ellroy, and author/Thuglit editor Todd Robinson said Ellroy made him nervous when they met.

Now, Robinson is wide, he's bald, and he's tattoo'd — not the first person I'd picture getting nervous in the presence of others. I took this as an endearing surprise, and also as evidence that despite Ellroy's intelligence, sensitivity, hard work, wide reading, and sometimes intense self-awareness, perhaps the man really does get close to the edge sometimes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A Shaw-King development: Two authors join my list of year's favorites

Here are two enjoyable additions to my favorite books of 2013. along with some of what I wrote about them earlier this year:

I've just finished reading Johnny Shaw's Big Maria, and I admit I teared up a bit at Shaw's resolution of his three screw-up protagonists' fates. The old-fashioned virtues of faith, determination, loyalty, and staying true to one's friends, family, and self are much manipulated and abused by governments, corporations, the media, and a thousand people we all meet every day to the point that's easy to mock them or to grow cynical. But irony is easy. Shaw gets a reader believing in this stuff even as the reader laughs.

Furthermore, I suspect Shaw does this deliberately. Here's a bit from near the book's end, XXX substituted for a character's name to avoid a spoiler:

"The same pit that (XXX) had imagined as his grave had become just that. Some might have found it funny, but the irony would have pissed (XXX) off. Irony is only amusing when it happens to someone else. Death isn't funny to the dead."

I'm not entirely sentimental about this book, though. Among the many things to like are Shaw's subordination. His supporting characters are just as memorable and wacky as its three protagonists, but Shaw knows when to pull them back and let the main characters take center stage. He brings those subsidiary characters part way toward resolving obstacles he had put in their way, but he avoids the monotony-inducing trap of resolving their problems as thoroughly as he does the main characters'.  Shaw has chops, and he also knows how to build a story.

***

I like Dana King's Grind Joint for its local color; its humor; its lack of sentimentality about its decaying urban setting; its ending that comes out of nowhere, but in a good way; and its tribute to a late star of King's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates.

A teenager who figures peripherally in the story is given the name Wilver, and if that's not a tribute to Wilver Dornell "Willie" Stargell, I'll eat your silly vintage-style 1979 Pirates baseball hat.

The novel's ending is harder to discuss because I don't want to spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that I did not see it coming, that it hits with a melancholy punch, that I'd have said, "Wow!" had anyone been around to hear me say it, and that it made perfect sense.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A post about McGilloway, McMaster, and me

I have nothing to say today, so I'm going to write a newspaper column. You know the kind I mean: the ones the columnist calls "Not that it really matters but..." or "Sudden thoughts and second thoughts," unless he abandons all pretense and simply reproduces great chunks of previous columns. Here's my version of what I'd do if I were a columnist rather than merely what a reporter of pedestrian literary talent once termed "editorial support":

1) The first three words of Brian McGilloway's The Nameless Dead, available in paperback from the folks at Pan (the entire novel, not just the first three words), are a pretty damn good first three words that would make a fine title: "The cadaver dog ... " That makes me want to keep reading.

2) As a follow-up to Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals, I'm reading H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. McMaster, a career military man and a scholar, shows a nice reporter's eye for detail in this vignette of the rivalry between Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in 1963:

"LeMay’s bushy eyebrows, sagging jowls, and jutting jaw advertised an irascible personality. Aware of Taylor’s aversion to tobacco smoke, he hung his ever-present long dark cigar out of the left side of his mouth and intentionally puffed the thick smoke in Taylor’s direction."

3) Dana King has posted the second in his series of Bouchercon interviews, this one with me in my capacity as a moderator of panels. I've been moderating for five years now, and Dana's questions gave me the chance to think about interesting aspects of this most enjoyable pastime. I am especially pleased at his declaration that I am "among the Bouchercon moderators whose panels are worth attending even if you don’t think you have an interest in the topic." That's the highest compliment a moderator can receive. Thanks!

Dana's interview with those superb panel organizers Judy Bobalik and Jon Jordan appeared last week, and further interviews with authors, organizers, and readers, all talking about what goes into a successful crime-fiction convention, will appear weekly through December.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon Day 3: McFetridge and Lansdale; Laukkanen, King, and Anonymous-9

After Bouchercon

From the perspective of 6:20 p.m., Saturday's 8 o'clock breakfast with the people who put together Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine seems a disorientingly distant memory, so it's time for a revitalizing nap before dinner. (This is Bouchercon; everybody takes naps at Bouchercon.)

*

Ah, that's better.

*

Saturday's panel on villains included this from Joe R. Lansdale:

"You're pulling something out of yourself. ... You're trying to bring humanity to the villain."

and

"You shouldn't try to write people as villains to begin with.  You should write stories that unfold in a certain way."

And this from DBB friend John McFetridge, who said his villains:

"See themselves as breaking laws, but they see the laws as kind of temporary."

North flank of Empire State Plaza, whose conference
center is the home of Bouchercon 2013.

That was more than just a laugh line. McFetridge told of seeing university buildings named for Canadian brewers who made their money shipping beer into the United States during Prohibition, even altering the shapes of the bottles to make smuggling easier. The drug smugglers in his books, he said, fully expect one day to see the BC Bud School of Finance.

*

I bought novels by Owen Laukkanen and Anonymous-9 after hearing them read during Bouchercon's author's choice sessions, which concluded with Dana King's passionate and eloquent defense of Raymond Chandler's championing of conduct not merely heroic but honorable. King is a fine crime writer. He'd also make a good university lecturer, and I was proud to have had him as a member of my noir and hard-boiled panel earlier in the convention.

Ali Karim, Roger Ellory, and your humble blogkeeper.
(Photo by Ursula)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon 2013 panels: Keeping it fresh, the Dana King edition

Here's a recycled post about how one of my Bouchercon 2013 panelists keeps things fresh. Such a question may be especially relevant on a panel that will discuss the tradition-encrusted genres of noir and hard-boiled fiction. The author in question, Dana King, may well have such matters on his mind already; he'll also appear at one of Bouchercon's new Author's Choice sessions, discussing “Is Chandler' s Concept of the Ideal Hero Still Relevant?”

===============  

I write occasionally about how crime writers keep established sub-genres such as P.I. or spy stories fresh (here, here, here).

Dana King's Wild Bill makes a running theme of one such example: FBI organized-crime agents' complaints that their resources are being depleted by another, more headline-grabbing priority:

“Rumor had it he had his eye on moving to an upcoming counterterrorism task force that could be a career maker, organized crime too Twentieth Century for him.”

*

“`Frank Ferraro might be the most dangerous criminal in the country. The only reason he’s not on the Most Wanted list is because he shaves and doesn’t wear a rag on his head.'”

*

“`About half our resources will be assigned to counterterrorism.'”

*

“`Careers are easier to make in counterterrorism than in OC.'”

That's some canny updating by King, a forceful case that gangster stories are still relevant, and another of the pleasures of this impressive book. Now I'll ask you once again: How do your favorite crime writers keep well-established sub-genres fresh, relevant, and contemporary?

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

Dana King will be part of my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Noir, hard-boiled, fantasy, and reality

My noir and hard-boiled panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., next month will also be a reality and fantasy panel, fantasy meaning nostalgia, pulp, and other forms of retreat from the everyday.

In this corner, representing reality, Dana King's Grind Joint, with its utter lack of illusion about the supposed benefits of a casino for an economically ravaged Pennsylvania town. In that corner, Terrence McCauley's violent Prohibition-era novel Prohibition and Eric Beetner's post-apocalyptic cannibal/survivor tale Stripper Pole at the End of the World.  Somewhere between these extremes, showing affinities at times with one, at times with the other, are Mike Dennis and Jonathan Woods, who join King, McCauley, and Beetner on the panel.

McCauley harks back to Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain (and to writers and movie makers who harked back to Hammett and Cain). While his book's themes of loyalty, doubt, and betrayal are confined to no one era, the cover of the novel, at upper left, quite accurately reflects the early- and mid-twentieth-century gats 'n' gloves mythos to which McCauley makes a modern-day contribution. He and Beetner are acutely aware of periods in American popular culture that preceded their own.

King, on the other hand, writes about a world where beaten-down cities are desperate for the next big thing, where governments happily throw cash at companies to relocate to (or remain in) their state, and a lot more money seems to circulate among corporations and politicians than among the relocated workers. For all King's affinities with Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins or King's amico Charlie Stella, it's a world you can find lurking behind today's headlines.

Fantasy? Reality? Pulp? Bad juju? You'll find it all at Bouchercon ... and here, at Detectives Beyond Borders.

How about you, lovers of noir and hard-boiled? Is your favorite reading reality? Fantasy? Or some mix of both?

======== 

Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods will be part of the "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, at Bouchercon 2013 on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon 2013 and what I'll do there

I'll be moderating two panels at Bouchercon 2013, which begins Thursday, Sept. 19, in Albany, New York.

First up, on Thursday at 4 p.m., is "World War II and Sons," in which I whip authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, Martin Limón, and Susan Elia MacNeal into fighting shape with a discussion of crime fiction set in wartime and its run-up and aftermath.

Then, after a quiet evening with a good book followed by a solid eight hours of sleep and a frugal yet nutritious breakfast, it's "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" on Friday at 10:20 a.m., with Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods.

That's a nice mix of authors I've read and admired, authors I'd heard about but not read until now, and a couple whose names were new to me. And that means I should be in for a stimulating and entertaining Bouchercon, and I hope you will be, too.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule. See you in Albany.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Long as I can see the leitmotif: Recurring themes that lend texture to crime novels

Some time ago discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders turned to those recurring snippets of dialogue or description that do so much to create a novel's feeling or texture.  I enjoyed the conversation, and not just because I got to use the word leitmotif.

Among my recent reading, Dana King's fine mob novel Wild Bill made great play of its FBI agents' worry that their specialty — organized crime — got short shrift in the bureau in favor of counterterrorism, the menace of the moment. More recently, Adrian McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Street is shot through with references to emigration from Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, the time and place of the novel's setting, invoked even when a suitcase turns up with body parts in it. (The suitcase's vendor can't remember having sold that particular item because so many people are buying luggage to pack for their permanent trips away.)

Leitmotifs in fiction are more than quirks, less than plot elements. A leitmotif should, according to a definition of leitmotifs' use in music, be "clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances." Used well, it indicates an author in control of his or her material, with a firm idea of what kind of story he or she wants to tell. Leitmotifs might not come to mind right away if someone asks you what happens in a given novel, but they are part of what a novel is about, part of the world it creates.

What are your favorite leitmotifs, or recurring themes, in crime novels? What do they add? And are leitmotifs a necessary part of a good story? Why? Why not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dana King and I

Dana King has long been a friend of Detectives Beyond Borders, a loyal reader and occasional commenter I've known since he was still in short pants at his first Bouchercon in 2008. Back in 2009, he even interviewed me on his blog, One Bite at a Time.

These days he's a two-time novelist, and I'm happy to report that his Wild Bill is the most fun I've had with a mob story since I last read Charlie Stella.  The link is apt; Stella has nice things to say about King's work, and King thanks Stella in the acknowledgments to his other book, Worst Enemies.

If you like Stella's writing, as I do, you'll likely like King's. Each writes books that follow parallel groups of characters, mob and police/FBI. Each uses multiple viewpoints, creating sympathy for characters good and bad. King's fiction is slightly more violent than Stella's; Stella's offers slightly more humor. But really, each is great fun, and I can picture the two writers as older and younger brothers, each slapping the other in the head as he tries to negotiate a forkful of steaming pasta.

Here's a brief example from Wild Bill, beguiling in its straightforward simplicity:

"You can't call someone who might put an ice pick in your ear a friend."

Can't argue with that. Now, goodnight. I have some reading to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012