Modern Ireland and modern Irish crime writers: A St. Patrick's Day post

For St. Patrick's Day, here's a post from a couple of years ago about Irish history and what you can learn about it from Irish crime writers.

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 A passage in Adrian McKinty's novel The Bloomsday Dead alerted me to a certain tendency in Belfast to romanticize the present and the past (though McKinty states the case more pungently), and I may first have heard the term irregulars, for the anti-treaty military forces in the Irish Civil War, through Kevin McCarthy.

The dicey subject of Irish-German relations in the middle of the twentieth century? Stuart Neville deals with one strand of its aftermath in his novel Ratlines. (And it appears that Declan Burke may do so as well, in his latest.)  And Eoin McNamee wrote about the chilling sectarian hatred at the heart of one of Belfast's most notorious murder gangs in his novel Resurrection Man.

The strange, orphaned position of Northern Ireland, unloved by both the United Kingdom and Eire (or is that Ireland? Or the South? Or the Republic?) cannot have been portrayed more directly and more touchingly than in the passage of Garbhan Downey's (I forget in which book) where a politician from the North tells a counterpart from the South something like: "I know you regard us as the unwanted child you'd rather tie up in a sack and toss into the river." And my first inkling that Irish history was more complicated than the Manichean pieties we get in America came when Gerard Brennan took me to the Irish Republican History Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast.

I've just finished reading Part IV of R.F. "Roy" Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, and I was periodically surprised and delighted when his entertaining, opinionated, analytical, non-ax-grinding history would touch upon subjects dealt with in some depth by each of the above-mentioned Irish crime writers. Foster's declaration, for example, that

"For all the rhetoric of anti-Partitionism, opinion in the Republic was covertly realistic about this point, too: the predominant note of modern Ireland in 1972 was that of looking after its own."

says in historical terms what Downey does in fictional ones, and induces a similar twinge of sympathy for Northern Ireland's people, if not its leaders.

So thanks, Irish crime writers, for writing entertaining popular fiction while casting an intelligent eye on the problematic present and past of your problematic country.

*

Foster's bibliographic essay at the end of Modern Ireland mentions one Irish crime writer by name, though not for her crime fiction:

"There are few first-rate biographies for the period, one glowing exception being R. Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, which illuminates far more than its subject."

Looking for more? Edwards, Downey, McNamee, and Brennan contributed stories to Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by McKinty and Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

"Fuck, it was cheese": Dietrich Kalteis' The Deadbeat Club

I'm not as high on Elmore Leonard as some crime fiction readers are, and my misgivings about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle verge on heresy, according to at least one highly partisan commenter on this blog.Yet some of my favorite crime novels of recent years—by John McFetridge, Declan Burke, Charlie Stella, Garbhan Downey—are of the Higgins/Leonard school, with its humor; its ensemble casts and multiple points of view; its wry views of men and women at work; and equal measures of sympathy, understanding, and careful observation granted to cops and criminals alike.

The latest entry is Dietrich Kalteis' second novel, The Deadbeat Club, about the complications unleashed by a drug war in southern British Columbia, a war with at least five sides and ensuing complications of which Kalteis good narrative advantage.

Throw in fast action, an interesting observation about Canada and the United States as settings for crime*, and a use of cheese that you've likely never seen before in a crime novel, and you've got a few hours of heartwarming and violent fun on the way.

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* "His baby face defied his age, hair as wild as Tanner himself. Plenty of practice with Russian AKs, Tanner did a stint in the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Left a body count up and down the Congo, hunted Al Qaeda and Islamics, popped off insurgents in Iraq, Darfur, more in the Gaza and Georgia. Now there was talk of North Korea. All the same to Tanner. A resume that had the military contractors drooling.

"North of the border things were different, no military contractors up here. Tanner lying low and getting high, starting to feel bored. So when he heard Travis wanted guns, sending his boys to the shipyard, he offered to throw in, not worried what the gig paid."

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

All I could drink with the author of All You Can Eat

But first, a pint or two with Kevin McCarthy, whose novel Peeler I liked so much a few years ago. That affable, insightful author talked about Ireland, about America, about the American city where we both lived at the same times years ago (I was the quiet one on the Green Line) and, before I knew it, I had a copy of his second book, Irregulars, in my book bag.

Peeler, I wrote:

"performed one of those acts of alchemy that always leave me in awe: It conveyed not just the facts of the novel's historical setting (the founding years of the Free State of Ireland), but also the feeling: the rural and urban poverty in West Cork, the moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler."

So I am excited to have Irregulars, and I'll keep you posted.

Then Kevin and I hied to the Porterhouse (I took a pint of the plain to keep my heart from sinking) to meet Ed O'Loughlin, who slapped his latest book into my hands. I had not heard of O'Loughlin before, but he was nominated for the Booker Prize, and he was smart enough to quit journalism when he looked around and found that the world's corps of foreign correspondents had been been slashed and cut and decimated to the point where it could fit comfortably into a snug at any bar in Ireland and still hear its lonely voices echoing off the walls.

***

Speaking of Irish authors new to me, Declan Burke has been throwing new names into the ring of late over at his Crime Always Pays, and no one knows more about Irish crime writing than Declan, even though he's sometimes too modest to show it.

© 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.

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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

Getting ready for the Edgars

The Detectives Beyond Borders wardrobe department is busy kitting me out for Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt in New York, hosted and presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

Overseas nominees (several from Ireland, naturally) are up for awards in several categories: Alan Glynn, for best paperback original (the excellent Bloodland); Declan Burke and John Connolly for best critical/biographical book (Books to Die For); and Jane Casey's The Reckoning, for the Mary Higgins Clark award. Teresa Solana (Spain) is up for best short story with "Still Life No. 41."  Malla Nunn's Blessed are the Dead (South Africa) is on the shortlist for best paperback original.

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French is up for best fact crime book. (See French in conversation with Parker Bilal and Adrian McKinty at the Adelaide Writers' Festival.)

Read my reports on the 2012 Edgars. See a complete list of the 2013 Edgar nominees.

(This just in: The wardrobe committee has made its decision. We're going with the charcoal gray suit, the white shirt, and a silk tie with a splash of purple.)

*

Meanwhile, Open Road is celebrating the Edgars with contests, news, and low-priced e-book versions of selected past winners.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Some Irish crime writers on St. Patrick's Day

I've been in touch with some of my Irish crime writing friends. It transpires that this St. Patrick's Day carry-on has something to do with Ireland, and that a few of them have some thoughts on the matter. First up is Anthony Quinn, author of Disappeared, with sobering, wistful thoughts on America's crapulous celebration of Ireland's patron saint. His essay is called "Green WIth Envy," and here's a sample:

"On March 17, every US city seemed to want to subject the saint’s day to a proper patriotic blowout, an annual invitation to a feast of green, white and gold, that, as a child growing up during the Troubles, I yearned to accept. However, in the 1970s and 80s, Northern Ireland was a world away from Boston, Chicago or New York. In the border towns of my youth, wearing green made you a target for loyalist death squads, while waving a tricolour was an act of rebellion that could lead to internment without trial. 

"For the children of my generation, March 17 was a religious festival blighted by bad weather, a solemn event from which all sense of pleasure or celebration was firmly excluded."

Read the rest on the Mysterious Press Web site. Quinn's essay devotes space to Denis Donaldson, the activist, informer, and haunted figure who was an inspiration for a haunted central character in Disappeared.

Next up is Carrickfergus' own Adrian McKinty, who writes: "If you want to call yourself Irish then be my guest ... and if that Irishness manifests itself in drinking German beer that has been dyed green, well that's fine with me too." Just don't wear a four-leaf clover and call it a shamrock.

Finally, Declan Burke marks the day with a list of fine Irish crime novels of the last five years, a list to which you should add Burke's own Absolute Zero Cool and Slaughter's Hound.

*

Irish fact of the day: Barry Fitzgerald was Protestant! Now, I'm off to read from The Oxford History of Ireland. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Big O is now a big e-book

A while back I glommed onto an Irish crime novel called The Big O.

"The deliciously complicated plotting," I wrote, "the wry dialogue and the sympathy Burke engenders for his cast of characters made this one of the most fun and purely pleasurable reads I've had in a while."

Reviewers invoked names such as Westlake, Leonard, and Hiaasen, which lets you know you'll crack a smile reading it. And now you can read it on your mobile reading device for $4.99, as well you should. Find out why Detectives Beyond Borders called The Big O a "tour de fun."

***

I sent Alan Glynn a verbal high five a year and half ago for exposing narrative's use as a contemporary weasel word in his novel Bloodland. His new Graveland, out this spring, does something similar with going forward, as well it should.

Read more about corporate and government weasel words at the Weasel Words Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Edgar is Irish, or DBB friend lands a nice nomination

Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Detectives Beyond Borders friend Declan Burke, has been nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award in the best critical/biographical category.

The Edgars will be presented May 2 in New York. Congratulations to Burke and Connolly for a bit of payoff on their stupendous effort, and good luck.

*

Alan Glynn's Bloodland is up for best paperback original novel, Glynn joining Burke and Connolly as Irish nominees for this year's Edgars. Bloodland has its finger on the pulse of contemporary paranoia and manipulation like no other crime novel I can remember, not least in its invocation of 21st-century Orwellianisms such as "narrative," "brand," and "to the next level."

*

Here's Glynn on  the Golden Age of paranoia.   Here are my previous posts about Bloodland. And here's a list of nominees in all categories, from the Edgars Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Declan Burke's Job search

Over at Crime Always Pays, Declan Burke highlights three readers' assessments of his novel Slaughter's Hound. The three discussions read, in part, thus:

“This is a dark tale, and it gets progressively darker as it goes along.”  

 “This novel is a tragedy, which takes place in a town called Sligo, a location that could be Thebes or any other place in the world where the frailties of good men and women are exploited by the eternal cynics and they become the playthings of the gods ... the hero’s every good intention or action goes wrong, and Harry Rigby reminds you at times of Job and at other times of Oedipus.”  

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is yet another ‘How the hell does he do that?’ offering from author Declan Burke.” 

Not bad, eh?

Burke himself cites his debt to Horace Kallen's The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy. I have no philosophical weight to add to that considerable discussion, but I will note that Burke sustains the serious tone without abandoning the wisecracking that has been a hallmark of his previous books. And the wisecracks never clash with the prevailing seriousness. It's as if Burke had taken a cheerful musical theme, then rendered it in a minor key. And it works.

"To date we'd had nearly a feel of sunny days and mild nights, and the sunset earlier on had been a ruddy shepherd's weight. Which meant it'd be a bright, warm and beautiful morning when I told Herb his cab was a write-off, this courtesy of Finn, his flaky fuck du jour."

and

"I knocked the stereo off and drove on. Shuddering from a bad case of the grace of Gods and but fors."

are just two examples of the sort of balance (or reconciliation) Burke maintains between the tragic and the funny. I've read the book before, and I'm reading it again, and I say that it can't be easy for a novelist to be so in control of his material and so aware of what he wants to do that he can maintain a tone so consistently. Good job.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

In praise of long sentences

I've been accused of prejudice in favor of brevity, and the accusation is just. I love Dashiell Hammett, and I live by Strunk & White's injunction to omit needless words. Some writing is so bad that chopping it down to size is an act of mercy.

But now I'm reading two books (rereading one, actually) that go in the opposite direction. Their long, baroque sentences are both gorgeous places in which to get lost, and fine settings that emphasize the punch of the brief sentences that surround them.

Here's the protagonist of That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda:

"Of medium height, rather rotund as to physique, or perhaps a bit squat, with black hair, thick and curly, which sprang forth from his forehead at the halfway point, as if to shelter his two metaphysical knobs from the fine Italian sun, he had a somnolent look, a heavy, lumbering walk, a slightly dull manner, like a person fighting a laborious digestion; dressed as well as his slender government salary allowed him to dress, with one or two little stains of olive oil on his lapel, almost imperceptible, however, like a souvenir of the hills of his Molise."

And here's just part of the first sentence of  Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound:

"It was a rare fine night for a stroll down by the docks, the moon plump as a new pillow in an old-fashioned hotel and the undertow in the turning tide swushing its ripples silvery-green and a bird you’ve never heard before chirring its homesick tale of a place you might once have known and most likely now will never see ... "

If I tell you that the novel's second sentence is "It was that kind of evening, alright," you'll know what delightful fun long sentences can be.

Long sentences: Good or bad? Discuss.

*

I go crazy when novels are described as "plot-driven" or, more usually these days, "character-driven." Among other things, such odiously simplistic shorthand neglects the possibility that a novel may be language-driven, that its effects and a good bit of its meaning may lie in the way the author tells it. That's the case with David Peace and also with the two examples cited above. Call the Gadda excerpt "character-driven," and you miss a good part of the point.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Character names that carry meaning

Two of the books in Wednesday's year's-best-in-crime-reading post feature protagonists with especially resonant names: Benjamin Sobieck's 4 Funny Detective Stories — Starring Maynard Soloman (Solo man. Get it?) and Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. (What does the prototypical fictional detective do if not use her wits to make murky situations clear?)

Declan Burke's Slaughter's Hound has some names fraught with meaning, too, if you're up on your Irish. Sobieck, Gran, and Burke have a light touch with names, but this significant-name thing brings peril. Get too obvious, and you risk sounding like John Bunyan.

Here's your question: What are your favorite character names that bear a message? What character names go too far and hit you over the head with their significance?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Books to Die For, Part I

I've begun my reading of Books to Die For with the essays by Scott Phillips on Charles Willeford, Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith, John McFetridge on Trevanian, Mike Nicol on James McClure, Qiu Xiaolong on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Elmore Leonard on George V. Higgins.

In each case but one, the essay is by a crime writer whose work I've read and the subject is another crime writer (or writers) whose work I've also read. In that exceptional case, the setting of the novel under discussion is my home town, so I feel that I can bring multiple perspectives to all six essays.

Each of the six probably says at least as much about its author as about its subject, with the possible exception of Nicol's on The Steam Pig, first of James McClure's six Kramer and Zondi novels set in apartheid-era South Africa. I can think of no author whose work looms larger over his country's crime fiction than McClure's does over South Africa's. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that Nicol's fine summation of the great McClure seems to me more self-effacing than the other essays I read.

Scott Phillips (lower left) simulates
a larcenous act as, from left,
John McFetridge, your humble
blogkeeper, and Declan Burke
look on. (If this were a newspaper
rather than a blog, McFetridge,
Y.H.B.K. and Burke would not
just be looking on but also
sharing a laugh.) 

Elsewhere, McFetridge on Trevanian's novel The Main offers the same keen eye for social history that I know from McFetridge's own books. And Scott Phillips' observation that Charles Willeford's heroes "cheat, brawl, lie, and seduce their way, unencumbered by notions of fair play, through a postwar American landscape Norman Rockwell never painted" reminded me of nothing so much as the unsentimental but very funny world of Phillips' own novels.

And now, as Bob Dylan said, the hour is getting late. So I'll leave you with the thought that I see no reason Books to Die For and its editors, Declan Burke and John Connolly, ought not to be considered for next year's Edgar, Dagger, and other crime fiction awards in the critical/non-fiction categories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crime books you should plotz, they're so good

Shots e-zine has asked a worldwide panel of crime-fiction experts and me to choose books to die for, the occasion being celebration of a new book called, as it happens, Books to Die For.

The book is a collection of essays by some of the world's best crime writers (Megan Abbott, Christopher Brookmyre, Ken Bruen, Sara Gran, Jason Goodwin, Allan Guthrie, John McFetridge, Adrian McKinty, Jo Nesbø, Leonardo Padura, David Peace, Scott Phillips, and many more) writing about their favorite crime writers, and it's coming soon to a country near you.

Each contributor was asked, in the editors' words, for

"passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they would place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so that they could be sure they had done all in their power to make you read it."

I have yet to see the book, but I did get the lowdown from one of its editors, Declan Burke, over a restorative fruit juice after Crimefest in Bristol this year, and the book sounds like a cracker, with a surprising choice or two.

Those are the captains and sailors of the great ship Crime Fiction. Among we critical barnacles clinging to the hull, Shots leads off with Barry Forshaw on Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene, and me, on how Bill James' Roses, Roses changed my life. I know I'll check back often as the Shots list grows; you should, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler turns 124 127 years old today, so I thought I'd bring back some old posts about his influence on crime writers beyond his own American (and English) borders.

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Four years ago the Los Angeles Times asked writers what they would give Chandler as a birthday gift, but I'd like to discuss taking rather than giving, namely what other writers have taken from Philip Marlowe's great creator.
Two years ago, in a post called "Chandler in South Africa," I noted Roger Smith's graceful extended tribute to Chandler in his novel Mixed Blood.

Last year I discovered Claudio Nizzi, Massimo Bonfatti, and their loving, amused, and amusing tribute to Chandler (and just about every other crime, movie, and pop-culture trend) in their Leo Pulp comics.

Matt Rees, Welsh-born and Jerusalem-based author of mysteries set in the Palestinian territories, told Detectives Beyond Borders that: "My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett." Moreover, he said the social chaos of the territories reminded him of the worlds those two authors portrayed so well: "In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler."

In Ireland, Declan Hughes invoked Chandler in discussing his own country's Celtic Tiger economic explosion and concurrent boom in crime and crime fiction: "The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.”

Also in Ireland, your humble blogkeeper noted the debt to Chandleresque plotting and wisecracking in Declan Burke's first novel, Eightball Boogie. Colin Watson's delightfully opinionated social history of English crime writing, Snobbery With Violence, cites Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," for his observations about crime writing and English writers.

An afterword to Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian crime novel American Visa noted the author's references to Chandler, Hammett, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. I've also detected more than superficial signs of Chandler's influence in novels by Australia's Peter Corris and noted the traces of Chandler some have found in the work of Algeria's Yasmina Khadra. Finally, Chandler is one of many crime writers upon whom Australia's Garry Disher muses in his wildly self-referential and wildly funny story "My Brother Jack."

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And now it's your turn. What other crime writers from outside the United States have felt Chandler's influence? How has the influence shown itself?

***

Late-breaking Chandler tribute: I've just read the following in William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around Rosa):

"Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

At Swim-Two-Birds, or Anything you can do, I can do meta

(First edition of At Swim-Two-Birds,
London, Longman's Green & Co., 1939)

The only thing that makes me blush about reading meta-fiction is that phrases like "modes of fictional discourse" spring unbidden to my lips.

The first third or so of Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds (that's how far into the book I am) reads at time like solemn myth; at times like boastful, parodic epic; at times like naturalistic narrative; and at times like just plain fun. One of my favorite examples of the latter:

"`I'm thirsty,' he said. `I have sevenpence. Therefore I buy a pint.'

"I immediately recognized this as an intimation that I should pay for my own porter.

"`The conclusion of your syllogism,' I said lightly, `is fallacious, being based on licensed premises.'"

But what I really like are the bits that call amusing attention to their own modes of fic— to their own amusing ways of saying stuff:

"My talk had been forced, couched in the accent of the lower or working classes."

This can wake the reader up and make him notice, with a smile, even the most routine acts:

"In a moment he was gone, this time without return. Brinsley, a shadow by the window, performed perfunctorily the movements of a mime, making at the same time a pious ejaculation.

"Nature of mime and ejaculation: Removal of sweat from brow; holy God."

If you don't think self-reference can be funny and lovely at the same time, try the following:

"Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins.

"We attained nothing on our walk that was relevant to the purpose thereof but we filled up the loneliness of our souls with the music of our two voices, dog-racing, betting and offences against chastity being the several subjects of our discourse. We walked many miles together on other nights on similar missions-following matrons, accosting strangers, representing to married ladies that we were their friends, and gratuitously molesting members of the public. One night we were followed in our turn by a member of the police force attired in civilian clothing. On the advice of Kelly we hid ourselves in the interior of a church until he had gone. I found that the walking was beneficial to my health."

Now, I'll go resume my reading. You should do the same.

***

Declan Burke offers more recent evidence that meta-fiction can be fun. His novel Absolute Zero Cool was a deserving winner of the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award for comic crime fiction at Crimefest 2012 in Bristol last month. "Author and character together and individually ponder and confront the very biggest moral and ethical questions in ways occasionally touching and always hugely entertaining," I wrote about the book.

That still seems about right,

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crimefest 2012 highlights

A gentle spring wind dissipates the gin fumes over College Green, and Bristol is an eerily quiet place now that Ali Karim has left town.

With Crimefest 2012's remaining stragglers marshaling their strength before the Sunday dinner, here are some highlights of my third Crimefest, one of the most enjoyable crime festivals I've been part of:

1) Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool wins the Last Laugh award, for best comic crime fiction published in the U.K., besting a field that included hacks and pikers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.

2) Your humble blogkeeper loses the Criminal Mastermind quiz to Peter Guttridge on the crime-fiction equivalent of penalty kicks. Guttridge and I each answered fifteen questions correctly in general crime-fiction knowledge and our specialty categories. (His was Richard Stark's Parker novels; mine was Dashiell Hammett.) Guttridge won the prize of Bristol blue glass and a free pass to next year's festival because he had passed on only five questions whose answers he did not know while I passed on seven. I think, however, that my showing may be the best ever by a North American, and proof to the Brits that there's more to America than bluff good humor, rustic colonial manners, and a flair for tall stories.

3) A post-dinner discussion with Gunnar Staalesen, who agreed with a Detectives Beyond Borders commenter's suggestion that the Anders Breivik case will halt fruitful, honest discussion of immigration and integration in Norway for a generation.

4) Finding a crime writer (William Ryan) for whom Isaac Babel (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry) is both an inspiration and a character.

5) Reunions with the delightful floating cast of authors, organizers, critics and fans who spend their vacations criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean to attend every crime festival they can in England and America, and the addition of Alison Bruce, Laura Wilson and Stav Sherez to the cast. See you in Cleveland or Harrogate or Bristol or Albany or Long Beach or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Juicy bits at Crimefest

Sounds better than "pulp."

"Juicy bits" is what they call citrus pulp here in the UK, and I'm probably not the first North American who has enjoyed a salacious snicker at the breakfast table over the expression.

Crimefest 2012 begins this afternoon, and this young crime fiction festival must have arrived. This years's lineup includes Frederick Forsyth, P.D. James, and Sue Grafton, plus more Scandinavians than you could shake a plate of lutefisk at and a passel of old Detectives Beyond Friends, including Declan Burke, Anne Zouroudi, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, Chris Ewan, and Michael Stanley.

It was the latter two ("Michael Stanley" is the nom de publication of the writing team of Stanley Trollip and Michael Sears) who suggested a hair dryer and a tiny Phillips screw driver might salvage my camera from a minor aquatic accident suffered on the train yesterday.

Here the Crimefest program, complete with juicy bits. More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Mystery Táin: How Ireland's epic is like a crime story

(Cuchulain heads
for military school)

So, how is The Táin like a crime story? (And yep, I know Táin doesn't rhyme with train, but I couldn't resist.)

Its protagonist is a fearsome physical specimen, but mainly he's clever. I mean, you don't want to mess with a guy who

"struck off their four heads from themselves Eirr and Indell and from Foich and Fochlam, their drivers, and he fixed a head of each man of them on each of the prongs of the pole."

but it's his cunning that makes him stand out. When just a child, he overhears from a great distance a priest's instructions to his pupils, then uses those instructions as the authority to obtain arms not normally available to one of his age. "Hey," he as much as says when caught, "the priest said so," earning him in my edition the angry epithet of "bewitched elf-man."

My edition gives the English translations of some of character names in brackets after the originals. Some of those names are epithets, and the effect is like that of colorful Mafia nicknames: "Bascell ('the Lunatic')."

And finally, after mentioning Declan Burke's allusions to Irish myth in his more than fine new novel Slaughter's Hound, I noted this passage in The Táin: "And Culann came out, and he saw his slaughter-hound in many pieces."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crime fiction and the power of myth

Declan Burke's forthcoming novel Slaughter's Hound is full of characters named Finn and Gráinne and Saoirse, and invocations of Queen Maeve, and a short prefatory note hints at wolf hounds' rich role in Irish mythology.

One need not recognize the allusions to enjoy and appreciate the dark, serious, and occasionally funny story (and I may well have missed more of them than I caught), but it doesn't hurt, either.

While waiting for Burke's book, why not dip into Mike Stone and Gerard Brennan's Requiems for the Departed,  a collection of short stories by seventeen contemporary Irish crime writers based on Irish myth?

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That's Ireland. What myths from other cultures have contemporary crime writers used? The Oedipus story? Cain and Abel? Which could they use? What ancient myths and tales would make good crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012