An ordinary not decent movie, or what's the secret to making a criminal a compelling protagonist?

To paraphrase Prince Rogers Nelson, this week I've been been watching violent comic crime movies as if it were 1999.

Here's what's wrong with Ordinary Decent Criminal, originally scheduled for release that year but withheld until 2000:

1) Kevin Spacey's character, Michael Lynch, is far too cuddly to be believable as a criminal.
2) The movie contained no surprise not telegraphed from five miles off.
3) The climactic art heist wants to be seen as madcap and zany, but isn't.
4) The movie is all concept and no story. Crook lives with two women, is a good family man, and likes to taunt the cops. And that's it. One knows from the start that Lynch won't be killed, won't be caught, and will get the girls.

Anything offensive about the movie? Maybe this: It lacks the guts to show Lynch committing any truly despicable acts. Doing so would have forced it to work harder to make him a compelling character.   That the real Dublin gangster on whom Lynch was at least partly based is said to have been a torturer and a bully who shook down hot dog vendors may make the movie a sin against truth as well as against fiction.

So here's a question for you readers: How does a novel, story, or movie make a criminal protagonist compelling without slipping into the opposite extremes of torture porn or excessive cuteness?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Benjamin Black is history, and so can you

John Banville signing
at Gutter Bookshop,
Dublin. Photo by your
humble blogkeeper

One of the last sights I saw in Dublin last week was John Banville signing books for a crowd that I'd guess was mostly Banville fans but had turned out on the occasion of a book he wrote as Benjamin Black.

Holy Orders is the sixth novel in Banville/Black's series about Quirke, a police pathologist in 1950s Dublin, and Black showed that he has his historical-novelist head screwed on right.

"Rome was our capital" in the 1950s, Banville told interviewer Olivia O'Leary at Smock Alley Theatre, Ireland's politicians taking their cue from the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, he said, he refuses to give his characters the benefit of hindsight. They don't know what the church is doing to them, and they — or Quirke, at least — can't learn from it. No characters spouting reassuringly progressive sentiments here, and the gap between what the characters know and what the readers know is a nice source of tension.

Here's part of what I wrote about the fourth Quirke novel, A Death in Summer:

"John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman’s pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman’s questions of the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work? Does the finished product perform the functions essential to an object of its kind?"

Get all the answers in the complete review, which appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Banville's remark about characters and hindsight in mind, what must a contemporary author do to make historical fiction work? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

Kells and other books on my last day in Dublin

Sign at the Gutter Bookshop
(above); Shane MacGowan
mural, Adair Lane (right);
Bachelors Walk reflected
in the River Liffey from the
O'Connell Bridge (below). 
Photos by your humble
blogkeeper

I spent part of my last day in Dublin looking at the Book of Kells, part listening to John Banville at the Smock Alley theatre, part buying books at the Gutter Bookshop, part drinking cider at the Palace Bar, and part cursing my impending return to Philadelphia and work.

Banville took questions from Olivia O'Leary in an interview to be broadcast on RTÉ Radio, then crossed the street to the Gutter to sign copies of Holy Orders, his latest novel written as Benjamin Black and featuring Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin.

Banville talked about Quirke, about the Black books, and about the novels he writes under his own name. He also revealed (a revelation to me, at least) that he used to be a newspaper sub-editor, what the English and Irish call a copy editor. Banville and I, that is, share a profession, and I am therefore obligated henceforth to consider him a blood brother.

Jim Larkin

My purchases from the Gutter included Kevin Barry's City of Bohane which, it transpires, is now award-winning. I may read that on the plane home, or else the history of the GAA. Or maybe, so help me, Lady Gregory's collection of Irish mythology.

How does it feel to be back? Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat! It's time to start planning my next trip.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

Hugo Hamilton's Headbanger

I called Hugo Hamilton's 1997 Dublin novel Headbanger "a bit literary in its opening pages," by which I meant it was at times a bit too conscious of its own cleverness, trying too hard to make a plot point.

But those moments are few, and the novel does what crime novels rarely do: It confronts the reality that most crime writers and readers are not killers or victims. Headbanger's Pat Coyne, a Dublin cop, wages small fights and dreams of glory for an imaginary audience, but does what he has to do when the situation demands, "driven by a new mood of optimism and complete fearlessness."

Throughout, Hamilton maintains a nice balance between gravity and comedy, or, to put it another way, he sees the humor in Coyne's fight without, however, belittling it. After hoods kidnap and threaten Hamilton's wife, we get:

"Coyne hesitated. They just abducted her and took her to the Phoenix Park. Subjected her to inhuman and degrading treatment.

"Like what? Molly demanded ...

"They made her perform Riverdance. She needs protection, Frank."

 It might not surprise readers to learn that Headbanger pays explicit tribute to Flann O'Brien and that, like O'Brien, Coyne had a father who waged a brave, futile fight to educate him solely in Irish. I suspect that, having visited Ireland just twice and Dublin once, and being no expert in the country's literature, I may have missed much in this book. But what I got is touching and funny, and you should get it, too.

***

Who Needs Copy Editors? Sentence of the Day:

    "Krzyzewski is already urging ACC officials to start contemplating what they need to do to avoid other leagues from poaching ACC schools."

— Aaron Beard, Associated Press Basketball Writer

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

If 20 was 24, plus a question about linguistic hucksterism

I had a post lined up about Hugo Hamilton's affecting 1997 Dublin crime novel Headbanger and another on Max Allan Collins' Quarry in the Middle, which forced me to re-examine what I look for and enjoy in a crime novel.

Then I dropped into a local Starbucks and found that its venti (the Italian word for twenty) drinks now contain twenty-four ounces. The same Starbucks has added a trenta, which, naturally, contains thirty-one ounces even though trenta is the Italian word for thirty. 

This means I can no longer simply ask for a small, medium, or large rather than the Starbucks equivalents of tall, grande, and venti. (I got around the problem this time by ordering a 24-ounce drink and asking the counter clerk if the drink whose name means twenty really contains twenty-four ounces. Her reply? "Would you like whipped cream with that?”)

But this is a watershed in American fast-food retailing: The stuff-your-face supersize McDonalds mentality meets the semantic snobbery that has “baristas” mispronouncing doppio macchiato all over America. It is also not the first time Starbucks has altered a word's meaning for its own purposes.

What examples of semantic hucksterism language change drive you nuts?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

An Iceman at the Pen & Pencil; Hugo Hamilton's eight honourable gobshites

Detectives Beyond Borders took the evening off to attend a wine tasting at his club. But, always on the job, I snagged a movie tie-in edition from a crime writer/fellow club member, one of whose books has been made into a movie that will be in theaters in May.

The author is Anthony Bruno, the book is The Iceman, the stars include Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, and Ray Liotta, and you can watch a trailer here.

When not imbibing Hollywood glamour at third hand, I began reading Hugo Hamilton's 1997 novel Headbanger. The book is a bit literary in its opening pages, by which I mean that Hamilton strains to draw parallels among crooks, cops, and civilians. But it's hard not to love a novel that includes a bit like the following:

"`Embibing Emporium' was another Dublin idiosyncrasy that sprang to mind. As a Garda, Coyne took an interest in the precision of language, and one of these days he would walk straight into that pub, slap a concise Oxford down on the bar counter and say: you pack of eight honourable gobshites, you can't even fucking spell. Look, it's I, not E. Imbibing."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

Con Houlihan: An Irish sportswriter on apostrophes and hurling

"A man who can put an apostrophe in the wrong place is capable of anything," said the Irish sportswriter Con Houlihan, who died Saturday.

While experience has taught me that reporters who don't know where to put apostrophes (and adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, prepositions, em-dashes, commas, semi-colons, numbers, letters, words, paragraphs, their own names) are, indeed, capable of much, including advancement to positions where they can pass on their lack of knowledge to other reporters, it's Houlihan's sports writing that is the occasion of this post.

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

I sought out a collection of his work because I wanted to see what he had to say about hurling. Four years ago at Dublin's Croke Park I watched one of the great performances in that old sport's history, and I wanted to see how my awed, outsider's view stacked up against those of an experienced observer. Happily, they matched in places, which I took as a compliment to my own sensitivity and a greater one to Houlihan's enviable ability to appreciate the sport's beauty even after watching it for decades.

I wrote after the game that a friend had made the day's winners sound like "the Ballets Russes, Patton's Third Army and the 1927 New York Yankees rolled into one." Houlihan had written years earlier that

"We tend to take this remarkable game too much for granted: a fresh eye would more sharply perceive its blend of bravery and hardihood and delicate skills."

Knowing hurling's association with violence (the club-like hurleys have been used for purposes other than carrying and striking the sliothar, or ball), I was astonished and gratified to see supporters of the two teams, Kilkenny and Waterford, mingling and drinking in peace and good fellowship before and after the game. Houlihan wrote about another All-Ireland final that

"The early swallows from Cork and Wexford were in town – mostly lads and lasses who fraternised freely in an intermingling of red and white and purple and gold and whose thoughts were more on love than on war."

Houlihan's appreciation of the game showed, too, in his description of  on-field action, a skill sadly atrophied now that sportswriters are taught to leave that sort of thing to television:

"Tony Doran put up his hand in a thicket of ash, brought down the ball, and with a full swing of the hurley sent it to the net."

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Posts and outposts

Welcome to the Gutter

Crime Always Pays brings the happy news of a new crime-friendly bookstore in Dublin. The Gutter Bookshop, conveniently situated in the happening Temple Bar district, has hosted or will host the likes of John Connolly, Arlene Hunt and Colin Bateman. Give store owner Bob Johnstone a round of applause, and give the store lots of support and money.

Out of the frying pan and into the Shrier

Former Noir at the Bar star Howard Shrier is up for Canada's best-novel Arthur Ellis Award for High Chicago. Shrier won the best-first-novel award last year for Buffalo Jump.

High five for Ghosts

Finally, Stuart Neville's criminally neglected debut novel, Ghosts of Belfast (called The Twelve in the UK, where the name Belfast apparently makes folks shuffle awkwardly and stare at the floor), has won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the mystery/thriller category. Well done, Irish Stu.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Irish writing sucks not in the least

The Irish are proverbially humorous; famine, bloody civil war and murderous sectarian hatred will do that, I guess. Here's Gypo Nolan after he has turned in Francis Joseph McPhillip (last seen in my previous post) in Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer and claimed the twenty pounds reward:

"How, for the first time, he realized the difficulty of making a plan without McPhillip. ... His brain got all in a tangle and he could make a beginning nowhere."

Hmm, maybe poverty, deprivation and bloodshed aren't the only reasons. Maybe Irish syntax has something to do with the occasional humorous effect of Irish English. Irish, according to Wikipedia, has no words for "yes" and "no," so must express negation in other ways. American or British English might express the boldface sentence above as "could not make a beginning" or "couldn't make a beginning anywhere."

"Could make a beginning nowhere" is structured like a little joke, the unexpected payoff ("nowhere") coming at the end, like a good punch line, working its magic by overturning the expectation generated by what had gone before. The context is not humorous, but the sentence still has a surprising effect. That's my theory, anyway. Now, talk me out of it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Informer

A serendipitous visit to a fine old bookstore this weekend turned up that fine old Irish crime novel, Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer, in a sturdily bound edition at an attractive price.

I liked O'Flaherty's 1928 novel The Assassin for its spare prose and harrowing exploration of solitary psyches (even though Wikipedia's article on O'Flaherty does not mention the book). It looks like more of the same from The Informer, published in 1925 and the basis for the 1935 movie of the same name by O'Flaherty's cousin John Ford.

Why keeps a crime novel from the 1920s fresh in 2010? Maybe it's the unsparing psychology. Maybe it's the unsentimental politics. And maybe it's the no-nonsense descriptions and action, full of concrete nouns and verbs, sparing with the adjectives.

Then he turned about. He crouched against the angle of the doorway and peered around the corner of the wall, up the lane through which he had just come. He wanted to find out whether anybody was following him. He was a murderer.

Writing like that doesn't get old.

(Did Irish storytellers from the twentieth century have a predisposition for tales of men on the run in their own land? The country's history makes the proposition plausible. Click here for a recent post about another such tale, though by a British author.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Shopping for books

Did I mention that I've been visiting Ireland and that I've acquired a book or two? In any case, I've had a shopping experience in Dublin to bookend the exceedingly pleasant one I had a week ago at Belfast's No Alibis.

My host this time was Michael Gallagher's Murder Ink on Dawson Street, attractively situated near Trinity College and some of the city's best shopping. Like No Alibis, this shop reflects a commitment to crime not to be found in chain bookstores. As is the case in Belfast, the stock is both comprehensive and reflective of what I take to be the owner's own tastes. No Alibis stocked few if any mysteries that would be called cozy, for instance, and Murder Ink has a separate shelf for historical mysteries.

Like No Alibis, too, Murder Ink repays all the love that a crime-fiction fan has to offer. I stopped by the shop well after closing time one evening, for example, and doors were flung open and inventory searched purely for my convenience.

So tonight, on my final evening in Ireland, I'll drink a pint of Bulmer's to two of the most pleasant and welcoming experiences this crime-fiction reader and shopper has had. To Murder Ink and No Alibis: Sláinte! May your customers always leave your stores with their shopping bags heavy and their wallets light.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Kilkenny shatters Waterford to claim third straight All-Ireland hurling title

Hurling aficionado and crime novelist Declan Burke had described this Kilkenny team in terms that made them sound like the Ballets Russes, Patton's Third Army and the 1927 New York Yankees rolled into one, and he was right. Today was my first hurling match, and I had never seen one team so thoroughly dominate another in any sport, Kilkenny taking a 2-16 to 0-5 lead in the first half at Dublin's Croke Park on the way to winning, 3-30 to 1-13.

For baseball fans, the matchup might have resembled the Yankees versus the Red Sox back when the Yankees were still good and before the Red Sox became preening, strutting -- in other, words, the Yankees. Waterford was trying for its first All-Ireland title in more than 40 years, much as the Red Sox went from 1919 to 2003 without winning a World Series. Kilkenny, on the other hand, has dominated the sport the way the Yankees ruled baseball in the waning years of the 20th century, and it looks set to continue doing so, as its under-18 team also won an All-Ireland title today.

Hurling is an odd game to North American eyes because players can advance the ball by just about any means: striking it with the hurley, running with it balanced on the hurley, slapping it forward, even kicking it. Kilkenny had Waterford's number in all those ways and more, and Waterford's frustration showed early, with players whining about non-calls and making impotent passes to the side of the field rather than attacking the goal.

For those not up on their hurling, a player scores a goal, worth three points, by striking the ball past the goalkeeper and into a soccer-like net, or a point, by batting it with the hurley through two North-American-football-like goalposts above the net. It's the latter that impressed this first-time spectator most, the players sending the ball through the posts from long distances and steep angles with flicks of the wrist that looked as effortless as tennis forehands -- or at least as effortless as tennis forehands looked before it became fashionable for tennis players to grunt to show how hard they're working.

I sat in the middle of a large group of Waterford rooters at Croke, and I learned a bit of Gaelic, a phrase that sounded like "Ahfer foegh's sake!" If any Irish speakers know the meaning of this phrase, please let me know.

The final is major news in Ireland, and the country's taoiseach and president attended. Toward the end of the match, the public-address announcers asked safety stewards to take their places and fans to refrain from running onto the field after the game. When fans ran onto the field after the game, the P.A. laconically announced: "Safety Plan B." The stewards, rather than linking arms in a show of strength and thereby inviting a confrontation, as their American and most of their European counterparts would have done, allowed the fans onto the field to mingle in celebration, keeping watch to ensure that no one got out of hand. No one did.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008