My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Michael Gilbert, plus bipartisan political vacuousness

A piece of gaseous conservative slogan-mongering in the National Review brought to mind Michael Gilbert's taking the piss out of a similar piece of gaseous liberal slogan mongering in his 1965 story "The Spoilers."  As a nonpartisan break from campaign-season brain rot, here's a post about Gilbert and politics.

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Thc occasional politically tinged passages that work their way into Michael Gilbert's stories about Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens are not always the most subtle, the hyperbole put in the mouths of young, speechifying men of leftish inclination especially wince-making (“Freedom,” said Tabor. “You’re prepared to accept inefficiency, selfishness, slackness, lack of purpose, timidity and greed – provided you have on the other side of the scales a fictitious thing called freedom.”).

But the books appeared in an unsubtle time (1966 and 1967) at least as prone to lunatic hyperbole as political discussion is now. Besides, politics and ideology are small presences in these tightly plotted, delightfully told stories. And, since today's readers want positive news, I thought I'd share a jab as pertinent and just as delicious today it was in the mid-1960s. It's from "The Spoilers," which appears in the collection Games Without Rules:

“`We’re getting so security-minded,' said Miss Nicholson, `that we might as well be living in a totalitarian state, under the control of the Gestapo.'

“Miss Nicholson, who was an intellectual liberal, often said things like this in letters to the Press and at public meetings, possibly because she had never lived in a totalitarian state and had no experience of the Gestapo."

Now, good readers, tell me your favorite political jabs from crime stories. Be a good sport, and tell me especially about lines with whose point of view you may disagree.

***

As noted above, ideology does not bulk large in these stories. The powers against whom Calder, Behrens, and their fellow intelligence officers work are referred to far more often simply as Russia or China than as communists or commies, never, that I can recall, as "evil" or "Rooskies" and only once as "reds." More typical are non-ideological barbs such as this, from "The Spoilers":

"Mr. Calder, considering the matter, was inclined to agree. He knew that in certain branches of the Security Services, sexual irregularity was considered a good deal worse than crime and nearly as bad as ideological deviation."

or jabs at features of English life that Gilbert probably wished were in a higher state than they were. From "The Cat Crackers":

“`Splendid,” said the professor. `We will sit all afternoon and talk.'

“`Not in an English pub, you won’t,' said Tabor."

or this, from "The Headmaster," which sounds more than a bit like P.G. Wodehouse:

"The Hambone Club in Carver Street is the offspring of that eccentric aristocrat, Sir Rawnsley Clayton. Having been turned out of the Athenaeum for giving dinner there to a troupe of clowns, he had founded it as a place where he could meet his more bohemian acquaintances. It was still much used by actors and writers, but had acquired a solid addition of politicians who found the Carlton too stuffy and of soldiers who found the Senior too exclusive."

Gilbert, an Englishman who died in 2006, was both a Cartier Diamond Dagger winner and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.  Here's Martin Edwards on Gilbert. The highest compliment of all, however, and the most pertinent to this post, may come from Joe Gores, who wrote:

"A critic once remarked that Maugham's Ashenden is the finest collection of espionage fiction ever written. That critic is wrong. The honor goes to Michael Gilbert's Game Without Rules, and to its twelve-story sequel, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens."

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Martin Edwards accepts
his 2016 Best Critical/
Biographical Edgar
Award for The Golden
Age of Murder. Photo
by Peter Rozovsky.
========

Martin Edwards will discuss Michael Gilbert as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you there.

See the compete Bouchercon panel schedule at http://www.bouchercon2016.com/#!schedule/c8k7
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2014, 2016

My Bouchercon panels — I Got Carter: What movie adaptations can and cannot do

OK, so Get Carter was too good to read slowly; I finished it in one evening, and that spurred one more observation about books and movies, namely the rather obvious one that the page is a better place for getting inside a character's head than is the screen.

Mike Hodges, who directed the celebrated 1971 movie adaptation of Get Carter, explains in a foreword to the new Syndicate Books edition some of the changes he made from Ted Lewis' novel. (The book was published originally as Jack's Return Home, should you find an old copy.)  Hodges explained that he wanted to include locations in the north of England that had opened his eyes to poverty and social inequality during his naval service. He also wanted a more visually interesting location for a key confrontation in the novel.

Not from Get Carter, the book
or the movie. This is one of
my own.

But he does not explain his most obvious and, arguably, most sensible choice: not to attempt a straightforward transcription of Carter's thoughts, mostly about the brother whose death he has come to avenge and that make up a large part of the novel. The movie gives us less than the book does about the dead Frank Carter, less of Jack's mix of fondness and embarrassment about his brother, almost none of the latter. That makes the movie feel less personal than the book. This is no argument for book over movie or vice versa. In this case, both are excellent. It's just a recognition that each form can do some things better than the other can.

Now it's your turn. What do books do better than movies? Movies better than books? (Read Detective Beyond Borders posts on Why books are better than television.)

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Jordan Foster will discuss Get Carter author Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m., and there is still time to register for the convention. Trust me: It's fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter: Who needs an accent if you can act?

I've rolled my eyes here at Detectives Beyond Borders at movie stars whose hardest work seems to consist in showing us how hard they work. My targets have included Kevin Spacey's award mugging and Benicio Del Toro's lisping and mumbling in The Usual Suspects,  Ed Norton's meta-mugging in The Score, and the unspeakably awful accents in The Drowning Pool.

Then there's Michael Caine in Get Carter, playing a gangster who returns home to investigate his brother's death. Caine's character is from the north of England, but to my uneducated ears, he might never have ventured out of earshot of Bow Bells. And you know what? It doesn't matter, because Caine does not see it as his job to mumble, lurch, limp, or gain 60 pounds to play a role. All he does is act, and if you can do that, you don't need an accent or any other Method crap.  Watch Caine in Get Carter, and you'll see a great actor in a great movie based on a great crime novel.

Ted Lewis

And that brings me to the international crime fiction event of the year. This week I'll attend a launch for Syndicate Books, a new imprint that is releasing not only Get Carter (original title: Jack's Return Home) in the U.S. for the first time in decades, but a good chunk of rest of author Ted Lewis' oeuvre, including two more of the Jack Carter novels, some for the first time ever in the U.S.

This new edition of Get Carter includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the film adaptation that starred Caine.The novel earns a spot as one of Allan Guthrie's 200 Noirs (as does Lewis' Billy Rags, due as an e-book from Syndicate)  Eight more novels to look forward to from an author whose admirers include David Peace and Derek Raymond? I'm excited, and you should be, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Get Carter, or what crime movies are just about as good as the novels from which they are adapted?

I've started reading Syndicate Books' reprint of Ted Lewis' 1970 crime novel Get Carter (first published as Jack's Return Home), and I'll want to read it slowly because it's so good.

Few crime writers could inject menace and desperation into small talk the way Lewis did, and he had a fine eye for period detail — the Hammond organ in the bar at the Cecil, for instance. Does anything say 1960s like the cheesy warbling of a Hammond?

This new edition of the novel, to be published in September, includes an introduction by Mike Hodges, who directed the celebrated 1971 film adaptation, starring Michael Caine and chosen by the Guardian/Observer in 2010 as the seventh-best crime movie of all time. (Its top crime film is Chinatown, so the list is by no means perfect, but still ... )

Hodges is both forthright about the changes he made and highly respectful and deeply admiring of Lewis' novel. And that raises this interesting question: What other crime movie adaptations rank as high in critical and popular esteem as do the novels on which they are based as do Lewis' Get Carter and Hodges'? The closest example I can think of is The Maltese Falcon. How about you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A Burnable Book gets its time and its crime right

"In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelry
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye ... "
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Bruce Holsinger's crime novel A Burnable Book is full of history. John Gower is its protagonist and narrates parts of it; Chaucer is a central personage; John Hawkwood cuts a figure something like Al Pacino's in the remake of Scarface. Richard II and John of Gaunt figure in the book; the Avignon papacy is invoked. So are Wycliffe, Wat Tyler, Boccaccio, and the Bardi family of Florentine bankers. In short, if you missed the Late Middle Ages, read this book, and you'll catch up.

Holsinger is a scholar. One expects lots of history from him, and the few examples that I fact-checked suggest that he gets his history right. But he gets the atmosphere right, too. Medieval London is a natural setting for hard-boiled crime, with its lawless precincts just outside the city, its cruel masters and mistreated apprentices, its fetid streets, its premature deaths, its maudlyns plying their trade in Gropecunt Lane, and Holsinger describes it vividly and well..

More important for the reader of crime fiction is that he makes of Gower a credible investigator and hard-boiled protagonist without, however, giving him the anachronistic mannerisms of a Philip Marlowe.  (Getting the essence right without slipping into genre cliché has to be one of a historical crime novelist's toughest tasks. The farther back in time the story is set, the greater the pressure on the author to avoid having his or her protagonist do things a modern fictional detective would do. One crime novel with a medieval setting was ruined for me when its otherwise vividly rendered main character turned without warning into Columbo.)

Holsinger gets around this by telling instead of showing. Gower examines in a straightforward manner his role as investigator and in doing so, makes himself both credible in the role and familiar to readers of hard-boiled crime: "If you build your own life around the secret lives of others ... Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well."

The book establishes Gower as temperamental kin to every flawed crime fiction protagonist who exists in a morally compromised world, and Chaucer, the liveliest of all great poets, underlines this nicely, challenging Gower not to be such a stuffed shirt in his own writing: "Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible?"

***

The novel's title refers to a manuscript that falls into the wrong hands, a book so subversive that it deserves burning.  Just as The Canterbury Tales begin in Southwark, a district across the Thames and just outside London in the Middle Ages, significant parts of A Burnable Book are set there. By happy coincidence, I bought my copy of The Canterbury Tales in the old Philadelphia district of Southwark which, like its English namesake, lay outside the city centuries ago but has since been absorbed by it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Where have you gone, Bill Shankly?

Bill Shankly

A few decades ago, one of the U.S. television networks began offering what it called "Up Close and Personal" looks at athletes.   Now no newspaper, large or small, is without its inspirational feature stories about athletes who battled long odds to get this far.

A few years later, ex-athletes began to go into television in big numbers, at first those who had had only marginal success as players or coaches, but increasingly, in recent years, former stars. Schooled in the power of TV and public relations, they maintained eye contact with their interviewers or interviewees and addressed them by their first names, voices carefully modulated to suggest empathy.  That the empathy more closely resembled the kind deployed by a human resources director, a real estate agent, or a mutual funds salesman than that of a friend with whom you'd schmooze over a drink or a meal or a cup of coffee didn't matter. Sincerity, and its close relative, personality,  were commodities, packaged for quick sale in a crowded market.

As transparently calculated as those trends were, they made perfect sense. As increasing salaries moved athletes in the major sports stratospheres out of their fans' social and economic orbits, teams, networks, and newspapers had to fabricate substitutes for the social bonds that no longer existed. Broadcasters began referring to players by their first names. Fans who could no longer afford to come to games would be given The NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL Experience. Reporters were only too happy to overpraise as great human beings any athlete in the top American sports leagues who had never been in prison, to laud as a family man any male athlete who did not beat, mistreat, or cheat on his wife or girlfriend, or whose agent managed to keep the misdeeds out of the papers. (Read the great Onion parody "Pro Athlete Lauded for Being Decent Human Being" for all you need to know about this trend.)

And that's why Red or Dead, David Peace's novel about the former Liverpool FC soccer manager Bill Shankly, is so moving an experience. It is a reminder that things were not always this way, that a celebrated coach once existed for whom dedication to the job, love for team and its fans, and devotion to his family were more than slogans or easy hooks. It is a vindication of generosity, hard work, loyalty, and all those concepts cheapened by noxious waves of political and commercial hucksterism.

Peace deploys any number of techniques to create his version of Shankly, some of them stylistic and technical quirks that he admits might drive some readers nuts. (The novel's first three words, "Repetition. Repetition. Repetition," are an apt summation of both Shankly's technique and Peace's.) Others are more subtle, such as his relegation of notable historical events and milestones in Shankly's life to allusion rather than direct mention, the better to focus attention on Shankly's single-mindedness. Sure, commentary on Peace tends to focus on his technical tricks, but in Red or Dead, the man — Bill Shankly — is the thing.

Lest you think that Red or Dead wallows in nostalgia, that other great salable commodity in popular culture, know that if Shankly, who died in 1981 and who deplored what had begun to happen to sports in his last years, were to look over my shoulder at this post, he would not despair. Rather, I think, he would slap me on the back, give me an inspirational lecture, and tell me to buck up and get back to the task at hand. And I would listen and believe him.

*

I'm too tired to start discussing politics, but it's worthwhile to note that, while the virtues David Peace's Shankly displays — the hard work, the determination, the devotion to family and colleagues, the love of community — are those we consider conservative today, Shankly considered himself a socialist, though with disdain for or lack of interest in theoretical socialism.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

David Peace, cliché killer

OK, so David Peace's novel Red or Dead is stylistically bold (perhaps infuriating to some), with its jump cuts and its repetition—uncompromising "to near pathological levels," according to one UK review. But he uses all the tricks to highly traditional end: a convincing, realistic, moving portrayal of one man, Liverpool soccer manager Bill Shankly.

And that's why I tear up at the mutual tenderness of Shankly and his wife, Ness, and I tremble slightly at his sudden eruptions of anger at players who question his judgment.

I was going to mention how impressed I was that Peace makes so fresh a story that, in summary, sounds like a string of clichés: the hard-working coach, the obsessive, the family man, and so on, but Peace says it better, in this illuminating interview.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What I read for the NFL championship game

The National Football League' played its championship game yesterday, but I spent a good chunk of the day reading a book about another kind of football — Red or Dead, David Peace's stylistically single-minded, idiosyncratic novel about a soccer manager named Bill Shankly and his revival of the Liverpool Football Club from the early 1960s on.

I will likely have more to say later, especially about Peace's prose style, notably his repetition of words, names, and phrases. And I'll compare those repeated words, names, and phrases to themes in a piece of symphonic music, because no immediate literary parallels to Peace come to mind.

A few thoughts on Red or Dead:

1) I commented last week that:

"The only thing that turned me off a bit in the early pages was that repetition of `In the winter-time. In the night-time.' It was not clear to me why Peace did that. Perhaps it will become so later."

It has.

2) Is Red or Dead historical fiction? It does as convincing a job of capturing the spirit of a place and of a time before that author's own, yet it is in no sense the story of Bill Shankly set against the cultural upheaval soon to burst forth from Liverpool and shake the world.  The only reference through the novel's first 280 or so pages to that other Liverpudlian cultural phenomenon of the early 1960s is indirect, and all the funnier for that.

3) The repeated phrases, one of which I mentioned above, are like themes in a symphony, or like leitmotifs in an opera by Wagner. Each accompanies a repeated action on Shankly's part, coming to stand for that action. Peace so ingrains the leitmotifs in the reader's mind (or at least in mine) that the slightest variation has great effect, opens my eyes wide, lets me know that something big is happening.

4) Red or Dead is no crime novel (though Peace is the author of the four novels collectively called The Red Riding Quartet). But the one death so far in the book is infinitely more affecting than a thousand crime-novel prologues that shove the victim's agony or innocence down the reader's throat.  That Peace deals with the death so sparingly and that Shankly resumes his work routine so soon afterward makes the death all the move effective, and all the more revealing of Shankly's character.

5) Shankly was known as an obsessive coach, and the novel is full of scenes of Shankly working late, Shankly planning strategy, Shankly thinking ahead.  Yet Shankly, or Peace's version of him, is miles removed from the cliché of the American football coach so dedicated to his job that he sometimes sleeps in his office (but not so dedicated that he does not quit after just a few years to work for ESPN).  The book reads as if Peace had deliberately taken on the challenge of making something compelling and original of a figure who, in the deadening, simplifying hand of American sports journalism, would be the sum of clichés (obsessive worker, man of the people who thanks the fans, family man).

6) The humor, as in Shankly's reply to a fan who begged for tickets to an important match with the argument "But I was born in Liverpool."

"Then you should have stayed here!" replies Shankly. "You should never have moved to Birmingham."

7) The soccer. Peace gradually works discussions of soccer strategy into the book, so telling and so sparing that they held my attention, and worked as part of the novel's action, even though I'm no particular soccer fan.

OK, it's early days. I have 400 pages yet to read. But if Red or Dead were a soccer team and my reading of it a game, it would be ahead, 4-0, with four minutes still to play in the first half.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

How historical fiction chronicles linguistic change, or What the hell is an air-port?

Historical fiction ought to create a convincing illusion of the period in which it is set. If it can reveal strangeness in our own time, so much the better.

Here are two short passages, about twenty pages apart, from the closing chapters of Black Out, set in 1944 and 1948 and the first of John Lawton's Troy novels:

"`And where would I land?' 

"`West London. There's a new airfield under construction on the far side of Houndslow. They call it Heath Row.'"

and

"Heathrow was referred to as an air-port. Troy presumed that this fiction was in some way meant to distinguish it from such places as Croydon which had always been called an aerodrome or Brize Norton which remained an airfield."

Have you ever thought how odd it is that the word port should be applied to a place where no harbor or ships are to be found? I had not until I read the passage in Lawton.

(Heath Row as two words in the first use, one in the second is a nice touch, too.  Presumably this reflects the process by which two words, expressing distinct ideas, fuse with increasing use and become a compound word to express a new idea. Either that, or it's one hell of a thought-provoking typographical error.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: John Lawton on being a "crime" writer

I first heard of John Lawton on crime fiction blogs, and I first heard him read at New York's late Partners & Crime mystery bookshop. His series protagonist, Frederick Troy, is with London's Metropolitan Police, and Lawton attends crime fiction conventions now and then. But when I wrote that Lawton reminded me more of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or even, in spots, P.G. Wodehouse than of crime writers, a reader huzzahed all the way from Canada. He wrote, too, that he was baffled by the occasional descriptions of Lawton's books as spy novels. So, is Lawton a crime writer, or a spy writer, or what? If not, why do some people say he is? And does it matter? I sought answers from the source, and here's what Lawton had to say:

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“I can't recall any discussion with my editor at Weidenfeld – Ion Trewin, who edited all my work until the move to Grove – as to genre. Black Out had no tags. Nor did any subsequent novel. I was reviewed as either fiction or crime. It wasn't an issue. `Genre' is a tag neither to be sought nor resisted. Like a book prize – neither sought nor resisted.

“It's flattering to be told `this book transcends genre,' but it's not a phrase that holds up to scrutiny. Five nano-seconds later, you're asking yourself, `What does he/she think is inferior about genre writing?' And when toastmasters at crime gigs harp on about crime being `as good as literature,' you think, `So what?' And when a crime novel is deemed `too literary,' you think, `Ain't no such critter.'

“It's marketing ... whatever gets you on the shelves and then off the shelves and into hands. And marketing is different country to country.

“I first became aware of an `invisible' crime tag only when the CWA called in (so I was told) Riptide for consideration for the Ellis Peters Award. As I said, you don't seek it and you don't resist it. It's only an issue if you win – who in their right mind, after all, would want to sit through an award ceremony they didn't have to?

“Paint and drying come to mind.

“The book after this was Sweet Sunday. Ion and I agreed this wasn't `crime.' Still ... it got reviewed as crime. But a review is a review ... not to be knocked. Better by a yard and a half than being ignored.

“And a few years later I was asked in an interview to categorize myself. I said something like ... `historical, political thrillers with a big splash of romance, wrapped up in a coat of noir.' What they're not is mysteries, and I think there is a tendency to assume that crime and mystery are synonymous. They're not.

“There are crimes in most of my novels. Occasionally unsolved. They aren't there to be `solved;' they're a propellant to drive the book along.

“Pretentious bit coming up ... I don't think I'm doing anything different from my immediate contemporaries. ... McEwan, Faulks, Amis, Hare, Turow (all born within months of me). ... In intent.

“That said, I've never written anything set in the present, and none of them has written a series around a policeman. Scott Turow is regarded as `crime' – he has no problem with this. (I asked him.) And at this point the sensible thing to say is, if Scott has no problem with `crime' neither should I.”

— John Lawton

*

Here's Lawton's Web site with essays and other information about the Troy novels. Here's a New York Times review that asks: "Is there any genre convention John Lawton hasn’t boldly disregarded, often to brilliant effect? "

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

John Lawton will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The English, they are a funny race

I've been reading three Englishmen in recent days, and, without purporting to analyze English character, I will say that each of these examples shows considerable wit, and that the wit cuts deeper than mere jokes.

The first is from a short story by Michael Gilbert:

"Mr. Behrens said, raising his voice a little, `If I were to lift my right hand a very well-trained dog, who has been approaching you quietly from the rear while we were talking, would have jumped for your throat.' 

 "The colonel smiled. `Your imagination does you credit. What happens if you lift your left hand? Does a genie appear from a bottle and carry me off?' 

"`If I raise my left hand,' said Mr. Behrens, `you will be shot dead.'  

 "And so saying, he raised it."

— "The Road to Damascus" 

The second is from a novel by John Lawton:

 "Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago. ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’” 

— Bluffing Mr. Churchill 

The third is from a poem by Philip Larkin:

"Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:"

— "Toads" 

Aren't those fun?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The French are coming! The French are coming!

Amid fascinating new theories I've been reading about the origins of English (Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain could easily include chapters called "No Saxons, Please; We're English," "All Angles," or "Some of My Best Friends are Jutes"), comes crime fiction news about the French:

Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, translated by Sian Reynolds, and Pierre Lemaitre's Alex, translated by Frank Wynne, were named joint winners this week of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. The news release announcing the award says the CWA plans to establish a French chapter "in the near future."

Wynne, Lemaitre, and fellow French authors Antonin Varenne and Xavier-Marie Bonnot attended Bristol's Crimefest 2013 along with your humble blogkeeper, so perhaps French crime writing is about to start enjoying a higher profile in the UK and then, perhaps, in America (Alex is to be released in the U.S. in September.)

Whatever its profile in the UK at large, French crime writing has enjoyed an outsize profile at the Daggers. This year marked the fifth time in the International Dagger's eight-year history that the award had gone to a French novel or novels. The award was the fourth for Vargas/Reynolds, following on The Three Evangelists in 2006, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009. Dominique Manotti's  Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, was the other French winner, in 2008.

*

Your humble blogkeeper interviewed Fred Vargas last month and Sian Reynolds in 2008. It was Reynolds' solution to a bit of untranslatable wordplay in The Three Evangelists that spurred me to start interviewing authors and translators in the first place. I also reviewed The Ghost Riders of Ordebec in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Goddamnit! plus thoughts on Barry Cunliffe

Barry Cunliffe is a wide-ranging scholar, an eminent archaeologist, a stimulating thinker, and a fluent and engaging writer. But he (or his editors) doesn't know what mitigate means. Here's a sentence from Britain Begins, his history of the peopling of Britain and Ireland, boldface mine:

"A genetically conditioned predisposition to be mobile is, however, balanced by a sense of territoriality which mitigates against wandering."

I knew a professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania who similarly misused mitigate for militate. Mitigate means to ease, mollify, or alleviate: A nip of schnapps mitigated the surgery's painful aftereffects. Militate means to have an effect, to weigh (against), or, loosely, to conspire or work (against): His insistence on correct word usage militates against the possibility that he will ever be promoted. Militate takes a preposition (against). Mitigate does not.

I don't know what Cunliffe's copy editor was doing the day that sentence came across his or her desk. Dreaming of citizen journalism, self-publishing, and the benefits of overthrowing gatekeepers, maybe.

Cunliffe, meanwhile, is even more impressive than I thought. I'd known of his work on the big-picture issue of population origins, but he's also a nuts-and-bolts archaeologist. I have just learned that he was involved in excavating Fishbourne Roman Palace in England, one of the most moving, because most human, of all Roman remains. This knowledge mitigates, if only slightly, my annoyance at his book's misuse of a word.

*

What misuses of words have driven you nuts in your reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders reads London Boulevard

A recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders touched on the relative merits of laconic and expansive prose. Ken Bruen can write both.

He's better known for his machine-gun verbal outbursts. A fair parody of Bruen on paper would include

Short sentences.

Idiosyncratic paragraphing.

Lists.

Mordant, rapid-fire jokes that bounce off the page like hailstones.

But London Boulevard is also chillingly laconic in the matter of its protagonist's reactions to the violence he inflicts, experiences, and has experienced. And that makes this 2001 novel more than just a revenge odyssey or damaged-hero story, though it is both.

It also is the author's version of Sunset Boulevard and, with a possible quibble about a surprising personality switch on the part of the Erich von Stroheim character, that aspect of the novel holds together beautifully and without intruding on the novel's suspense and mystery. Discussion of Bruen tends to focus on his raw emotion, tragic humor, and this like—on feeling rather than craft. But London Boulevard shows he’s capable of a well-crafted mystery while retaining all the rawness you’ve come to love. And that's why it's probably my favorite, and maybe the best, of the seventeen or so of his novels that I've read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Did Derek Raymond know Shane MacGowan?

Did the superb English noir writer Derek Raymond (right) know Shane MacGowan, the superb Irish songwriter and singer who was well into his dissipated career in and out of the Pogues when Raymond died in 1994?

Did MacGowan (left), who has spent a good chunk of his life in southeast England, read Raymond, who began chronicling London's shady half-world in 1962, in The Crust on its Uppers?

Each chronicled low lives with sympathy and compassion that can make you cry, and the temperamental kinship is nowhere as apparent, in my experience, as in Raymond's novel How the Dead Live and MacGowan's song "A Pair of Brown Eyes" (try to ignore the pretentious video by Alex Cox.)

How the Dead Live brings the nameless protagonist of Raymond's Factory novels into contact in several scenes with a old soldier whose experiences in love and war silence the protagonist. Something similar happens in "A Pair of Brown Eyes," where a self-pitying young lovelorn man wanders into a bar and encounters a old man with a far more harrowing tale. "All I could do was hate him," the narrator sings in one line, yet the refrain, in the voices of both characters, tells the real story. (Again, ignore the visuals on the video. They have nothing to do with the song and are clunkily obvious next to MacGowan's performance.)

While you are listening to the Pogues and reading the Factory novels (reissued by Melville House and recommended highly. Raymond is a David Goodis or Jim Thompson for our times), ponder this question: Which crime novels remind you of which songs, and vice versa? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The stupid should stay at home and other Viking wisdom

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

If the first bloom of this fellow's youth seems to have faded, consider:

— He has sixteen visible wounds.

— The wedge-shaped wound on his upper leg was caused by an ax.

— The cut on his jaw and the blow under his nose would have caused severe bleeding.

— Injuries to his arms suggest he defended himself against sword blows.

— He has two execution-style wounds to the back of his head.

— He probably was not wearing a helmet.

— He's almost a thousand years old.

Take all into account, and I should look so good.

The young man probably died around the time of the Battles of Fulford and Stamford Bridge or during the Norman takeover of England, which followed shortly thereafter (1066, and all that). He sleeps today at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, a museum and educational center at the site of spectacular archaeological finds in the 1970s that laid bare the history of Viking York and that today includes both traditional and "living" displays.

I studied the rich artifacts. I rode through an impressive recreation of how Jorvikers might have lived in the eleventh century. And I bought a small copy of the Old Norse collection of wisdom poetry, the Hávamál, which I left in the York train station before I had the chance to read it.

Happily, I found another copy, and initial reading suggests the Vikings were, indeed, wise. A few examples:

"Who travels widely needs his wits about him,
The stupid should stay at home"

and

"Less good than belief would have it
Is mead for the sons of men:
A man knows less the more he drinks,
Becomes a befuddled fool"

I showed the second example to the bartender at my local, where I was doing my reading, and her reply proved her as practical as her Scandinavian predecessors a thousand years ago: "I think two drinks, you know more; three drinks, you know less."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

After Crimefest: York at night

... your humble blogkeeper

All photos by ...

At left and right, please find some of the many sculpted heads that decorate the chapter house of York Minster. All I can say is that standards of meeting-room decor have declined since the  English decorated Gothic period.

The church's western towers are impressive, too, especially when they loom like giant queens about to crush a city full of sleeping pawns.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

No time for crime

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

No time for crime yet, though this view from my Paddington hotel puts me in mind of a good rooftop chase.

I also realized today that Elizabeth II became queen the same year The Mousetrap opened, and both are still going strong sixty years later. Coincidence, or something more mysterious?

I think I'll look for backers for a baseball-themed musical about Prince Charles. I'll call it Reign Delay.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bruen's "Blitz" on screen

I was apprehensive when I heard Ken Bruen's 2002 novel Blitz was being made into a movie. The book's centerpiece, Southeast London police officer Tom Brant, is a feral, funny wild man, maybe Bruen's best creation, and I thought it would take a gifted actor and daring filmmakers to manage the transfer to a new medium, if the transfer were possible at all.

The movie, directed by Elliott Lester, released last year, and featuring Jason Statham as Brant and the excellent Paddy Considine as Porter Nash, could have been worse. It drops at least one major subplot and adds a narrative element that's not obtrusive but not necessary either.  It softens Brant's character, notably in the opening scene. The pruning results in a character a bit more believable but also a bit more conventional, a bit less maniacal, and a bit less funny, and a world not quite as dark as the novel's.

The movie also tones down Nash's reaction to the flak he gets from fellow officers because he's gay.  In the movie, he's a tough, righteous cop. In the book, he's a tough, righteous cop with jaw-droppingly funny chutzpah. And that's the movie, really: a milder version of a highly spicy book. Oh, and Bruen has a cameo role — as a priest.

(I discuss the appeal of the Brant and Roberts novels here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A late addition to the year's-best list

I was premature a few weeks ago when I listed the best crime fiction I'd read this year.

Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year is more historical fiction than crime fiction, if one must squeeze it into a genre, but it's mainly a fine, penetrating, and moving piece of fiction, no need for labels, and it may be the best novel I've read since I started this crime-fiction thing five years ago. Its hero is a coroner investigating a murder, so crime is as good a label as any other.

It's also a serious and frightening meditation on the dangers of faction, fanaticism, and hypocrisy (it's set as religious war moves ever closer in seventeenth-century England), on the blessings of true charity, on the elevating powers of love religious and sexual.

Finally, it's beautifully written, not a word wasted, description reinforcing narrative, plots reinforcing one another, character, plot and setting of a dense, immensely affecting piece. And how can even such a hero as Atticus Finch be as admirable and noble a character as Bennett's loving, strong, vulnerable, wise, compassionate, truth-seeking John Brigge?

I once wrote that The Coffee Trader, David Liss' novel of love, religious prejudice and commodities trading in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, offered the most thorough, convincing fictional world I had ever entered. Bennett's book stands besides it, it not outright elbowing it to one side.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011