What Kirkus didn't tell you: Three more new crime novels you can read this summer

Kirkus Reviews recently published a list of twenty crime novels due for publication this summer and recommended for your consideration. It's not a bad list, but here are three novels that it missed:

1) Paradime, by Alan Glynn (Picador U.S. August/Faber U.K. May) Reviewers have invoked James Ellroy and John le Carré when discussing Alan Glynn, and if I squint and hold my head at the right angle, I can see resemblances. But Glynn's new novel is a lot more like David Mamet's 1997 movie The Spanish Prisoner than it is like anything by Ellroy and or le Carré. The novel's fever-dream narration is intoxicating, its first section in particular a kind of contemporary nightmare picaresque. (A worker for a private military contractor in Afghanistan witnesses a shocking incident, comes back to New York City, discovers that the incident won't leave him alone, and finds aspects of the result a strangely attractive escape — addictive, even.)

The novel shares some themes with Glynn's previous books, The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless), Winterland, Bloodland, and Graveland: alienation, paranoia, helplessness in the face of corporate and government power, and the uncertainty of boundaries between the two. But the action centers more on the protagonist than it does in the earlier novels, with distant but distinct echoes of mid-twentieth-century American noir. The book also seems carefully constructed, full of epiphanies that shed shocking new light on earlier scenes. And that may be one more mark of its kinship with The Spanish Prisoner.

2) One or the Other, by John McFetridge (ECW Press, August). I know of no crime writer who writes about suburbs and people who live there with the respect that McFetridge does, even though his books are set mostly in cities: Toronto and, in his three most recent novels, Montreal. But I also know of no crime writer who writes more vividly about cities, and who integrates character, crime, and history as seamlessly as McFetridge.

McFetridge's empathy with his protagonist, a young police constable named Eddie Dougherty, may remind readers of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, but McBain never had anything like McFetridge's eye for the way big events and individual lives intersect, the lives always more important than the events. McFetridge's Dougherty books, of which One or the Other is the third, following Black Rock and A Little More Free, don't try to transcend any genre, but I can easily imagine that they would appeal to readers who love to empathize with characters and wonder about everyday lives lived in tumultuous times, whether or not the stories involve crime.

3) A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto (Bitter Lemon Press, August U.S./June UK) Too many invocations of one crime writer to describe another are silly, but Matsumoto really is reminiscent of Georges Simenon. This is true especially in his portrayals of dogged, unexceptional characters, bewildered, sometimes to the point of pathos, as they navigate the consequences of crimes they understand only dimly.

Matsumoto died in 1992, and little of his large output has been translated into English, so any new publication is welcome. A Quiet Place is a noirish tale full of sparing but sharp observations and pointed critiques of postwar Japanese society. The novel is reminiscent in that respect of Matsumoto's Points and Lines, which I named one of my favorite international crime novels in the first Detectives Beyond Borders post back in 2006.  The novel's close examination of a setting observed by the protagonist as he travels through it may remind readers of Akira Kurosawa's classic crime movie Stray Dog or of work by the contemporary Japanese crime writers Keigo Higashino and Fuminori Nakamura.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Noircon 2014: The pierogi-fueled piss-up

A foggy night outside the Philadelphia 
Mausoleum  of Contemporary Art, 
site of the second evening  of
Noircon programming. Unless otherwise
indicated, photos by Peter
 Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper.

I'm drifting slowly into happy post-Noircon slumber on a giant pieróg-shaped cloud of good fellowship and beer.

The fourth edition of the world's greatest little noir convention wrapped up on Sunday with a shopping trip and a final presentation at Port Richmond books, followed by a right good mid-afternoon piss-up at a local bar in the heavily Polish neighborhood.

Noircon's programming has always been eccentric and stimulating. We have heard from strippers, sexologists, sculptors, and, this year, the author/investigator who is positive his father was the Black Dahlia killer.

But, as is usual with the intimate gathering of inquisitive, intelligent crime and noir readers, writers, editors, publishers, agents, and fans, some of my favorite moments happened outside the convention programming, and not all of them at the bar.

So, for instance ...

Fuminori Nakamura

1. I had the great pleasure of hearing Eddie Muller hold forth on his work with the Film Noir Foundation. I know no one else as devoted to, or so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about, any worthwhile subject as Eddie is about film noir, and by God, he channels his passion into action, with his work at the FNF.  OK, the Muller discussion happened at the bar.



Stuart Neville

2. So did the next highlight, actually, at the very same bar, when the sights and sounds of a wedding party of overripe frat boys and superannuated cheerleaders had several of us recalling this incident from Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis. But we were no ordinary gang of nostalgic barflies, and by the time we'd got done speculating about what those Indianapolis bridesmaids were doing with that pizza, we'd imagined them into a gang of bloodsuckers migrating slowly south for the winter. I'm thinking of calling the screenplay Vampire Bridesmaids With a Pizza.



Me and Andrew "Pulp
Curry" Nette.

3. I spent some time with the ultra-knowledgeable Andrew Nette, who had come all the way from Melbourne, Australia, to visit Noircon and see the East Coast. Andrew was pleasant company, and he suggested what will likely turn out to be a vital reference for one of my Bouchercon 2014 panels.

4. 

   Suzanne Solomon

   I realized I've been in Philadelphia long enough to have become a bit of a local expert, playing guide throughout the four-plus days to a cast of characters that included friends old, new, and in between.

Your humble blogkeeper, Scott Adlerberg, Duane Swierczynski, Ed "Philly Poe Guy" Pettit, Jeff Wong, and Mike White at Donna's  Bar. Photo courtesy of Andrew Nette.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014