Crimefest 2012: Wrap-up and fun facts



(Peter James, James Sallis)

1) As a good chunk of crimeworld knows by now, a seagull shat on Lee Child and three other Crimefest 2012 attendees.

2) James Sallis attended the festival, and he must be a nice guy because everyone referred to him as Jim.

3) Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther World War II novels, was also on the program, and if I did not mention him earlier, that's an indication of how packed the Crimefest program was with star power. Kerr's Prague Fatale made the shortlist for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, announced at Crimefest.

(Peter Guttridge, Philip Kerr)

4) I've already written about my Crimefest encounters with P.D. James and Bill James. Peter James was there this year (he asserted on a panel that crime fiction begins with Sophocles; I reminded him that the much older Epic of Gilgamesh contains considerable elements recognizable as crime fiction. "Good point,"  he said.)

I also renewed my acquaintance with Dan Waddell, one of whose novels is written under the name Dan James. So, parents, if you want your kids to grow up to write crime novels, change their last names to James.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Sumer time, and the living is easy

After yesterday's post about Babylonian law codes, crime, and beer, I'm bringing back this old post (with some new thoughts added). I originally titled it "A noir story set in Iraq," and it's about a proto-crime story even older than the Babylonians.

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And it includes an invasion of Lebanon.

OK, it's not all noir, and its setting was not called Iraq 4,600 years ago, when the title character lived, or 2,700 years ago, when the most complete version of the tale was set down.

The story is The Epic of Gilgamesh, called simply Gilgamesh in Stephen Mitchell's 2004 version, and, in addition to being one of the most stirring stories ever told, it offers what is likely world literature's first femme fatale.
In this scene, Ishtar, played by Joan Bennett or Mary Astor, says:

"Come here, Gilgamesh ...
marry me, give me your luscious fruits
be my husband, be my sweet man ... "

to which Gilgamesh, played by Sterling Hayden or Humphrey Bogart, replies, in part,

"Which of your husbands did you love forever?
Which could satisfy your endless desires?
Let me remind you of how they suffered,
how each one came to a bitter end,"

rejecting her advances as surely as Sam Spade rejected Brigid O'Shaughnessy's at the end of The Maltese Falcon. And then:

"Ishtar shrieked, she exploded with fury."

Not all Gilgamesh's femmes are fatales. Shamhat seduces Gilgamesh's future sidekick, Enkidu, in one of the sexiest scenes in any ancient epic, but the sex civilizes the feral giant rather than threatening his downfall. Still, the scary Ishtar and the stoic Gilgamesh earn the epic a place on history's list of proto-noir and proto-crime classics.

Ishtar, or in Akkadian, kicks even more butt in "Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World," threatening the gatekeeper that:

"If thou openest not the gate so that I cannot enter

I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt,

I will smash the doorpost, I will move the doors,

I will raise the up the dead, eating the living,

So that the dead will outnumber the living."

Needless to say, she gets in. She also does a slow strip along the way, and whoever called the netherworld "the house which none leave who have entered it ... the road from which there is no way back" had not met Ishtar.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2011