Crime writers and reviewers, as they looked at Crimefest 2015

Martin Edwards

Kati Hiekkapelto

Ali Karim

Jake Kerridge

Anthony Quinn

Gunnar Staalesen

Steve Cavanagh

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Hans Olav Lahlum

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Crimefest 2015: All hail Bartlett

In preparation for this week's Crimefest 2015 in Bristol, I've been flipping through a number of translated crime novels by authors who will appear at the festival.  One of the books stands out from the rest for the fluency of its English rendering, so here's a salute to the translator, Don Barlett, whom I first met at Crimefest in 2009.

The novel in question is Cold Hearts, by Gunnar Staalesen (whom I first met at Crimefest in 2012), and I am going to buy it on the strength of the easy flow of its English. Not once in its opening pages did I stop at a word or phrase that did not seem quite right, wondering if the fault was the author's, the translator's, the editor's, or the publishers.

(Here's Bartlett discussing his work. And here is a series of Detectives Beyond Borders interviews in which translators of crime fiction talk about their work.)


One edition of Cold Hearts carries a declaration by Jo Nesbø, another author translated from Norwegian into English by Bartlett, that Staalesen is "a Norwegian Chandler."  The novel's early pages suggest that the comparison is a good deal less fatuous than such comparisons tend to be. Those pages are rife with wry humor and romanticism that might not have reminded me of Chandler had I not been prodded (this is no mere Chandler parody to pastiche, that is). But having read Nesbø's testimonial, I can well understand why he said what he did.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

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

Crimefest Day 2: Fire and Iceland

"You never hear anyone telling Norwegian jokes anymore, and I think it's because of the money," Swedish crime writer Åsa Larsson said during today's Crimefest 2012 panel on Scandinavian crime fiction.

"Now it's the other away round," Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger replied. Norway's oil wealth has apparently muted at least one outward expression of Sweden's superiority to its neighbors.

But the panel was not all doleful observations and good-natured gloating. Gunnar Staalesen gave a plausible answer to a question I'd long had about Scandinavian crime writers: Why did Satanism and the fear thereof figure in a number of their crime novels in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (a.k.a. The Savage Altar) among them? Tursten appeared to take umbrage when I put the question to her a few years ago, apparently thinking I implied she had copied Nesbø. I implied no such thing, and I'll chalk Tursten's impatience up to fatigue from a gruelling tour schedule.

Larsson said a church figured in her book simply because, while secular now, she had had a religious upbringing; churches were simply a part of her background. But Staalesen suggested that a real-life wave of church burnings in the 1990s by a black-metal musician who wrote about Germanic neo-Paganism might have brought Satanism to the fore as an issue of public concern.

The intriguing thing about the resulting novels, at least the three I named, is that Satanism and satanists tend to be suspects and sources of fear rather than the actual villains of the piece. The books do not decry or praise Satanism, they merely take it up as one aspect of Swedish and Norwegian social and spiritual life.

I asked Staalesen after the panel whether an amusing, geographically specific metaphor for oral sex in the English translation of his 1995 novel The Writing on the Wall was an accurate rendering of the Norwegian original. He did not remember the line, which he'd have written seventeen years ago. But he did say the metaphor would work just as well in Norwegian as in English.

Finally, Ragnar Jonasson paid tribute to the trail blazed by his fellow Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. That Arnaldur did not publish his first novel until 1997 indicates how new Icelandic crime writing is. "Prior to that," Ragnar said, echoing a battle that crime writing has had to wage in a number of countries, "crime fiction was looked down upon by the public."

*

 The panel's moderator was Barry Forshaw, who really has written the book on Scandinavian crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A few words about "The Writing on the Wall" by Gunnar Staalesen

Time constraints preclude a full review, but a few comments are in order:

1) As one might expect from a novel that opens with an off-hand account of a seventy-year-old male judge found dead in a hotel room wearing lingerie, the novel contains a touch of humor here and there.

2) A prostitution ring involving teenage girls is at the heart of the novel. The girls' ages make them interesting characters — they are real characters, in other words: balky, headstrong and vulnerable, and not just passive victims.

3) Staalesen includes a few sex scenes for his protagonist, but the sex is immediately followed by bad news — a report of another death, for example.

4) The novel contains a funny, clever metaphor for oral sex that takes unique advantage of the story's Norwegian setting.

5) The title, a literal translation from the original Norwegian, is not overkill, despite its portentous tone. It refers to the warning of his empire's demise that King Belshazzar of Babylon saw during a banquet in the Book of Daniel. Here, a minor character delivers the ominous words to the protagonist, Varg Veum. I won't give anything away, but the warning resonates.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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