What's with the pish? and other linguistic miscellany

Events have turned my mind toward language and its uses.

First, the good people at St. Martin's/Minotaur Books sent Inspector Ghote's First Case, a prequel to H.R.F. Keating's long-running series. Then a discussion here turned to the odd happenings when speakers of one language appropriate speech patterns from another. Finally a piece of Scottish slang reminded me of a treasured word from my un-Scottish youth.

As I did when I first read Keating, I noticed in the opening chapters of Inspector Ghote's First Case a speech pattern in which characters use only at the end of a sentence where North American or European speakers would use it in the middle. It transpired that at least one Indian critic had been ambivalent about Keating and unhappy with Ghote's "broken-English patois." You can follow the ensuing discussion here and here.

In the meantime, some questions for readers with knowledge of English as spoken in India: Is only in the end position ("I have been longing to see it since I was at college only.") particular to certain regions of India? And could that speech pattern be a carryover from any of India's own languages?

Finally, pish. The word was part of my youth growing up, a holdover, I assumed, from Yiddish. But it must be part of the Scottish lexicon, too. Christopher Brookmyre has used it in his books, and Allan Guthrie uses it several times in Two-Way Split, most pungently thus:

"Kennedy chucked the paper in the bin, since the journalist was obviously from the west coast and therefore everything he said was unadulterated pish."

OK, lovers of Scottish English. What's with the pish? How did it get into your language?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How do characters talk?

A distinctive feature of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books for this North American reader was its characters' use of the word just. They often place the word at the end of a sentence, as against North American English's tendency to place it before the word or phrase it governs. Thus, in Sansom:

"So what is it you'll have?

"A mineral water just?"

where we in Canada or the U.S. would reply "Just a mineral water."

I don't know if this quirk of speech is Irish, Northern Irish, English, characteristic of one or another social class, or just a favorite of Ian Sansom's. (On second thought, I may have seen it in other Irish writing.) I do know it punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity or, God help me, texture.

Certain varieties of Indian speech use the word only in similar fashion. I first noticed this tendency in H.R.F. Keating's stories, where characters say things like "I am a simple policeman only." It was easy for me to condescend to Keating, to feel just slightly uneasy with this white Englishman's imitation of Indian speech.

Then I found that Vikram Chandra has several of his characters use the same speech pattern in Sacred Games. More recently, as I have read blogs from India, I find that the tendency to end sentences with only appears to be a living feature of Indian English, at least around Kolkata (Calcutta) and Mumbai (Bombay). This was a rich education for me, not least because it made me repent my own ignorance in having felt morally superior to H.R.F. Keating.

But this is a crime-fiction blog and not a confessional. I'll close with some questions: What role does speech play in creating setting? How far is too far when it comes to trying to capture the flavor of "ethnic" speech? How do authors strike a balance between maintaining an illusion of everyday speech on the one hand and creating memorable dialogue on the other? What happens when authors give up the effort at maintaining a balance? Who are your favorite writers of dialogue, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A critical question for readers

A week and a half ago, I quoted Joe Gores' praise of Michael Gilbert's dapper but deadly fictional spies, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. Gores' thumbs-up appears in a useful collection called 100 Great Detectives, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and winner of an Anthony Award for best critical work in 1992.

Another entry in the book, Peter Robinson's, shines an illuminating light on Georges Simenon's Maigret, demonstrating in the process that criticism need not be diffuse, obscurantist, frivolous or incomprehensible. Robinson writes:

"H.R.F. Keating has noted that the Maigret stories represent the first examples of the detective as writer. Part of this clearly stems from Maigret's desire to understand human motivation and his need to soak up the atmosphere of a place and immerse himself in a complex mesh of relationships until the solution to the crime becomes clear. Simenon's plots are often flimsy or far-fetched, and Maigret's actual detective work can be minimal at times. What makes the books so absorbing is his empathy with the characters he encounters ... " (Highlighting is mine.)

What can I say except that the man is right and that his comments say much about why we read crime fiction.

As it happens, crime-fiction reviewers come in for some criticism on Crime Scraps this week, where a comment laments the shakiness of the Telegraph's recent list of 50 crime writers to read before you die. The commenter complains that:

"With the odd exception — Marcel Berlins, e.g. — reviewers are stringers or staff with a passing interest and without knowledge either wide or deep of the genre, nor of what, in literary terms, constitutes fine writing. And they [don't] particularly care — after all, it's just crime fiction. Today we have no Julian Symons, no Harry Keating, no Jacques Barzun, and that is a very unhappy thing."

That's another bouquet for H.R.F. Keating. Now, how about you, readers? Who's your favorite crime-fiction critic? What remarks about crime fiction have made you stroke your chin thoughtfully and muse, "Hmm, that's right."?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Kudos to Keating

I've mentioned H.R.F. Keating several times recently, both in a discussion of his novels (and one movie) about Bombay's Inspector Ganesh Ghote and in connection with Virkram Chandra's Sacred Games. The Paperback Mysteries blog brings news of a special honor for Keating of the kind not many writers receive.

Dialect-schmialect, or, more words, words, words

Two weeks ago, I noted the odd speech patterns H.R.F. Keating gives the characters in his stories about Bombay police inspector Ganesh Ghote. At the same time, I noted a comment from a blogger in India that "This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well."

I am now about 270 pages into Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and I note with interest that his characters use precisely the speech patterns by which Keating distinguishes his characters. Two of the most noticeable are a dismissive rhyming when a character is annoyed or impatient, and frequent use of the word only after the word it modifies.

Thus, a Bombay (Mumbai) constable, asked what he has found in a murder victim's purse, replies, "Lipstick-shipstick, that's all." Or a newly abstemious political candidate says: "No time now for drinking-shinking." A gangster explains his origins this: "I was born here in Mumbai, in GTB Nagar only, saab."

True, the British Keating used these linguistic devices far more frequently than the New Delhi-born, Mumbai- and Berkeley-residing Chandra. Therein, perhaps, lies the difference: For Chandra, speech patterns are one among a variety of ways to mark characters. For Keating, their frequent use can appear something like a mark of caricature. In fact, I don't think that was Keating's intention. But they do lend the stories a quaint, if not dated, touch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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India crime fiction
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Inspector Ghote's hard work and quaint words

I spent part of the long weekend with H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ganesh Ghote: Dead on Time, the sixteenth of twenty-four books about the hard-pressed Bombay (Mumbai) police inspector, then the Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of the first Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder. (Yeah, the movie has a director, too, and some stars, but Merchant-Ivory is the brand, and so it will be here.)

The novel and the movie are good comic-crime fun, mostly of a gentle variety, and Naseeruddin Shah does an excellent job as a harried Ghote in the latter. The movie stresses the competing demands on Ghote from his superiors, who pile case after case upon him, demanding that each be given top priority. In Dead on Time, the demands come from competing powerful individuals, each of whom puts pressure on Ghote to solve a murder in a manner that best suits his own interests. (It is one of the novel's little surprises that these powerful people, as willing as they are to throw their weight around, are not always wrong, on the one hand, and are sometimes as puzzled at Ghote, on the other.)

My exposure to Keating before this weekend consisted of a Ghote short story that is one of two works of crime fiction I've read in which, arguably, no crime is committed. The story is all Ghote: his frustrations, his patience, his relations with his family, his outward deference to social superiors even as he seethes at their overbearing stupidity. Dead on Time shares that emphasis; I can think of no other crime novel that depends so heavily on its protagonist and his interaction with his surroundings, human and physical. (There are beguiling passages of Ghote's frustration and then slow enchantment with the languid pace of life in a village where his investigation leads him.)

Readers will notice peculiarities in the dialogue that one Indian writer called Ghote's "broken-English patois." This "patois" consists principally of progressive verb forms where conventional English uses simple past or present ("I mean, a chap is not coming into a shop and finding one dead body on the floor without feelings of surprise, no?") and frequent use of only after the word it modifies ("That is perhaps nonsense only.") I can understand why such syntax might make an Indian reader wince. I wonder also if such speech patterns reflect the syntax of the Indian languages the characters would be speaking, the way a Russian speaking English might drop articles, or a Dutch speaker might use the perfect where a native English speaker would use the simple past. ("I wonder if he has done it," a detective asks in an early English version of one of Janwillem van de Wetering's novels -- jarring to English readers who would naturally expect the detective to ask instead "I wonder if he did it.")

To his credit, the writer, Ashok K. Banker, puts such linguistic manipulation in historical context: "This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well."

P.S. I quoted the above from a 2005 entry in Banker's blog, which in turn quotes a review Banker had written several years earlier of Keating's novel Breaking and Entering. Banker ended that earlier review with the commendable declaration that:

Bombay still awaits a truly worthy detective series - or several of them - to explore the city's unique beauty, charm and sleaze. Ghote was a worthy attempt, and certainly the only commercially successful one abroad. Now, what we need is a detective series that Indians will enjoy and buy in great numbers. Even if I damn well have to write it myself.

He does himself considerably less credit when he remarks in the newer blog entry that accompanies the review:

The only thing I don't stand by anymore is that last line. I have no intention of writing more crime fiction, regardless of how well it sells or gets reviewed. I simply don't have the kind of mind that can shape a story to fit genre formulas. What's more, shaping any story to fit any kind of structural expectation, in my honest opinion, is a crime in itself. Which is perhaps why I no longer read much crime fiction, or respect it very much.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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