More good words from Bill James

Thirty years on, Bill James' Harpur and Iles crime novels ("His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent," raved Ken Bruen.) may have fallen off a bit from their peak. The series was terrific from its beginning, with You'd Better Believe It (1985), then caught a thematic wave that lasted from Club (1991) through, say, Eton Crop (1999).

Commentators love the books' savage humor, occasionally invoking Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays.  The novels also create touching and hilarious portraits of aspirations to respectability on the part of low-life gangsters, notable the great Panicking Ralph Ember.

But James is such a good prose stylist that even the least of the books contains lines you'll want to quote to your friends. Perhaps the weakest of the novels, The Girl With the Long Back, contains one the series' very best lines. (The line concerns the title character's offer to show Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles her butterfly; she's a swimmer, you see.)

The latest in the series, Blaze Away, published this spring, looks so far to rank fairly high among recent entries. And, as does every book in the series, it contains the sort of dialogue you won't read elsewhere. Here Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur replying to a query from his informant, the shady art dealer Jack Lamb:

"‘It’s the ochre that speaks to my centre, too,’ Harpur said. ‘I thrill to that drumbeat.’ He knew Jack prized this kind of ramshackle, barmy conversation. Lamb obviously thought it made Harpur a more or less happily enmeshed associate of Jack’s brilliantly prosperous, profoundly dodgy vocation as fine arts huckster, sales online or by appointment.

Here me and Bill James. And
here's my two-part interview
with him.

The novel also nails a voguish usage much favored by corporate executives and politicians who want to avoid scrutiny:

"They wanted all their dealings to be entirely transparent – a modish term that George found deeply unreal."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The new Harpur and Iles novel from Bill James!

For Disclosures, Number 31 in the Harpus and Iles police procedural series, Bill James gives Panicking Ralph Ember a new origin story and makes his best use yet of Esther Davidson, a high-flying police officer who appeared first in James' non-Hapur and Iles novel Tip Top, written under the same David Craig.

Most of the novel is told as a series of flashback chapters, narrated alternately by Ember and Davidson. I'm not sure what the technique contributes to the story, but James again manages nicely to recapture Ember's pathetic ambitions for his club, the Monty, whose social standing is, now and forever, "admittedly not quite as he would have it, owing to present high yob, slob, slapper and villain membership levels."  And one has to admire the sang-froid of Davidson, who, begins Chapter 30 thus:

"In the morning at The Mandrake Esther went downstairs first, leaving Gerald patching himself up while she looked for the manager to apologize and settle the account. ... `There are some breakages in our room, three-twelve,' she said. `Obviously inadvertent, but I hope you can give me a quick estimate of the cost and I'll do a checque to cover our stay and the accidents with the curtains, the basin in the en suite, and the TV set. I think the sheets will wash out fine if you put them through twice, and the mattress is absolutely OK."

Your humble blogkeeper
(left); Bill James (right)

Davidson and her husband like a bit of rough sex, you see (tastefully kept off-stage), and I don't care what you say, that excerpt is funny.

Though recent Harpur and Iles novels have fallen short of the level established in, say, the first sixteen books, the wordplay is as exuberant as always, and Ralph's patent combination of cowardice and tactical intelligence come to the fore as well as it did in the early novel Panicking Ralph.  James completists will want to read Disclosures, and other readers might like it as well, though I'd advice beginning with the earlier novels.

(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James at  http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/search/label/Bill%20James%20interview)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

In praise of Jamesian high jinks

I am pleased to report that Snatched, a comic novel by Bill James that includes art theft, revenge, malicious flashing, and trenchant social comedy, is shaping up as worthy company to the author's Harpur and Iles novels. Here's a sample of the opening chapter:

"In a throaty, not quite panic-driven voice, Jervis, one of the economy-measure, hourly paid, part-time porters, said: `Ladies and gentlemen officers of the Hulliborn Regional Museum and Gallery, we have got what could be designated in my opinion a fucking riot at the Fire Department, pardon the demotic. ... "

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

In short, this seems the sort of book for which the term high jinks was invented, and that's good.

I have long been in awe of the Harpur and Iles novels. If you don't want to take my word for it, listen to Ken Bruen, who

"abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent."

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

or Tim Hallinan, who wrote that

"If I were told I could only read five writers for the remainder of my life, and I had to name them at that moment, both Bill James and Anthony Powell would be on the list." 

Here's a checklist of the Harpur and Iles novels. While deciding which ones to look for, read my 2009 interview with Bill James, Part I and Part II.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bill James and the dark art of verbal evasion

I was preparing a simple list of excerpts from Undercover, Book 29 in Bill James' Harpur & Iles series, when I realized that almost all the selections shared a theme: verbal evasion.

Political and criminal functionaries self-consciously use buzzwords and jargon, and undercover police slip into similar jargon when deceiving their spouses. Euphemism and deception feature in much of the dialogue and, in one section quoted below, James takes the piss out of what may be the most widely and disingenously abused English word of the last twenty-five years: community.

What's more, the characters know what they and their fellow characters are doing, and the resulting self-loathing and mutual mistrust build up and build up until they lead to verbal explosions, usually from Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles or from James' other favorite bullshit detectors, the wives and girlfriends of endangered cops and low-level criminals.

James told me three years ago, apropos of his notable evasive cross-talk between Harpur and Iles, that:

"I tend to get bored reading books where the dialogue is very sequential and reasonable. I like the talk to obscure at least as much as it tells. I don’t want the reader dozing off, so I introduce the seeming breaks from sense. ... Opaque dialogue can be an avoidance of a troublesome topic. The reader would spot that it’s troublesome, which means the dialogue is doing its job while appearing not to. People may be obsessed with their own concerns and will try to dominate the conversation to get these across, despite the other person’s probable wish to do the same. We get a nice helping of chaos, evasion, dead-ends, just like at home."

Undercover, whose plot revolves around another pet James theme  – the physical, psychological, and moral dangers of undercover police work  –carries the evasions and deceptions into every aspect of the narrative, and the result lends the book much of its tension as well as its humor. Here are some examples plus one bit unrelated to the matter at hand but included because it's so deliciously funny.

*

"Your replies to questions needn’t be too detailed, though: they could be ‘redacted’, to borrow a modish term."

*

"The course he’d attended had as its official, magnificently uninformative title, ‘Actual Progressive Policing’ (APP). Those selected were instructed to tell anyone outside who asked about it that the object was to improve police integration within the community. The last phrase – ‘within the community’ – should be used verbatim and with a pious tone, his tutor said, because the word ‘community’ had lately developed a kind of gorgeously holy tinge, and to be ‘within’ that blessed fold made things even holier: the curious would consider it crude to go on nosing if once blocked by this cosy, sanctified formula. He’d tried it on Iris, and she’d replied: ‘Rubbish. You’ve been learning how to spy, haven’t you, Tom?'"

*

"Iris had one hell of a down on jargon – assumed always that its purpose was concealment and evasiveness, not communication; anti-communication."

*

" ‘He was ambushed,’ Harpur said. ‘No blame on him for that, surely. Who could have dodged it?’

"Maud said: ‘Well, who? Yes. And who could have laid it on?’

"‘The Home Office loves blame – blaming, that is, not getting blamed,’ Iles said."

*

" ‘But that’s rather negative, isn’t it?’ Maud said.

"‘No. Not “rather”. It’s totally fucking negative,’ Iles replied."

*

"Tom felt it vital to go along with the half-baked nature of this conversation. It suggested geniality and friendship, beyond mere business concerns."

*

" ‘This is interesting,’ Tom said. It was the best he could come up with. He felt almost smothered by guff. He said it pretty matter-of-fact, no heavy, fascinated trill laid on, otherwise it would sound like sarcasm – apparently admiration, but really piss-taking words that stood in for the true meaning, which amounted, approximately, to, ‘Fuck off, Leo, you verbose, anti-grammatical cunt.’"

*

"They know about it, live on it, Vogue-clothe themselves on it, smart-shoe themselves on it, status themselves on it, but there needn’t be too much definition of what it actually is. That would disturb and even upset them." [On the self-deception of high-level gangsters' wives.]

*

"‘A couple of cabbages and four Jaffas give him or her a social background?’ Iles asked.

" ‘Undercover needs its methodology, Desmond,’ Maud said.

"‘Its methodology couldn’t keep him alive,’ Iles said."

*

"His trousers, socks and shoes were blood-drenched and muddy. In one sense he did well to crawl at all.’

" ‘Which sense would that be?’ Iles said."

"‘This is very high-class shooting,’ Maud replied."

*

" My mother used to cry out gleefully to me, even as a child, `Desmond, you’re such an internationalist!'”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bill James on Stieg Larsson, the Krays, and what the modern hit man wears

Like all right-thinking readers, I'm wary of contemporary pop-culture references in crime novels. Jo Nesbø's recent Phantom, for example, drops the names of Don Draper and Mad Men to no great effect.

But I'll make an exception for the following, from Undercover, the latest installment in Bill James' Harpur and Iles series:

"‘You’ll remember that moment in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson,’ she replied.

"‘Oh?’ Harpur said.

"‘Where the investigative reporter, searching for clues about a missing girl, finds a group photograph of her glancing off-picture at somebody or something that shocks and/ or fascinates her,’ Iles said. ‘It’s a kind of revelation. Actually, the reporter comes over as thick as shit, so he needs revelations.’"

Another reference earlier in the book, to an English cultural phenomenon not quite so contemporary, shows that James does not just write funny things, but write things funny. The discussion has turned to the business wardrobes of hit men, and:

"For instance, people wouldn’t put on a decent suit for today’s type of mission, not because the smartness would seem freakish at a killing and a bit too Kray, but on account of the vulgar, showy bulge of shoulder holsters."

"A bit too Kray" rather than, say, "a bit too much like the Kray twins," is a nice touch and an example of why Bill James is a delight to read.

*

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' 2009 interview with Bill James.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

New Bill James novel arrives!!!

Bill James' twenty-eighth Harpur and Iles novel is in hand, and all is right with the world.

Vacuum has drug dealer Mansel Shale finding religion and stepping back from (though not abandoning) his trade in his grief over the shooting deaths of his wife and son. Manic ACC Desmond Iles and scheming DCS Colin Harpur worry about solving the crime. More than that, they wonder whether Shale's retreat will shatter the fragile peace with rival dealer Ralph Ember and bring chaos to the streets.

That's the story through the first three-plus chapters.  As usual with James, though, the real pleasure is the dark, rich, sometimes very funny prose. Here's a sample:

"This pair had to deliver peace on the streets and preserve it: no turf fights, no drive-by salvoes to hail the New Year and/or mark the Queen's official birthday, no domestic torchings, no body-part severances or desocketed eyes. Desocketed eyes really riled Iles. `Desocketed eyes get up my nose,' he'd told Harpur a while ago."

The opening chapters have a bit more of a contemporary edge than other recent books in the series; James' half-mocking portrayal of the rival drug gangs in terms straight off the business page is more acidic than usual, and the author has not neglected the times in which he writes:

"People had less money, yes. As a result, many prioritized their spending more ruthlessly than before, went with absolute, steely dedication for the essentials. That is, they lashed out generously on stuff which would for a while blur the crisis pain and complement their Jobseeker's Allowance, although, of course, it ate into their Jobseeker's Allowance, because prices of the commodities stayed high on account of this increased demand."

So my early verdict is that Vacuum may turn out to be one of the stronger recent entries in the series.

***

I've long been in awe of the Harpur and Iles novels. If you don't want to take my word for it, listen to Ken Bruen, who

"abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent."

or Tim Hallinan, who wrote that

"If I were told I could only read five writers for the remainder of my life, and I had to name them at that moment, both Bill James and Anthony Powell would be on the list." 

Here's a checklist of the Harpur and Iles novels. While deciding which ones to look for, read my 2009 interview with Bill James, Part I and Part II.

***

Vacuum is published by the Creme de la Crime imprint, now a branch of Severn House, about which Martin Edwards had some nice things to say last year. Join me in thanking them for having the good taste to publish Bill James.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Besieging for Dummies, or Bill James on hostage talks

I.J. Parker, author, Detectives Beyond Borders commenter, and acid-tongued critic of writing she doesn't like, disagrees with me on the merits of Bill James. For her, "There is such a crazy abundance of words as characters contemplate absolutely everything at great length, whether it's relevant or not, that I want to strangle the author and his characters."

She'd likely not want to strangle James if she met him. He's a cheerful, soft-spoken sort, more than willing to pose for photos with admiring fans. But Parker is an acute reader; words do flow in crazy abundance in James' books, at least the more recent ones. The difference is that I like the effect. Here's Colin Harpur in James' newest, I Am Gold, contemplating a hostage negotiation with an armed kidnapper who calls himself John:

"Harpur thought the greeting, regreeting, fizzled with emptiness and formula. Naturally it did. It came from the manual — Besieging for Dummies, or something like. And, just as naturally, this boy, this boy `John' in there could recognize smooth-textured bullshit. Very likely these calls would contain nothing but. In fact, perhaps ultimately there'd be so much he would get disorientated by it, half smothered by it, gently and mercilessly chinwagged into collapse and surrender by it. But, maybe he recognized this hazard and left the phone dead for spells while he got his breath back."

That's a bigger step into contemplation than is usual in a police procedural, with perhaps more irreverence than is the custom, but the effect is all the stronger for this. ("mercilessly chinwagged into collapse and surrender" is nice because unexpected.) And, for all the baroque smother of verbiage, it's a plausible thought about such a negotiation. It's relevant, in other words, pace Parker. And I giggled like an idiot at this:

"`You're trying to soften me, aren't you, Olly?' ...

"Rockmain mouthed: `Fuck, fuck, the smartarse fuck.' Harpur took that to be an admission John read the psychotactics right. Iles leaned over and tapped Rockmain on the arm. When Rockmain turned towards him Iles pantomimed a lavatorial scene, holding his nose with one hand and pulling an imaginary flush chain with the other: his thoughts on Rockmain's intervention."

That's relevant. More to the point, it's fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

New Bill James novel arrives!

How many crime writers give us a detective mourning and contemplating the special horror of a child's death? Lots, and almost always to show the detective's sensitivity to the brutal world out there and hence his or her bravery in taking up arms against it. How many would give us this:

"One of the notable things about Iles was he'd get very upset over the death of any child, but especially a child who'd been shot. He gazed at this lad on the floor of the Jaguar, and Harpur could read the self-blame, anguish and despair in Iles's face. It had happened on his territory, and in daylight — that's how he would think: a damned affront, a stain; someone, or more than one, monkeying with him, with him, Desmond Iles.

A tragic event, a little portrait of Desmond Iles' monstrous vanity, and Colin Harpur's wry, clear-eyed observations of his borderline unbalanced superior. And the passage is just plain fun to read — no surprise from the author of such gorgeous prose as that cited here, here and here.

***

(I Am Gold, newly arrived by mail, is Bill James' twenty-seventh novel in the Harpur and Iles series. Here's a checklist of the books. Peter Temple has called James a star. Ken Bruen has praised him. So have I; here's my 2009 interview with James.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Home, James, or Harpur & Iles get back to basics

Readers of long-running crime-fiction series like to talk about how authors keep their series fresh, with love, death and alcohol being primary instruments of change. But authors can be better off sticking with what they do best.

Hotbed, twenty-sixth in Bill James' Harpur & Iles series, dispenses with such recent novelties as Eastern European competition for the series' established drug dealers (Girls) or the absence of Harpur (In the Absence of Iles). Instead, James concentrates on what he does so well: deceit, mistrust, evasion, and fear of betrayal, lavishly rendered in gorgeous, flamboyant, theatrically self-conscious prose.

Here the antagonists are Mansel Shale and (Panicking) Ralph Ember, the drug barons of long standing whose uneasy alliance is threatened, as successful businesses will be these days, by mutual fear that one will try to achieve a monopoly by eliminating the other. Here, too, the rivalries and mutual jealousies of Harpur, the detective chief superintendent, and his manic boss, are highlighted, the accent a bit more on Harpur's thoughts about Iles and a bit less on Iles' manic rage and froth.

Ember, fearful of Shale's possible ambition, plants a spy in Shale's rival drugs firm, the spy disappears and comes to a bad end, and the dance of deceit begins. Ember's susceptible teenage daughter longs for the vanished underling. Shale fears that his off-stage ex-wife will disrupt his pending wedding. Shale's fiancee and the victim's actor brother are the latest in James' string of bothersomely clever outsiders threatening the uneasy peace by asking disturbingly probing questions.

James is more conscious than ever of the series' theatricality, a theatricality of words more than of gestures. The invokes Jacobean drama, as critics and reviewers have done in discussing the Harpur & Iles series. Here are few of those words:

"Harpur had often heard Iles quote that guru he'd mentioned, Sartre, who said, `Hell is other people,' though that, apparently, didn't stop him shagging oodles of them. Naturally, Iles said it in French first, and then generously translated for Harpur. And sometimes Harpur would think, Yes, hell is other people, such as Iles."

(Read Part I and Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Eddie Coyle's best friend

Partisans of George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle sprang to its defense last week when I wrote that some parts of the novel had aged badly. It turns out that one of the book's most ardent defenders was lurking right here all along.

The superlatively talented Bill James, author of the Harpur and Iles novels, told your humble blogkeeper in June that "the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part II: Bill James on dialogue, gleeful savagery, and crime fiction vs. detective fiction

In Part II of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about dialogue, jokes, crime writing versus detective writing, and a parallel that a fellow writer drew between his books and Jacobean drama. He also makes a surprising choice for the Harpur & Iles character with whom he identifies most closely.

Click here for a Bill James bibliography, including non-Harpur & Iles books. Click here for books he has written under the name David Craig. Under his own name — James Tucker — Bill James wrote a study of the novelist Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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Q: Ken Bruen told an interviewer in 2004 that “I abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. ... His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent.” Peter Temple called you “a star.” John Harvey and Val McDermid are just two more crime writers who have rhapsodized about your work. What in your writing so attracts your fellow writers?

A: I don’t know why these writers think well of my books, except where they’ve published their comments. But I’m very grateful. I’d like to think it’s the jokes, two or three of which during the twenty-five novels are original. Well, two. John Harvey in the Guardian said the novels had a Jacobean drama feel to them. A sort of gleeful savagery, I think he meant.

It’s not all praise from other authors. Someone said the books were lightweight. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment, though it could be a half-compliment. After all, what’s the opposite: deadweight, overweight? Another writer-reviewer said, `Not much detection here.' Guilty, my lord. I think I’m a crime writer, not a detective novelist, although my two principal characters are detectives. They have other things to do.

Q: Panicking Ralph Ember is a drug dealer. He is at various times a coward, a blowhard, and a cheater on his wife. He also vies with Iles as the most memorable character in the series, and he is pretty likable, even charming for all his faults. Tell me about the genesis of Panicking Ralph. Why does he work as a character? And what makes him so lovable?

A: Ralph has pathetically and comically unachievable ambitions, like most of us: he hopes to change his lowlife club into the Athenaeum. He takes fright easily, as do many of us. He strives to keep up appearances, as do many of us. A French interviewer asked me if I was Colin Harpur. I said, no, I’m Panicking Ralph. Perhaps readers also feel an affinity.

Q: One distinctive feature of your dialogue is the elliptical cross-talk mainly between Harpur and Iles, but also between Harpur and other characters. They talk around each other, answering questions the other did not ask, ignoring ones that are asked. Talk about this technique, your models (if any) for it, and what it adds to the characters and the books.

A: I tend to get bored reading books where the dialogue is very sequential and reasonable. I like the talk to obscure at least as much as it tells. I don’t want the reader dozing off, so I introduce the seeming breaks from sense. Sub-Pinter? Again, guilty, my lord. Opaque dialogue can be an avoidance of a troublesome topic. The reader would spot that it’s troublesome, which means the dialogue is doing its job while appearing not to. People may be obsessed with their own concerns and will try to dominate the conversation to get these across, despite the other person’s probable wish to do the same. We get a nice helping of chaos, evasion, dead-ends, just like at home.

Q: You’ve said that you wrote the first book, You’d Better Believe It, without planning to write a series. What got you thinking about a series?

A: The first book got very few reviews and they came late. I’d already started another, The Lolita Man. The title rang literary bells. The critics woke up. It had a bucketful of good notices. Iles had appeared and seemed ready for development. Even then, I certainly wouldn’t have expected the books to go to number twenty-six (this autumn – Hotbed).

Q: The most recent Harpur and Iles novel introduces a new character and omits a familiar one. Why the changes? Was it a stroke of mischief to write a book in which Harpur does not appear and call that book In the Absence of Iles?

A: Yes, I suppose a kind of mischief. I’d introduced a new detective in a book called Tip Top, written under another of my pen names, David Craig. This is Esther Davidson. I wanted to give her another outing, and brought her over to the Bill James stable. She features in another book due out in Britain in September, Full Of Money.

Incidentally, you mention Anthony Powell. In Full Of Money a couple of crooks are big Powell fans. One of the baddies has done a lot of jail and needed a long novel for distraction. Powell`s twelve-volume work, A Dance to the Music of Time, suited. He refers to it as A Dance to the Music of Doing Time.

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(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interview with the master, Part I: Detectives Beyond Borders talks with Bill James

Some of us remember where we were when John F. Kennedy was shot or World War II ended; I remember where I was when I first read Bill James. I was having coffee and a scone and passing the time of day at my local secondhand bookshop when the owner said, "Hey, you might like this" and handed me Roses, Roses, tenth novel in James' Harpur & Iles series.

Two pages in, I was Siddhartha Gautama under the bodhi tree. I was Hugh Hefner at that magical moment when his mother said, "Hugh! Stop studying so much. Go find a nice girl." I read a third of the book, brushed the crumbs from my upper lip, and said: "I'll take it."

James' world of cops and criminals is rich, dark and often very funny. And it offers some of the most gorgeous prose ever set to paper in crime or any other kind of fiction:

"If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."

or

"To her, garrotting looked a sinister, damnable skill; in fact a kind of art, a kind of filthy art, and Iles had about him much of the good third/fourth-rate artist: arrogance, contempt for usual social and possibly legal standards, some flair, some posturing, some taste, some vision, and the irresistible impulse to create, or its complementary and sometimes necessary opposite, to wipe out."

Hotbed, twenty-sixth novel in the series, will appear this fall. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Bill James talks about his rich, dark world, the people who populate it, and why he chose two high-ranking police officers as his protagonists rather than the more conventional workaday cops.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

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

Q: The first Colin Harpur novel appeared in 1985, and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles came along a bit later. What else was going on in British crime fiction at the time? What did you set out to do differently? Other than Anthony Powell, what writers haunted your imagination?

A: Most crime fiction deals with police at low or middling rank. I aimed to show two very highly placed officers who are committed to fighting crime, unbribable, but very fallible morally and socially. The books aim to shock and amuse by featuring two men who virtually run a police force but also conduct personal relationships in very unconventional, even dubious, ways.

I’ve said it boringly often, but the one book that influenced me above all was The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins, for its dialogue and its subtle treatment of the fink situation.

Q: Iles is cruel to his chief, Mark Lane; fiercely protective of his own daughter; lecherous toward young women; yet he ultimately rejects The Girl with the Long Back. Tell me about the genesis of this complex, appalling and attractive character and how he made his way into a co-lead role in the series after not being around at the start.

A: Many detectives in fiction are portrayed as having personality faults, their creators knowing that otherwise their leading characters would be saintly and non-credible. But the faults tend to be forgivable and often part of macho-ness. Drinking too much because of job stress is a favourite failing; one I’ve used myself. I came to feel this kind of ploy was a sentimental cop(!)-out. I decided it would be interesting to see how readers reacted to someone with rather more off-putting (realistic?) flaws.

Also I tried to understand the psyche of a born second-in-command — someone who had a big job, but not the biggest. Iles will never make it to chief constable. What kind of personality does this produce? Answer: not eternally sweet; sometimes manic.

Q: Families have loomed large in the Harpur & Iles books at least since Protection, when a fellow crook kidnaps “Tenderness” Mellick’s son. Why the emphasis on families, particularly criminals’ families?

A: I like the whole organisational bit. A police force is an organisation, so is a crooked firm, so is a family. I try to put all three alongside one another and examine the friction.

Q: A related question: One motif of the series is the strange ways people build families in changing times: Harpur with his daughters and his young girlfriend. Panicking Ralph, comically overprotective of his own daughters. Iles, his wayward wife, and their baby girl. What attracted you to families as a vehicle for social comedy? For that matter, why daughters rather than sons?

A: This is part answered in 3. Daughters are more markedly outside the cop-crook scene. Sons might inherit a criminal empire. Girls probably wouldn't. I solicit their detached view, which can be funny and sharp. (Not all readers like Harpur's daughters, though. Too flip and know-all?)

Q: Families are not the only recurring motif. There are the hypersensitivity about sending officers undercover, and the persistent girlfriend who presses Harpur and Iles to probe the case of her weak, hapless criminal mate. Among other things, these create continuity. Talk about these recurring themes, why you keep coming back to them. Feel free to name any that I missed.

A: I’m a bit wary of pointing out recurring themes. They might look like repetition. However, undercover is an obsession of mine. Possibly it’s the influence of spy novels – le Carré etc. I’ve written spy novels myself and occasionally do one now: in fact, I currently have one on offer to a publisher, and the signs are promising. Secrecy, cover-ups, play-acting fascinate me. Harpur and Iles have to rehouse and hide a former super-grass in Wolves of Memory. Undercover gives great openings for dramatic irony — that is, where the reader know more than some of the characters. This can give an added complexity and shiftiness to dialogue.

I find the tensions and moral/legal/ethical problems of undercover work a very useful story source. For example, how far in criminality should an undercover officer go to convince a crooked gang he’s a genuine member? Think of the undercover officer in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. I won't describe the tricky points there, in case it gives away the surprise, for someone who hasn’t seen the film, but they are very tricky.

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

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Bill James here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pix: More dark, gorgeous prose from Bill James

This twenty-fourth novel in Bill James' Harpur & Iles series focuses a bit less on Panicking Ralph Ember and a bit more on Mansel Shale. Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's daughters take their usual helping/hindering comic turn, and they are delightfully, if somewhat darkly, echoed in the drug-dealer Shale's more high-strung children. Pix also contains a bit more suspense and mystery than previous books in the series.

Beyond this, the novel revisits a number of characters and situations from earlier novels: The evasive cross-talk between Harpur and his supervisor, Iles. The vital informant Jack Lamb, fond of grand gestures, nighttime meetings and military trappings. Another probing, insistent woman who worries all with harrying, dangerous, occasionally effective prodding of the police to find her villainous, disappeared, perhaps dead boyfriend.

Mostly, though, there is James' prose, dark, funny, baroquely gorgeous, unequalled in crime fiction and perhaps elsewhere as well:

"`The house — in a poor state? Some intrusion? Is that what you're saying, Manse?'

"`You know the state it's in, you sodding smarm prince,' Shale replied. `You know about intrusions.'"

or

"`These are instinctive with me, Harpur —humanity and perception.'

"`Anyone can see those in your face, sir.'

"`I do notice people in here staring at me, perhaps reading those qualities.'

"`No, that's because most of them recognize and hate us, sir.'

"`Equally?'

"`You more, because of rank,' Harpur said.

"Iles smiled, gratified. `But undercurrents, Col.'"

Here is a Bill James bibliography. Books seven through sixteen in the Harpur & Iles series, Astride a Grave through Eton Crop, may be the finest sustained piece of storytelling in all of crime fiction. Here's an interview with James from Crimespree Magazine to read before you go shopping for the books. And you will, I hope, do that shopping.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Friday's forgotten books: Bill James' Harpur and Iles

Patti Abbott frets over Forgotten Books. "I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness," she writes, and she asks other bloggers to help out by retrieving a book from the ranks of the forgotten. I like her idea so much that I'm suggesting a whole series: Bill James' Harpur & Iles novels.

The books are not exactly forgotten; the series is now up to twenty-three novels with a twenty-fourth due this year. But James' brand of dark betrayal, darker humor and keen social comedy has remained a connoisseur's taste, beloved of critics for the rich beauty of its prose style, among other features, but never selling in the mass numbers that its excellence deserves.

What makes the series great? Its delicious looks at the upward aspirations of its gangsters. Its funny, touching takes on family life. Its teaming of the vain, violent, ungovernable Iles and his partner, Harpur, who sometimes deflects and sometimes slyly returns Iles' insults, yet who is capable of betrayals of his own. Its "brilliant combination of almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary manners," according to John Harvey, who ought to know a thing or two about crime fiction. And the beauty of the writing:

"If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."

That's from In Good Hands, and it's haunting and beautiful. James can also be laugh-out-loud funny while remaining just as haunting, as in the opening paragraph from The Detective is Dead:

"When someone as grand and profitable as Oliphant Kenward Knapp was suddenly taken out of the business scene, you had to expect a bloody big rush to grab his domain, bloody big meaning not just bloody big, but big and very bloody. Harpur was looking at what had probably been a couple of really inspired enthusiasts in the takeover rush. Both were on their backs. Both, admittedly, showed only minor blood loss, narrowly confined to the heart area. Both were eyes wide, mouth wide and for ever gone from the stampede."

The series hits its stride around its seventh book and becomes a kind of grand and cracked portrait of Britain's shifting urban and social landscape at the end of the twentieth century, of the murky boundaries between police and criminals, of suburban social climbers who happen to be killers and drug dealers, of the strange ways people build families in changing times. The books are violent, dark, and often very funny. And their author just happens to be the best prose stylist who has ever written crime fiction in English.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Necessity is the mother of this question to readers

I had intended to post about the remake of a movie I discussed here some time back, but that will have to wait, thanks to a defective DVD from the video store. This was just the second defective disc I'd rented, and I believe the first one was of the same movie. Oh, well. You remember what George Santayana said, don't you?

Instead, I'll share some observations about Kittyhawk Down by Garry Disher, whose books about the professional thief Wyatt I've discussed recently. Disher's approach in this novel, the first of his Hal Challis books that I've read, dovetails nicely with some readers' comments on my recent posting about crime series and freshness. The discussion turned to writers who change the central point-of-view character from book to book, and names including Michael Robotham, Karin Fossum, Olen Steinhauer and Ed McBain came up.

Disher does something vaguely McBainian in Kittyhawk Down's early chapters, opening each with a different point of view in a pattern that seems almost symphonic, if one diagrams it: Hal Challis gets the first chapter; followed by his sidekick, Ellen Destry; then Pam Murphy, another officer; then Challis again; Destry again; a local eccentric; and a return of Challis, a kind of ABCABDA structure.

Disher discusses his ensemble approach and other issues here and here on the State Library of Victoria's summer reading blog. In the latter piece, he writes that he became more interested in Destry as the series progressed. What began as the Challis series, and was billed as such, is now the Challis/Destry series.

Thus, today's question. The Challis series became the Challis/Destry series. Similarly, Bill James billed early books in his great series as Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur novels until the manic Desmond Iles came on the scene, and the books became the Harpur & Iles series. Who else has done this? Who has started writing a series with one protagonist, then brought in a co-star or changed protagonists as the series progressed?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
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Some good lines from Bill James' "Girls"

An instructive comment that I quoted yesterday noted that the characters don't change much over the course of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels. But that's not entirely true. In the latest of the series, Girls, we are given this heretofore unrevealed biographical datum: Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's sexy, smart and much younger girlfriend, Denise, plays lacrosse for her university.

Denise is also responsible a meditation on mortality from Harpur:

"(H)e would catch himself sometimes storing memories of Denise brilliantly naked, as if he might lose her any day and should make sure he amassed these recollections as a fill-in for her absence. ... This sad urgency, also, arose from age. It meant he knew he could not rely on a future with her and should therefore file these images away in his brain, the way explorers left pemmican and ship's biscuits in igloos for subsequent journeys. But he did not want to be reminded that he could not rely on a future with her by behaving now as though he knew he could not rely on a future with her."

That's the first time I've seen nostalgia compared to pemmican. It's also touching, and it's similar to thoughts that Andrea Camilleri puts in Inspector Salvo Montalbano's head in The Smell of the Night and that I quoted here. In each novel, an author around eighty years old puts suspicions of mortality in the mind of a protagonist thirty or forty years younger. Could the bittersweet wisdom of age be creeping into crime fiction?

Elsewhere, Girls has its share of the funny, caustic commentary that James-lovers have grown accustomed to, as in this exchange between Harpur and his boss, the smarmy, menacing Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles:

"Mrs Grant is not keen on the police, that's right, sir."

"Quite a few like that about these days in luxury houses. It's because speed cameras do their four wheel drive jobs. They think it's persecution. They don't know what we're like when we really persecute, do they, Col?"

Or this, from the perennially insecure Panicking Ralph Ember, doomed but ever hopeful of turning his lowlife bar into a respectable club: "Consider the tainted ancestors of many earls and so on in the House of Lords. What was it Lord Kinnock called them — before he could get the robes on and become one himself? Brigands."

James may have stopped writing anything like a conventional crime story fifteen or twenty years ago, but he can still write a good line and offer a poignant observation.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Bill James

Blogging for a Good Book, from the Williamsburg Regional Library, offers some interesting comments on Bill James' Harpur and Iles series:

Most crime fiction writers working today are all too imitable. Then there’s Bill James. His Harpur and Iles novels are all style. The characters — thugs on both sides of the law — have a way of talking that’s a hilarious combination of smarm and menace. ... Harpur looks like a yobbo, but is infernally crafty. Iles is urbane, ambitious, and violent—and has a thing for young girls. The crooks, meanwhile, subscribe to business management theory and harbor illusions of joining the upper middle class.

Each of the short books in the series follows Harpur’s and Iles’s efforts to foil a criminal plot while keeping a wary eye on each other. Double crosses and adultery are common. The characters don’t develop much through the series, so it’s not necessary to read the books in order.

The observation about the characters not developing much is especially acute as long as the reader understands two things: We don't necessarily want our main characters to change, and much of the fun in these books comes not from how the characters change, but from the how circumstances change around them. And those circumstances provide a wonderful stage for some memorable characters, the recurring cast of supporting characters as well as the two protagonists.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime families

Not to get too sociological or anything, but I noticed a couple of years ago that some of my favorite crime writers had as significant sub-themes in their books their protagonists' efforts to build alternative families. Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, for instance, struggles to bring up his daughter, Linda. (He must have done something right, because she went on to become a police officer and a colleague of her father's.)

That great social comedian Bill James takes the theme several steps further, weaving families throughout his Harpur & Iles series. He explores the idea in particular detail starting with the tenth novel, Roses, Roses, built around the murder of Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's wife. Even when spouses don't die, marriage, betrayal thereof and substitutes therefor are constants in almost all the books. Harpur becomes a loving, earnest single father to his wise, impudent and hilarious adolescent daughters -- and they love having Harpur's university-student girlfriend around, especially at breakfast time.

Several of the series' principal criminals have family issues of their own, and Harpur's occasionally insane superior, ACC Desmond Iles, is regularly reduced to frothing rage when remembering his own wife's affair with Harpur. Even the maniac Iles, uncertain as he may be about the paternity of his own daughter (Sarah Iles has had an affair with another officer in addition to Harpur), develops a fierce and protective tenderness toward the child.

Over in the Netherlands, Janwillem van de Wetering carefully delineated three distinct family situations for his three protagonists: Sgt. Rinus de Gier, Adjutant Henk Grijpsta, and their wise old superior, the unnamed commissaris. In France, there are Benjamin Malaussène and his incredible multinational, multigenerational Belleville crew in Daniel Pennac's novels.

OK, I'll stop here. This is crime fiction, after all, and not social science. I'll throw the question in your laps, readers. What interesting families and alternative families can you think of in crime fiction? And why are they interesting?

P.S. Maxine at the Petrona blog picks up this question and puts a slightly different spin on it. Post your comments in both places, and we can turn this into a world-spanning mega-discussion.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Gorgeous prose

If my posting seems more disjointed than usual, perhaps it will compensate by being more enthusiastic. I've had such a flood of superb books arriving in recent days, from Bill James, Friedrich Glauser, Peter Temple, Norbert Davis, and Richard Stark (Donald Westlake), among others, that I don't know what to read first. So I've decided to read all at the same time, or as close to it as possible.

First up is The Sixth Man and Other Stories, with its fine examples of Bill James' knack for dialogue whose meaning resides not just in what the characters say, but in how they say it. Here's an informant – a grass – in "For Information Only":

"What's known as sacrosanct, almost holy, is the relationship between a grass and his cop contact. This is totally private, one-on-one, what is sometimes also referred to as symbiotic, meaning they depend on each other."

And here are Mansel Shale and Ralph Ember conducting a joint meeting of their drug-pushing firms:

"Yes, Manse, Ralphy, you say that, but these people are – "

"We definitely got it in mind," Shale said. "Ralph and self, we note all factors, you can believe it."

"This goes without saying," Ralph told them.

"But Manse, Ralph, if we don't – "

"This is an area known in boardrooms and such as `executive action,' meaning leave it to Ralphy and me. You heard of executive action at all? A well known, corporation term you might of missed. The topics you mention are not for open talk at a meat and potatoes do."

Look at these criminals’ pride that they know the same words that educated people do: symbiotic, executive action. Look at their wonderfully comic self-consciousness: "What’s known as ... " "You heard of ... " These are pitch-prefect examples of upwardly mobile crooks who haven’t quite got the middle-class verbal mannerisms down. And that, in turn, is part of the delicious social comedy of the superlatively great Harpur and Iles series.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Bill James

I've raved about his Harpur & Iles novels before, and I'll rave about them again. For now, the opening words from two of the books:

from In Good Hands:

"If you knew how to look, a couple of deaths from the past showed now and then in Iles' face."

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

from The Detective is Dead:

"When someone as grand and profitable as Oliphant Kenward Knapp was suddenly taken out of the business scene, you had to expect a bloody big rush to grab his domain, bloody big meaning not just bloody big, but big and very bloody. Harpur was looking at what had probably been a couple of really inspired enthusiasts in the takeover rush. Both were on their backs. Both, admittedly, showed only minor blood loss, narrowly confined to the heart area. Both were eyes wide, mouth wide and for ever gone from the stampede."