Look out, Cleveland

I'm busy selecting my Bouchercon wardrobe, so posting may be light, erratic, or both for a few days. At left is Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, part of my research for my first trip to this year's Bouchercon city.

I also know a bit about Cleveland through the crime writer Les Roberts, a former Chicagoan and Californian who writes mysteries about a Slovenian American P.I. named Milan Jacovich and has become so favorite a Cleveland son that he's one of this year's Bouchercon guests of honor. I read one of the novels years ago, before Detectives Beyond Borders, and I found Jacovich a highly engaging regular-guy protagonist.

Once I get to Cleveland, I'll moderate a Bouchercon panel called "Murder is Everywhere" with authors Timothy Hallinan, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Cara Black, Jeffrey Siger, and Stanley Trollip (Michael Stanley) on Saturday, from 10:15-11:05 a.m. (Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.)

I'll also head for the West Side Market and the Cleveland Museum of Art, though I'll miss the Harvey Pekar statue dedication. And I'll look for some good kielbasa, because it's there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon, Cleveland, and what I'll do there

The Bouchercon 2012 schedule is up for public viewing. I’ll moderate a panel called “Murder Is Everywhere” Saturday, Oct. 6, with panelists Timothy Hallinan, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Cara Black, Jeffrey Siger, and Stanley Trollip. Trollip is one half of the team that writes as Michael Stanley, and the panel takes its title from the name of a blog to which all five authors contribute.

I know all five and have panelized with three of them at previous Bouchercons, included twice before with Yrsa. I interviewed Tim Hallinan in 2008 here at Detectives Beyond Borders, and I’ve met and chatted with Jeffrey Siger through the others.

In this case, familiarity will lead not to contempt but to good questions, as I’ll want to avoid queries that I (and others) have asked the authors before. Such challenges are among the joys of moderating a panel. The first time I had the job, at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, for example, my panel included two translators from other languages into English, one who translated from English into French, and an author. The search for common elements among these three categories of panelists led to questions I’d likely not have come up with had I had to quiz them separately, in groups consisting solely of their exact peers.

I’ve already come up with a couple of good questions, but you won’t read about them here, because then the authors might read them. I always feel that a bit of mystery is best at a crime-fiction convention.

I’m also developing an itinerary of things to do in Cleveland, with the help a colleague who comes from there. The Cleveland Museum of Art tops the list, and Bouchercon’s opening ceremony happens at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Other recommendations include kielbasa, kraut, pierogies, the West Side Market, East Sixth and Prospect Avenue, the Flats, and jazz clubs on West Sixth Street. Unfortunately I’ll have left town by the time the Harvey Pekar statue is dedicated, but such a statue leaves me with warm feelings about Cleveland.

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"Murder is Everywhere" happens Saturday, Oct. 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m. View the Bouchercon Web site for more information.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Jim Tully, a father of hard-boiled

Brian Lindenmuth recommended Jim Tully, and when Brian speaks, I listen.

Tully, who lived from 1886 to 1947, was  a "vagabond, pugilist, and American writer" who achieved commercial success and critical favor in the 1920s and '30s with a series of novels and hard-boiled memoirs. 

He was not a crime writer, but Harvey Pekar's foreword to Tully's Circus Parade (1927) says Tully's legacy is perhaps "most clearly seen in detective stories beginning about 1930. His work often had a rough quality, but it is genuine, not affected, like Ernest Hemingway's."

Circus Parade's first sentence is suitably Hammettian in its matter-of-factness and brevity ("It was my second hobo journey through Mississippi") and the ending of its third story/vignette is wryly humorous ("Cameron's loss was several thousand dollars. Finnerty had gained eighty cents"), a bit like Hammett's story "Slippery Fingers."

So if you like Hammett (and I know that you do), you just might like Jim Tully.

Thanks, Brian.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Great minds ...

(Misleading Italian poster for Big Deal on Madonna Street, right)

I was excited when Donald Westlake called the 1958 Italian heist movie Big Deal on Madonna Street a post-graduate workshop for comedy writers and lamented that future Americans might miss similar opportunities to absorb and learn from foreign influences. "New writers' brains are not being mulched in this way," Westlake said. "What will be produced by people who think a good time is Spiderman?"

Among other things, Big Deal...'s absurd caper gone wrong, its odd anti-climax, and its affection for its gang of robbers may have inspired Westlake's own Dortmunder novels. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when I found the following exchange in Harvey Pekar's Our Movie Year (you'll have to imagine the drawings):

Joyce: How's this Big Deal on Madonna Street?

Harvey: Oh, that's great. It's got Vittorio Gassman an' Marcello Mastroianni in it ... it's one of the best comedies I've ever seen.

Joyce: You've seen it before?

Harvey: Yeah, but it's been a long time. Take it out. I'll enjoy it again.

Among the many pleasures of Pekar's comics are that the man takes art seriously, and he has impeccable taste. These days, the former is even more important than the latter, I'd say.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Nesbø on news

The profession of which I am a part has cropped up twice this weekend in my crime reading. First, Dan Waddell writes about the excesses of English tabloids and the non-action of Home Secretary Jack Straw in a notorious real-life murder case. (Jack Straw used to be my favorite political name until Philadelphia elected Michael Nutter mayor.)

Then Jo Nesbø's The Snowman offers an amusing swipe at newspapers' moral pretensions and a more probing examination of television. Here's the first, as reporters besiege Oslo police headquarters

"Mumbling among themselves that the police had to acknowledge their responsibility to keep the general public informed about such a serious, shocking and circulation-increasing matter."

Later Nesbø has protagonist Harry Hole appear on Norway's leading talk show to discuss the killer and turn the show into something like Harvey Pekar's appearances with David Letterman. That television manipulates truth and reduces everything to entertainment and morally neutral "content" goes without saying, though Nesbø says it well. What I like best, though, is that he captures that ghastly attraction of the insidious medium.

"`Jesus,' she heard the producer wheeze behind her. And then, `Jesus bloody Christ.' Oda just felt like howling. Howling with pleasure. Here, she thought. Here at the North Pole. We aren't where it happens. We are what happens."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Harvey, Alan and Clive

I bought books by Harvey Pekar and Alan Moore at my neighborhood's exciting new addition last week. Imagine my surprise when I opened the Pekar book at a random page yesterday and found a storyline about Pekar's visit with Moore in England.

Unlike The Simpsons' version of Moore, Pekar's, drawn by Ed Piskor, makes Moore look even more like a wild man than he does in video clips. "Alan is a very good and very talented guy," Pekar writes. "You couldn't have a better friend." Pekar has Moore say that he lives in Northampton because "It centers me. It has a large working-class population that I feel comfortable with." and "It's been inhabited continuously for 8,000 years."

In other news related to my reading, I found this in an essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper: "The world is jealous of confidence and success: it loves to detect the occasional ignorance of the omniscient, the trivial errors of the infallible."

Of course, he was writing about Macaulay and not about Clive James, but still.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009