Detectives Beyond Borders on the radio — again

My 2009 appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth program will be rebroadcast today at 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Dig that nifty opening theme, and find out what kind of voices the show's host, Jean Feraca, likes! In honor of WPR's rebroadcast, I'm bringing back a blog post I made after the show first aired.

Here's a summary of  what we talked about and what I would have liked to talk about had we had more time. (If you're just tuning in now, the Here on Earth link should still allow you listen to the archived program.)

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I'm back from talking international crime fiction on the Here on Earth radio program, and how about a huzzah for Wisconsin Public Radio for hosting a show on that entertaining, enlightening topic? The broadcast is available for listening or downloading here or here.

I learned that radio is an astonishingly compressed medium. I was worried we'd run out of things to discuss, but we got to barely a tenth of the authors and subjects I'd prepared. So in the coming days, I'll post a series of outtakes, things I'd have discussed had there been time.

I did get to tout Ireland as a hotbed of crime fiction, to offer my definition of noir and to talk about Yasmina Khadra, Seicho Matsumoto, Henning Mankell, Patricia Highsmith, David Goodis, Ian Rankin, Matt Rees, Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole. My fellow guest and I both like Jean-Claude Izzo, so we talked about him awhile. (That fellow guest was Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Akashic Books' Delhi Noir, about which he made some interesting remarks.)

But, oh, the things I didn't get to: Corporate villains. Humorous Swedes. Canadian borders. Northern Ireland. Irish odysseys. Hard-boiled crime as America's gift to the world. Translation. Miscellaneous exotica. The world of publishing.

More to come. Oh, and the show's host, Jean Feraca, with whom I had never spoken before, said on air that I had a "nice voice." Bless you, Ms. Feraca.

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P.S.: Feraca gave me credit for a statement that I was only quoting. It was the Edgar Allan Poe scholar Shelley Costa Bloomfield who suggested that the French were ready and waiting for what Poe had to offer before Americans were: "Maybe it takes an older civilization to feel comfortable with the dark side and be able to enjoy it." I wish I'd said that, but Costa Bloomfield said it first.

P.P.S: Before anyone can point this out to me, I realize that I said, "If you will" once on the air. I shall suffer the consequences in the next life.

P.P.P.S. Finally, I think I got Seicho Matsumoto's death date wrong. That fine Japanese crime writer died in 1992. I think I killed him off twelve years prematurely.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009, 2011

Why do crime writers set stories overseas?

My recent immersion in Dashiell Hammett implies no abandonment of international crime fiction. Hammett set "Ber-Belu" in the Philippines and "The Road Home" in Burma, and his friend Raoul Whitfield spent part of his life in the Philippines and set an entire series of stories there.

Henning Mankell took Kurt Wallander to Latvia in The Dogs of Riga, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö sent Martin Beck to Budapest in The Man Who Went up in Smoke, and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole does some far-flung travelling in a pair of books not yet available in English.

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What other crime writers send their protagonists overseas? Why do they do this, and what does it add to a story? Have crime writers' reasons for setting stories overseas changed over time? (Keywords: Wanderlust, exotica, curiosity, exploration, Edgar Allan Poe.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What do your favorite writers do less well?

I've finally found something Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did not do well: routine description.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966), second of the ten Martin Beck novels, takes Beck to Budapest to look for a missing Swedish journalist. His reflections on arrival are potted history and travel-guide boilerplate, the only time I have been tempted to skim rather than read Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Apologists might call the flat prose a comment on Beck's alienation or on the economics of tourism, but that would be out of character for Beck, who we are told enjoys travelling. Besides, alienation ought not to alienate the reader.

In any case, the bad bits were brief distractions, paling next to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's compelling portrayal of Beck's feeling at a loss in a country about which he knows little, whose language he cannot speak, investigating a case as baffling as the novel's title.

But that's a distraction from the day's question: What have your favorite writers tried that did not work?

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The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is broadly similar to Henning Mankell's The Dogs of Riga, which takes Kurt Wallander to Latvia. Each novel is the second in its series in order of original Swedish publication.

Mankell has acknowledged Sjöwall and Wahlöö's formative influence on Swedish crime writing. Could The Dogs of Riga be in part a tribute to his great predecessors?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Sjöwall and Wahlöö: My late start on an early source

This post is by way of atonement. If Henning Mankell is a father to the current boom in international crime fiction, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are grandparents. Their ten Martin Beck novels, from 1965's Roseanna to The Terrorists in 1975, were among the first to examine a society critically as well as tell a crime story, and authors to this day cite them as influences.

Despite this, I had not read Sjöwall and Wahlöö until now. Mankell's introduction/appreciation to the 2008 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprint of Roseanna is a brisk review of its highlights, its influence, and its remarkable freshness despite the apparent distance of its world from Mankell's and ours. I am especially impressed that the first adjectives Mankell applies to the book are "straightforward" and "clear," and that he says "Even the language seems energetic and alive."

So far he's right. The first two chapters are like an operatic overture or prelude, sounding, one by one, miniature versions of the themes that will follow until, in Chapter 3, we meet Beck — the same Beck whose ordinariness as a human being, along with that of his colleagues, was such a revelation to Henning Mankell forty years ago. I have a heady feeling that I am exploring a source of much that has become familiar to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Domestic intelligence (Giles Blunt, The Delicate Storm, and a question for readers)

I posted a few days ago about The Delicate Storm by Giles Blunt, noting this Canadian author's ability to chart the humor and hopelessness of small-town life "as well as any American or Swede you’d care to name."

I've since noticed a parallel with one Swede in particular: Henning Mankell. Like that author's White Lioness and, especially, Firewall, The Delicate Storm rather nicely blends small-town life with thriller-like elements of international crime (in this case, the elements involve terrorism of the domestic variety, too.)

This leads to the evening's question for readers: What other novels and stories pull off a similar blend of small-town investigation and international terrorism or financial crime? Think of this as the Daniel Woodrell-meets-John Le Carré question.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Giles Blunt
Canadian crime fiction

Sir Kenneth to be Kurt Wallander

A reader reminds me that Kenneth Branagh will play Kurt Wallander in BBC adaptations of Henning Mankell's novels One Step Behind, Firewall and Sidetracked.

Branagh, according to the BBC, "has had a long time passion for the books." It's nice to know that the actor/director shares a liking for an author who has introduced so many to international crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A gold mine of international crime fiction on TV and DVD

I’ve written here and there about international detective stories televised by MHz Networks in the Washington, D.C., area. It turns out that the network shows more than the Andrea Camilleri and Harri Nykänen series I mentioned in those posts. It screens entire series of detective shows from abroad under the general title International Mystery and plans to issue several on DVD, which I think is big, exciting news.

Here’s a note from Mike Jeck, MHz’s programming manager for films:

International Mystery has been screening since early 2000 on MHz Networks [an independent, noncommercial television broadcaster delivering international programming to the Washington, D.C., area, and now, selected affiliates and other outlets around the country].

Currently we are showing TV movies adapted from:
— Georges Simenon’s works about Maigret [the French series starring Bruno Cremer]
— Andrea Camilleri’s works about Montalbano
— The originally scripted German series Tatort [Scene of the Crime], focusing on the Cologne team of Ballauf and Schenk
— The unique, award-winning Finnish miniseries Raid [inspired by the novels, so far untranslated, by Harri Nykänen].

In the past, we have shown the Russian Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and almost all of the Mankell/Wallander movies and mini-series. We will soon resume showing all the Swedish adaptations/extensions from the novels about Martin Beck.

On a sister program we are showing the originally scripted Mafia series La Piovra [The Octopus], series 1 [there are 10.]

All of these are presented in the original language with English subtitles.

How to see us: For those in the Washington, D.C., area, click here. Nationally, click here.

DVD: We hold all US rights for the Montalbano, Octopus, and Martin Beck series; have wholesale/retail agreements re the Maigret and Raid series, and are in negotiations for several other series.

We expect to begin issuing Montalbano, Octopus and Raid DVD collections by at least early next year, with plenty of others to follow.

This is good stuff, readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A postscript to "Synergy and Swedes"

An April article in the Toronto Star, one of three(!) competing daily newspapers in that civilized city, offered thoughts on current Swedish crime fiction and its position in Europe and the wider world.

"We're riding the waves of Henning Mankell," says Håkan Nesser, whose name readers of this blog will know well.

"Germany is the door-opener to the rest of Europe," says Nesser, citing Mankell's earlier penetration of the German market as a key event in the ensuing proliferation of Swedish crime writing. "Between Germany, Switzerland and Austria, you have potentially 100 million readers in German. And, also, if you want to get published in Spain, the first thing they ask is, `Is he out in German?' That's when things can start rolling."

The article also traces the current wave of Swedish crime writing to a traumatic national event: the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot dead in Stockholm while walking home from a movie with his wife. Anyone who dismissed crime fiction as trifling might be intersted in this passage about the Palme assassination:

"In a way, Sweden has never recovered," says Swedish author and critic Marie Peterson. "Sweden changed, brutally, on almost every level, but this change was nowhere to be found in literature. No one explored it, analyzed it or wrote stories about it. Except the crime writers, starting with Mankell."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Swedish Crime Fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

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

Technorati tags:
Henning Mankell
Kurt Wallander
Harpur and Iles
Janwillem van de Wetering
Daniel Pennac