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

Here's a better idea

Instead of discussing what I didn't have time for on the radio Wednesday, here are the notes I carried with me into the studio. I guess this would have been a bit much to get to in one hour.

Listen here to hear what we did get to.
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Latest Here on Earth notes
Date: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 12:06 AM

Seicho Matsumoto: Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Points and Lines. Trains and their role in Japanese society.

Jakob Arjouni: Plight of Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany.

Matt Beynon Rees: The Arabic review that explained an investigator's job is to find out the truth.

Post-Troubles and Troubles off-shoots in Northern Ireland: How does one cope? a) Garbhan Downey b) Adrian McKinty, who penetrates into the heart of America. c) Brian McGilloway, who sets novels on the border, Borderlands. d) Stuart Neville, Ghosts of Belfast.

Arnaldur Indriðason: Takes superb advantage of setting in Jar City, The Draining Lake. "One problem for Icelandic crime writers is that we have almost no crime."

Manuel Vazquez Montalban: Has a private cook, Biscuter. Was jailed under Franco. The Buenos Aires Quintet. (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Andrea Camilleri: Salvo Montalbano (named for Montalban) loves food, prickly but increasingly tender as the series goes on. Excursion to Tindari, Smell of the Night, Patience of the Spider. (cf. Simenon) (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Jean-Claude Izzo: Loves food, music, poetry, Marseilles. Predicted the riots in the banlieues. The Marseilles Trilogy (Political. Mediterranean. Food.)

Humor and Scandinavians: Jo Nesbø (The Redbreast, Devil's Star, Nemesis); Håkan Nesser (The Return); Karin Fossum (He Who Fears the Wolf)

Qiu Xiaolong: Death of a Red Heroine. Slow buildup through pollution of Shanghai. Anti-climax of the perps' hasty execution.

Canadian setting and the border: John McFetridge (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Dirty Sweet); Howard Shrier (Buffalo Jump, High Chicago); Boldness of a Canadian setting: Sandra Ruttan: What Burns Within. Arson. Ensemble cast.

Fred Vargas: Slow buildup. Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand.

Pierre Magnan: Rural life, slow pace, neuroses, acceptance. Death in the Truffle Wood.

Irish writers and Americans: Ken Bruen ("All my influences are American. That's how to I learned to read. That's how I learned to write.") Declan Burke loves Chandler. Brian McGilloway on the American West. Declan Hughes loves Margaret Millar, Ross MacDonald.

Yasmina Khadra: (Army officer, self-imposed exile, wrote in French because his teacher encouraged him)

Bill James, Peter Temple: Best prose stylists.

Clive James:

" . . . there are only so many storylines and patterns of conflict. The only workable solution has been to shift the reader's involvement from the center to the periphery: to the location. In most of the crime novels coming out now, it's a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks."

Misc. exotic settings: Eliot Pattison (Tibet). Double outsider: Exiled Han Chinese prisoner in Tibet. Michael Walters (Mongolia)

Translation: Stephen Sartarelli on the richness of Camilleri's language. Sian Reynolds on translating wordplay. Mike Mitchell on Glauser's dialects. Don Barlett on Vibes gate. Janwillem van de Wetering: Translating canals' names to show their silliness.

Crime fiction crossed borders from the beginning:

"One should remember also that crime fiction was international from its beginnings. Poe's C. Auguste Dupin was a French crime solver created by an American. This is no mere accident of history. There is reason to believe, as one Poe scholar says, that an older society such as France was more prepared than the young United States to accept a writer who probed the dark side the way Poe did."

Chinese crime plays that became novels in the 18th century. Robert Van Gulik.

Crime fiction as a key to history: Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels

Crime fiction as a key to politics: Jean-Patrick Manchette's political noir (The Prone Gunman, Three to Kill.); Helene Tursten, Kjell Eriksson

Exotic locations (with respect!): Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri.

Timothy Hallinan: Struggles as an outsider.

Brazil: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Leighton Gage

Publishers: Bitter Lemon, Serpent's Tail, Quercus, Harvill Secker. Vertical (Japan, Korea)

Dominique Manotti: Corporate villains.

Stieg Larsson + Michael Jackson: Together in Borders window

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© Peter Rozovsky 2009