My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Norbert Davis and Max Latin

With Bouchercon 2015 just over a week away, here's a post from this blog's Paleolithic Era about an author will be a subject of one two panels I'll moderate:

I admit it: Norbert Davis was American. But he qualifies for this blog on two counts: He had a sense of humor, and Max Latin, just one of his creations in a short but busy career writing for American pulp magazines in the 1930s and '40s, had an interesting profession: He owned a restaurant.

Here's the opening of "Watch Me Kill You!", the first of five novellas collected in The Adventures of Max Latin:

"Guiterrez came out of the kitchen in a cloud of steam and slapped the heavy metal swing door violently shut behind him. He was a tall man with a dark, bitterly disillusioned face. He was wearing a white jacket and a white apron, and he had a chef's hat crushed down over his right ear. There was a towel wrapped around his neck, and he wiped his forehead with its frayed end, glaring at Latin.

"`What was the matter with it?' he demanded."

You're a sterner reader than I if you can resist that.

===========

Mr. Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith,  will discuss Norbert Davis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007, 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Norbert Davis' hard-boiled slapstick

Last year's questions from the audience at my Bouchercon panel on "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" included one about Norbert Davis. I hope the questioner plans to attend Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., next month, because this year's version of the panel will include Kevin Burton Smith, the man behind the invaluable Thrilling Detective Web Site, talking about Davis.  The panel, its title slightly inflated to "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," happens Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015, at 2:30 p.m. Sarah Weinman, Jordan Foster, and Laura Lippman will join Kevin, each discussing a favorite crime writer from out of the past. 

While you rush out to register for Bouchercon, if you have not signed up already, here's a post from the past about Davis, who was known for his comic crime stories, but could get tough when he wanted to. 

 ===============

 Norbert Davis wrote novels with a dog as co-protagonist. He wrote stories set largely in a restaurant, and he created characters named Bail Bond Dodd and J.P. Jones (the J.P. stands for "Just Plain." That's the man's name — Just Plain Jones.) Yet despite those slapstick touches, and plots, dialogue and action to match, the stories work as hard-boiled tales. Little touches in some of the stories may even reflect the grimness of the Great Depression; Davis published his first stories in the early 1930s.

Here's the opening sentence of "Something for the Sweeper":

"Jones limped slowly along, his rubbers making an irregular squeak-squish sound on the wet cement of the sidewalk."

Is that slapstick (squish-squish), or is it gritty urban realism? In Davis, it's both. When you get to the end of this tale of murder and deception, you'll find the story has come full circle.

Read more about Davis at the Thrilling Detective Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Dashiell Hammett, father of the wisecrack, plus questions for readers

Dashiell (accent on the second syllable)  Hammett was not the first to introduce humor; Edgar Allan Poe had already done that by 1844, in "The Purloined Letter." (First publication in December of that year, right here in Philadelphia.)

But Hammett may have been the first to incorporate wisecracks, and he was almost certainly the best.

The scene in "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" in which the  Continental Op tries to pry information about the vanished Jeanne Delano from her would-be lover Burke Pangburn ought to be read in its entirety, but this excerpt gives something of the flavor:

"`What color hair?' 

"`Brown—so dark that it's almost black—and it's soft and thick and— 

"`Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?'

"`Long and thick and—'

"`What color eyes?'

"`You've seen shadows on polished silver when—' 

"`I wrote down gray eyes ... '"

Hammett's wisecracks are entertaining for their own sake, wittier than most, and, unlike most wisecracks by the generations of hard-boiled writers who have followed, they are always thematically apt. They advance the story; they never seen designed to attract attention for their own sake. Hammett did it first, and Hammett did it best.

And now, readers, who are your favorite wisecracking hard-boiled writers? Why? What do wisecracks contribute to a story? What makes for a good wisecrack in the context of a story, as opposed to a mere funny line?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Craig Rice, crime, humor, and empathy, with two questions for readers

I picked up Craig Rice's 1945 novel The Lucky Stiff because someone had put it on a "Ten Best Noirs" list.  It's not noir*, but it is a high-water in fast-talking, hard-boiled crime fiction with far more empathy for the accused than most crime writers try, let alone pull off.

The protagonist is Rice's impecunious Chicago lawyer John J. Malone, so you know the laughs will be there, but with a hard edge. (Of course, the best comic crime novels have always leavened the jokes with profound sympathy, or at least empathy, for victims, dupes, and even criminals. Think of The Thin Man.)

I'm about two-thirds of the way through the book, and only twice, for a total of two or three words, has a laugh line seemed even slightly forced or cheap.  The rest to the time Rice juggles humor, suspense, domestic interludes, and dark empathy, and keep all the balls in the air.

And now, your question: When does humor become too much in a crime novel or story? When the humor is just right, and what makes it so? 

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

Here are two previous posts about Craig Rice (Click the link and scroll down). And here's an article about the Craig Rice touch from the Rue Morgue Press website.

* OK, maybe The Lucky Stiff is noir. I shall be happy to discuss this further once you have all read the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bob and Ray meet Jim Thompson in Gerard Brennan's The Point

Lots of Northern Ireland crime writers take the Troubles and their aftermath as a subject. Here's Gerard Brennan's take in his delightful comic (and dark) novel. The Point (The scene is two young hoods surprised by a young woman as they burgle her apartment):

"`The IRA knows a lot about you, wee girl,' Paul said. `You better stop what you're doing.'

"`What are you talking about?' she asked.

...

"Brian shoved him ... `What the fuck was that for?' Paul asked.

"`You know what it was for.'

"`Ach, fuck off. Maybe if she thought the IRA was really watching her she'd make an effort to do a dish or two. You saw the state of the place.'"

At the risk of wallowing in identity politics, Brennan is a few years younger than, say, his compatriot crime writers Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville. I wonder if that renders him more able to joke about the Troubles because he's farther removed from them. I'll have to ask Brennan about this the next time I see him. In any case, The Point is Bob and Ray meets Jim Thompson, Give it a look.

============== 

Gerard Brennan will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

"Hell ... with a good electrician"

You know that nighttime view of Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills that you've seen in a million movies and television shows? (At right, if your memory needs refreshing.)

Here's how the narrator of Alfred Hayes' 1958 novel My Face for the World to See assesses that view:

"Besides, she’d heard it before: I was sure she’d heard it all before . Possibly in a scene that was a close duplicate of this: the car parked in the hills, and two cigarettes, and the town below looking as hell might with a good electrician."

That ought to be enough to persuade anyone that the book, which appeared when disillusion with Hollywood was becoming a staple of American popular culture, is a good deal more that just another self-pitying rant. Even at his most morose and detached, the narrator can crack wise in even better than the best hard-boiled style. And, while the novel is not crime, it is hard-boiled, noir, even.

Elsewhere, I've picked up Brian Garfield's Checkpoint Charlie, a collection of spy stories, hard-boiled but with a touch of the British-style eccentric detective to its protagonist, somewhat in the manner of Frank McAuliffe's wonderful Augustus Mandrell or Michael Gilbert's equally wonderful Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens.  Garfield's creation is not quite up that level, but I like very much the author's description of the character in the volume's introduction (highlighting mine.)::

"He really enjoys only two things: eating, and practicing his trade."

Eating--rather than the more delicate food or, the even delicater fine dining--lets the readers know that their just may be an edge to this Charlie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Johnny Shaw is a hardass with a tender heart

Johnny Shaw is a Scott Phillips of the American Southwest, like Phillips setting his novels in bleak, flat landscapes, and populating them with dangerous, violent characters who, call them bad or call them immoral, are almost always endearingly human. Oh, and, like Phillips', his books will always make a reader laugh out loud while only rarely descending into jokiness.

What redeems Shaw's characters? Their cleverness, even when they seem stupid at first. Their self-knowledge, and the zest with which they screw up. The funny things they say without seeming to pat themselves on the back for being funny.

Here's a favorite example, all the more endearing because it occurs at what could be an awkward moment of truth between two characters, without undercutting the seriousness:

"`Look,' Buck Buck said, `I know you're used to sidekicking for Bobby and not me. And I'm used to Snout being my sidekick. But I'm sure we can work it out. Batman usually's got Robin, but I'm sure he teamed up with Aqualad or Speedy and they still beat the bad guy.'

"`Am I Aqualad in that scenario? I don't sidekick for Bobby,' I said. `I can't believe people can't see this. He's my sidekick. Which means you're Aqualad, I'm Batman.'

"`I'm really more of a leading man.'

"`Okay, how 'bout this? You're still Batman. I'll be Superman. They teamed up all the time. Snout and Bobby are the sidekicks.'

"`I can work with that. But I want to be Green Arrow instead.'"

You'd never guess the two are about to infiltrate a colony of dangerous bikers. Other things to like about Plaster City:

• Like The Simpsons, it stands four-square for family values, a beautiful thing, despite the shameful appropriation of the term by political opportunists..
• It condemns the exploitation of young women without, however, reducing the characters in question to titillating victimhood.
• Like Shaw's novel Dove Season, it uses the word fiasco in the title, and I'm for anything that has fiasco in it.

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' posts about Johny Shaw's Big Maria.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

The Dalkey Archive: Flann O'Brien says things funny

I like writers who don't just write funny things, but write things funny.  I'll save the narrative high points of Flann O'Brien's last novel for a later blog post, the deadly substance that can end all life, the underwater meeting with Saint Augustine, and the discovery of James Joyce alive, well, and tending bar in a seaside resort years after his supposed death.

For now, what I like best about The Dalkey Archive is that O'Brien seemed incapable of writing a non-funny sentence.  Even purely expository passages and the most routine actions are funny:

"It was near six when they stopped a tree."

*

"My goodness, the Bishop of Hippo!"

*

"I implore you not to be facetious, the unsmiling Crabbe replied. The funny thing is that I like the name Nemo. Try thinking of it backwards. 

"Well, you have something there, Hackett granted, 

"Poetic, what? 

"There was a short silence which Dr. Crewett broke. 

"That makes you think, he said thoughtfully. Wouldn't it be awful to have the Arab surname Esra?"

Who else is like that? Who else is funny no matter what he or she is writing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Comments on and one correction to James Ellroy's American Tabloid

1) The item of jewelry one pins to one's clothing, sometimes as a fastener, is a brooch, no matter how many times American Tabloid spells it broach.

2) I don't like pat critical phrases, but American Tabloid really is compulsively readable. I've tried to get to bed early the past few nights, slipping under the covers by 2 a.m., intending to read a few pages, then get up early and work the next day, but I was still reading at 4 and 5 a.m. Here are a few examples of what makes the novel so much fun:

"Hoffa said ` ... don't make Kennedy sound like Jesus handing God the Ten Commandments on Mount Fucking Vesuvius.' 

"Ryskind said, `Santo was just making a point.' 

"Rosselli said, `It's Mount Ararat, Jimmy. Mount Vesuvius is in fucking Yellowstone Park.'"

*

— A list of Marilyn Monroe's lovers, as turned up by FBI surveillance, that includes "David Seville of David Seville and the Chipmunks," but not John F. Kennedy.

*

"Kemper sat down. `You speak excellent English, too.' 

"`I speak the slow and exaggeratedly formal English of the laboriously self-taught. Native speakers tell me that I sometimes lapse into hilarious malapropisms and mutilations of their language.' 

"Stanton pulled a chair up. `Would you mind talking with us now? We've got a nice apartment ready for you, and Mr. Boyd will drive you there in a little while.' 

"Paez bowed. `I am at your disposable.'"

See you soon. I have work to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Nordic humor and satire from Hallgrímur Helgason

I've run into deadpan Danes, wisecracking Swedes, jovial Icelanders, and Norwegian authors who enjoyed a good joke, and the one Finn I've met was a gregarious hotel clerk who radiated benevolence and good fellowship. In short, if dour, gloomy Nordics exist, they cheer up when they see me coming.

So I was not shocked by the following in Hallgrímur Helgason's The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning:

"I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here [to Iceland], in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. ... Only when you've had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars."

and

"Getting Friendly off my back was like dumping a loud girlfriend with a Texan accent and a cell-phone addiction."

and

"She smells like a New Jersey Devils' banner that's been hanging on the dim corner of a seedy Newark lounge for the past twenty years."

and

"I don't know. I just hate it when people discriminate against me, only because I kill people."

Along the way, Hallgrímur's satirical targets include sanctimonious public apologies and spurious declarations of corporate duty to the customer. And I have to think that his decision to make the protagonist a Croat is a bit of sly fun at the expense all the crime novelists who have found it expedient in recent years to people Europe with Balkan characters, usually one per book, generally dark and forbidding, all the better a background against which we are asked to contemplate big subjects like human depravity and the vicissitudes of history. (I can't be sure, but I think those characters have tended to be Croats rather than Serbs, possibly because Serbs were the bad guys in the recent Balkan wars, as opposed to World War II, when Croats filled that role.)

The Icelandic author's decision to make his protagonist/narrator a foreigner also affords him the opportunity to observe the oddities of his own country: its silence, its high prices, its cleanliness, its difficult language, its beautiful women. And the briefer glimpses of the protagonist's native Split tally with my recollections of that marvelously situated city.

I'm not sure how well a middle section works in which the multi-named protagonist has an emotional crisis and undergoes a kind of exorcism. The section is melodramatic, and Hallgrímur has more fun when the soul-savers turn out to engage in some of the same crimes as the protagonist does.  But even there Hallgrímur works in a few good observations and jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Visigoths in the dust

Today's find when pushing books around and raising dust motes in my house was Karel Poláček's 1928 novel released in 1993 in an English translation (from the Czech) titled What Ownership's All About. I decided I would probably like this one when I read in the introduction that in 1934:

"Poláček published A Journalist's Dictionary, a collection of hundreds of vapid expressions favored by contemporary journalists."

And I felt a surge of kinship with Poláček when I read that

"(O)n the pretense that the Visigoths had been maligned in history as a barbarous and destructive people, he founded a tongue-in-cheek school journal called the Visigoth Review, in which he championed the Visigoth cause."

I have never founded a tongue-in-cheek school journal, but I did put up a blog post two years ago called "Visigoths: Breaking the Silence." I may lack a spiritual brother, but a satirical novelist with Visigothic tendencies who hates clichés sounds like a good candidate for the job.

***

What Ownership's All About is available as a free e-book from the publisher's Web site. The publisher, Catbird Press, specializes in Czech literature..


© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Big O is now a big e-book

A while back I glommed onto an Irish crime novel called The Big O.

"The deliciously complicated plotting," I wrote, "the wry dialogue and the sympathy Burke engenders for his cast of characters made this one of the most fun and purely pleasurable reads I've had in a while."

Reviewers invoked names such as Westlake, Leonard, and Hiaasen, which lets you know you'll crack a smile reading it. And now you can read it on your mobile reading device for $4.99, as well you should. Find out why Detectives Beyond Borders called The Big O a "tour de fun."

***

I sent Alan Glynn a verbal high five a year and half ago for exposing narrative's use as a contemporary weasel word in his novel Bloodland. His new Graveland, out this spring, does something similar with going forward, as well it should.

Read more about corporate and government weasel words at the Weasel Words Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders dissects a joke

The wait is over. It's been barely a week since I finished reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but when the book in question is quite possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a week seems long. But my copy of Volume 2 arrived today, and I shall keep you posted as appropriate. The novel's third part, with which Vol. 2 begins, is called "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," so I suspect I'll come up with a post or two to interest the crime readers of intelligence and good taste who visit Detectives Beyond Borders.

I made good use of the inter-Musils interval, reading, among other things, one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Allan Guthrie's funny, violent, touching novella Kill Clock, and a whole bunch of newer writing influenced by pulp, paperback originals, and 1970s and '80s adventure stories.

Along the way, I revisited a previous comment I'd posted about wiseass crime writers, talented authors whose good jokes occasionally obtrude on the story rather than helping it along. Such jokes sometimes seem to me the verbal equivalent of an actor mugging for the camera.

Eric Beetner has an interesting relationship to those guys. I read two of his books while waiting for TMWQ2, the novella Dig Two Graves and The Devil Doesn't Want Me, a novel. Beetner is good at creating entertaining variations on crime themes, such as the prison story and the revenge tale (you might call his takes on the former two, in Dig Two Graves, oral storytelling), the road epic, and the saga of the aging hit man and the hotshot young gun. (The latter works all the more because the young gun is such a little shit.)

I thought some of Beetner's jokes were a bit jokey in the novella, but hell, it's a novella. When he stretched out to novel length, in The Devil Doesn't Want Me, I was pleased to see an occasional rueful tone to some of the jokes, which shows me that the guy has chops and that he knows how to create a range of moods.

And the book is filled with good things: amusing byplay involving FBI agents who never get involved in the main story, and trenchant observations about the new Las Vegas and the old, among them. But a time or two, I think Beetner loved a joke too much to let go once he'd told it. Here's an example: The protagonist, Lars, a middle-aged hit man who keeps body and soul together with yoga, contemplates his superiority to the musclebound thug holding a gun on him:

"Guys like the big brute...smashing Lars' own gun hand into the tile floor cared only about the muscles. Lifting, squatting, pumping. For what? A thick neck like that can't turn to check out a great ass anymore."

That's the kind of touching, surprising, humanizing thought that Allan Guthrie is so good at. But Beetner has Lars continue the thought:

"And why did evolution put a swivel on a neck if not for that?"

That may be funny, but what does it add? What does it say that the preceding lines did not? I say Beetner should have cut the line and saved it for another book. To me that coda to the joke was a bit like being elbowed in the ribs and asked "Get it? Ya get it?" And that was all the more frustrating because the first joke was so good.

Your questions: Am I wrong? And what makes a joke function effectively as part of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Allan Guthrie, funnyman

I recently expressed misgivings about wiseass crime writers: talented authors who can write the hell out of an action scene, who are good at going for the laughs, but who sometimes crack wise when (in my humble opinion) restraint is called for.

I am happy to report that Allan Guthrie is no wiseass. The extended edition of his novella Kill Clock had me laughing out loud and reminded me that the author, often cited for his chilling noir, is not just good at coming up with funny lines, but is a craftsman of the comic. Here's one sample:

"Pearce grabbed the wrist and used Baldie's momentum to pull him forward. His face bounced off the roof of the car with a dull sound like a dropped mug hitting carpet.

"That had to hurt.

"Pearce let go.

"Long time since he'd been behind a wheel. Hadn't had much experience before he went to jail, and since he'd come out, he'd not had the chance.

"First thing, he put on his seatbelt."

That's funny because it's 100 percent deadpan, without the slightest hint that author, narrator, or character know they are up to anything funny. The Guardian recently criticzed a BBC production of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings stories for breaking the commandments of comedy, the first of which is: "Don't let your cast behave as if they are acting in a comedy. Wodehouse depends on all the characters taking their predicaments very seriously."

Guthrie does not need to be told this, not when he has a 5-year boy curse in amazement at protagonist Pearce's three-legged dog, or the boy's 2-year-old sister curse in imitation of her brother. And not when he has the children's mother plead for Pearce's help in terms that might be objectionable if another character applied them to her but are touching and maybe even a little heartbreaking when the she uses them about herself:

"`Doesn't help that I've spent time in psychiatric care.'  

"`Why should that make any difference?'

"`I was committed, Pearce. I'm a nutjob.'

"`Ah.'

"'My head was all over the place when I was a teenager. Didn't used to have my shit together like I have now.'"

I don't know about you, but I root for a character like that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A grammatical error, or P.G. Wodehouse on American politics

"If Mr. Wilberfloss had been a politician, he would have been one of those dealers in glittering generalities who used to be fashionable in American politics."

— P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith, Journalist (1915)

First edition, A&C Black, 1915

What did he mean "used to be" fashionable in American politics? I've generally found Wodehouse's American stories less satisfactory than his English ones, but I like this take on American politicians, even if he puts it in the past rather than the present (or future) tense.

And the following, from the novel's preface, ought to tantalize fans of crime fiction that crosses borders:

"There are several million inhabitants of New York. Not all of them eke out a precarious livelihood by murdering one another, but there is a definite section of the population which murders—not casually, on the spur of the moment, but on definitely commercial lines at so many dollars per murder. The `gangs' of New York exist in fact. I have not invented them. Most of the incidents in this story are based on actual happenings."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fun and games from Garbhan Downey

Here's the post I was going to put up a week ago when the author, Garbhan Downey, preempted my plans by offering some comments that I turned into a guest post. The original post was to have been about matters humorous and serious (that is, soccer and politics) in the book, but Downey took care of the serious part with his guest. So this post is  fun and games. And here's a post about another political crime writer who also loved and wrote about soccer (football).

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

Garbhan Downey says his novel Across the Line is about politics and football (soccer), the lines being both those on the soccer field and that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

So it's no surprise that two of the book's best jokes are about soccer, to wit:

"He'd always hated the descent into Cityside Airport. Because of the airport's topography, the little jet had to stay almost five miles up until it was directly above the runway. The first sign you knew it was on its way down was when the London stewardesses, to a man, would belt themselves into their seats, close their eyes and bless themselves. After which the plant hit the ground quicker than an Italian striker."

and

"`The entire squad walked out of Muff Hall last week when they heard I'd been signed as centre-forward.' 

"`You're joking?' 

"`I'm afraid not. Something about mafias taking over football clubs. That they wouldn't go the way of Chelsea."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Garbhan Downey on why Northern Ireland crime fiction is so funny — and so serious

I was ready to put up a second post about Garbhan Downey's novel Across the Line, sparked by this bit of dialogue:

"`Those dirty Fenian bastards,' said Harry, shaking his head sadly."

"Harry" is Harry "the Hurler" Hurley, a Catholic paramilitary leader gone (mostly) legitimate, here enraged because his Protestant counterpart, "Switchblade Vic" McCormick, has schemed to sign a squad of players from the traditionally Catholic soccer team Glasgow Celtic to play for Vic's team in an all-Ireland soccer tournament on which Harry and Vic have a sizeable wager. (Harry had previously pulled a similar stunt for his own team, signing players from Manchester United), and he's outraged to have been outfoxed by his rival, particularly with a team of Catholic players.

Harry's use of the anti-Catholic slur did a number of things for me. It exposed Harry's venality and self-interest. It showed me a Catholic writer confident enough to write words he might not have dared set to paper a few years ago — and a belief that readers in Northern Ireland were ready to accept fun being poked at words they may have heard or uttered in hatred not so long ago. And it was damn funny.

Then Downey surprised me with an e-mail about my first post, which I'd called "Garbhan Downey, humor, and (the specter of) violence."  So, instead of my speculations, I reprint, with his permission, Garbhan Downey on humor and violence in Northern Ireland and the relationship between the two.

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

As always, you ask very salient questions — in this case as to why Irish writers often use humour as a response to violence.

As I might have said to you before, I have no complete answer, though you've set me thinking again as to why I do it myself.

There are those who often misconstrue our levity as callousness. They believe we've become inured because of prolonged tragedy. “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart, as Yeats would have it.

But I'd contend it's not quite that simple, and we're certainly not heartless. A large part of our humour, I figure, is a defence mechanism to prove to ourselves (and others) that we're not scared of what is often truly terrifying. I say prove to, but I actually mean convince — because the gallows humour is often little more than a thin veil.

For example, in my next book I have included a character called Clack-Clack, who has two artificial knees as the result of a double kneecapping. It's funny because it's the noise he now makes when he walks.

But I can still remember the chill of fear that shot through me when, as a teenager, myself and a pal took a late-night shortcut and inadvertently walked in on a youth being kneecapped by a gang of men wielding hurleys.

I'm not a psychologist of any ilk, but I imagine that to survive in any conflicted society (as ours was until about twenty years ago), it doesn't do any harm to live in an advanced state of denial.

My own experience is that levity can deflect attention from the macabre and puncture the seriousness that violence so often demands. The humour stops us from staring for too long into the abyss. It forces us back to the superficial.

The black humour in my writing reflects a real response, apparent among survivors (by which I mean the entire island of Ireland and many of our neighbours besides).

But, it's also important to note that there has been considerable softening in this humour as the years wear on and peace beds in. People are much kinder now and much less frightened — if at all. Our jokes are more inclined to be about what politician got caught swiping money from the Peace Fund than the gunman who tried to blow his own brains out but missed his ass by three feet.

Not that we're finished with the darkness by any means. There is still a major job to be done satirising the simplistic brutality which went before. And ridiculing it is perhaps one way of ensuring that it never happens again.

— Garbhan Downey

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Garbhan Downey, humor, and (the specter of) violence

I write often about Northern Ireland crime fiction and, from time to time, about humor in crime writing. In the latter discussions, readers sometimes express reservations about whether laughs and mayhem are a suitable combination.

One answer, as long as the author does not make light of violence, is that the combination is true to life. All kinds of people see the absurd or the comical in unexpected situations. Why should criminals, police, or victims be any different?

Another is that humor can sharpen the threat of violence rather than blunt or belittle it. Here's an exchange from Across the Line, the latest novel by Derry's own Garbhan Downey, whose books about Northern Ireland are comic and nothing but comic, but always with an edge of menace understandable in a land so long wracked by bloody conflict and still occasionally shaken by violent aftershocks:

"`One more word and I'll bury you in my back garden. And I'll get Derry's top cop to swear in court that you never got off the plane.'

"`Some republican you are,' laughed Dee-Dee. `Get into bed with the cops one time and you're colluding against your own people.'"

Downey's novels are comic in the classic sense, with resolution coming when lovers pair off with their appropriate matches, but that reference to collusion had to have caused some squirming in Northern Ireland, where the ideological purity of paramilitaries on both sides of the sectarian fighting has long come into question. It's not for nothing that Stuart Neville titled his second novel Collusion.

What do we learn from this, other than that Northern Ireland has some interesting crime writers? Maybe that tragedy and violence are fertile soil for humor that has an edge. What do you think, readers?

***



(New Year's fireworks near my house, with color temperature adjusted. If I had a sound file, you'd be able to share my favorite sensory experience of 2013 so far: the car alarm several blocks from the pyrotechnics that went off in sympathy with each blast: Boom! Boom! Whine! Whine! Boom! Boom! Whine! Whine! etc., etc.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Ross Thomas on politics and other absurd subjects

In honor of the day's events, I'm bringing back two posts I made way back at the beginning of the campaign season about Ross Thomas, a great political satirist, humorist, and Edgar Award-winning crime writer.

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

Thumbs up to Ross Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw for its title, its subject, and its humor.

The political strategists at the Pen & Pencil Club here in Philadelphia are almost as bad as the cigar smokers and the lawyers, but Thomas' operatives, plotting a campaign for the first election in the newly independent fictional African nation of Albertia, make the profession sound like delightful fun without being more cynical than thou:

"I'm going to call him Chief," Shartelle said firmly. "It’s the first time I’ve ever worked for anybody who was a real chief and I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to address him by his rightful title.”

The book is also full of amusing social observations about its time (it appeared in 1967):

“English lit—right?”

“Wrong. Letters.”

“Letters?”

“As close to a classical education as Minnesota got that year. It was an experiment. A little Latin, and less Greek. It was to produce the well-rounded man. I think they abandoned it in favor of something called communications shortly after I was graduated.”

How good a writer was Thomas? He won two Edgar Awards, but I'm two-thirds of the way through the novel, no crime has been committed, and the book still works as highly entertaining political comedy.

With an American presidential election campaign on, the book will make especially entertaining reading. (Of course, there's almost always an American presidential campaign on.)

***

Speaking of American presidential campaigns, did I mention that, in a burst of serendipity Thomas could hardly have envisioned when he wrote the novel forty-five years ago, one of its characters is the Ile of Obahma? © Peter Rozovsky 2011

It's a strange land, where normal rules don't apply, where shifting tribal loyalties make life dangerous for the unwary, where even the most careful and idealistic visitors may soon get sucked into the intrigue and become indistinguishable from those whom they had previously affected to deplore.

It's Washington, D.C., and it's the setting for Ross Thomas's 1967 international thriller Cast a Yellow Shadow. Less overtly a satire of politics than the two Thomas novels I'd read previously (The Seersucker Whipsaw and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side), the book is nonetheless full of snippets of dialogue and nuggets of description evocative of their place and time in politics:

“The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. `Two votes a precinct,' he said for the dozenth time. `Just two lousy votes a precinct.' “`When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,' I said as Karl handed me the phone.”

and

“He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn’t and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.”

and

“It sounds like a typical American intelligence plot,” he said. “Only 2,032 things could go wrong—and probably will.”

Here are some notes about Ross Thomas and a Thomas bibliography. While you browse them, ponder these questions: What is your favorite Washington crime novel? Your favorite political crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

At Swim-Two-Birds, or Anything you can do, I can do meta

(First edition of At Swim-Two-Birds,
London, Longman's Green & Co., 1939)

The only thing that makes me blush about reading meta-fiction is that phrases like "modes of fictional discourse" spring unbidden to my lips.

The first third or so of Flann O'Brien's 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds (that's how far into the book I am) reads at time like solemn myth; at times like boastful, parodic epic; at times like naturalistic narrative; and at times like just plain fun. One of my favorite examples of the latter:

"`I'm thirsty,' he said. `I have sevenpence. Therefore I buy a pint.'

"I immediately recognized this as an intimation that I should pay for my own porter.

"`The conclusion of your syllogism,' I said lightly, `is fallacious, being based on licensed premises.'"

But what I really like are the bits that call amusing attention to their own modes of fic— to their own amusing ways of saying stuff:

"My talk had been forced, couched in the accent of the lower or working classes."

This can wake the reader up and make him notice, with a smile, even the most routine acts:

"In a moment he was gone, this time without return. Brinsley, a shadow by the window, performed perfunctorily the movements of a mime, making at the same time a pious ejaculation.

"Nature of mime and ejaculation: Removal of sweat from brow; holy God."

If you don't think self-reference can be funny and lovely at the same time, try the following:

"Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins.

"We attained nothing on our walk that was relevant to the purpose thereof but we filled up the loneliness of our souls with the music of our two voices, dog-racing, betting and offences against chastity being the several subjects of our discourse. We walked many miles together on other nights on similar missions-following matrons, accosting strangers, representing to married ladies that we were their friends, and gratuitously molesting members of the public. One night we were followed in our turn by a member of the police force attired in civilian clothing. On the advice of Kelly we hid ourselves in the interior of a church until he had gone. I found that the walking was beneficial to my health."

Now, I'll go resume my reading. You should do the same.

***

Declan Burke offers more recent evidence that meta-fiction can be fun. His novel Absolute Zero Cool was a deserving winner of the Goldsboro Last Laugh Award for comic crime fiction at Crimefest 2012 in Bristol last month. "Author and character together and individually ponder and confront the very biggest moral and ethical questions in ways occasionally touching and always hugely entertaining," I wrote about the book.

That still seems about right,

© Peter Rozovsky 2012