A nice scene from Bouchercon 2013

Authors Cara Black and J. Robert Janes
Photo by your humble blog keeper.

What Thomas E. Ricks taught me about war

I'm done reading the parts of Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals most relevant to my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction.  Here's what I take from those sections, on World War II and the Korean War:

1) High respect for the skill, tact, wisdom, foresight, and calculation of the good generals: George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway. 

2) Hatred of the sloppy invocation of military metaphors in areas of civilian life whose laughable triviality is matched only by the self-seriousness of the morons who invoke them. Every football coach who likens his game to war.  Every corporate executive who issues a mission statement. Every middle manager who expects his or her underlings to take that crap seriously. Every business person who invokes The Art of War. At best you're a clown. At worst you're a destroyer of lives for no noble cause. I knew that already, but Ricks taught me that in appropriating military lexicon without any of the risk or the high purpose that attends some military action, you're not just debasing the English language, you're disrespecting an institution you'd probably pretend to admire. 

3) Ricks writes about war without resorting to the condescending, ethically dubious you-were-there in which reporters transport themselves into the bodies of the people who really were there. (You know the sort of stuff: "Harry Grabowski shivered in the early-morning chill on that fateful day in June 1944." How does the reporter know this?)  Ricks does a perfectly fine job relating the rigors and horrors of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir without resorting to such trickery.

4) Another reason to hate the Dallas Cowboys, if football fans need one. Clint Murchison, Ricks writes, father of the Cowboys' first owner, was among the arch-conservative Texas oil billionaires who bankrolled a nationwide tour by the frothing, insubordinate Douglas MacArthur with a view toward getting MacArthur elected president. Lest this offend any Republicans, conservatives, oil men, or Texans, they should know that Ricks also notes the role of Sid Richardson, another rich Texas oilman, in the political career of the much saner Eisenhower. And is MacArthur to blame for such scary creatures as Alexander Haig and Oliver North? (I wonder, too, if Murchison or Richardson inspired any of the characters in James Ellroy's Underworld USA novels.)

I thought of including boots on the ground, much overused these days, in 2) above, but Ricks sheds some incidental light on why that particular phrase, rather than some other, is the self-serious instant cliché in the current debate about Syria. In the 1950s, Ricks writes, the future of the U.S. Army was in doubt. Many in the army and out believed that sea and air war would render ground troops and the army itself obsolete. So boots on the ground may reflect bitter relearning of a lesson Donald Rumsfeld did not know or pretended not to know: that warfare still requires troops, sometimes in massive numbers.

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Thomas E. Ricks' presence will loom over my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m., which will include authors Susan Elia MacNeal, Martin Limón, John Lawton, J. Robert Janes, and James R. Benn.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: J. Robert Janes' murky world

J. Robert Janes' fourteen Kohler and St. Cyr mysteries pair a Gestapo officer and a French Sûreté inspector solving "everyday" crimes in German-occupied France during World War II, and if that description gives you pause (as it gave me for years), Janes recognizes that such a reaction is likely.

Each book in the series, from Mayhem (1992) to the new Tapestry, bears an exculpatory note from the author explaining that he abhors "what happened during these times" and that "during the Occupation of France everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?"

An introduction to the series on Janes' Web site suggests (accurately, at least for Tapestry) that no one in the books comes off as especially pure, ethical, admirable, or even clean:

"It's German-occupied France during the Second World War. Two honest detectives, one from each side of that war, fight common crime in an age of officially sanctioned crime on a horrendous scale. Gangsters have been let out of jail and put to work by the Gestapo and SS; collaborators welcome the Occupier and line their pockets; ordinary citizens struggle to survive; inflation hits 165% while wages are frozen at 1939 levels; but most of all, German servicemen come on leave to Paris, ‘our friends' to some, ‘the Green Beans' to others, the ‘Schlocks, the Boche'.

"Paris, unlike all other cities and towns in war-torn Europe, is an open city, a showcase Hitler uses to let his boys know how good things can be under Nazi rule. French Gestapo are everywhere and definitely don't like these two detectives since St-Cyr put many of them away before the war, but Kohler is all too ready to tell them this and is fast becoming a citizen of the world under Louis' influence and also has no use for the Occupier, even to ridiculing Nazi invincibility. Hated and reviled by the Occupier and often by the Occupied, the two constantly tread a minefield."

I'm not up on my administrative history of the German occupation of France, so I don't know how much attention the various organs of the occupation and of the French civil authority and population paid to ordinary crimes. But a relatively recent history of the occupation, Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains, suggests a real occupied France similar to Janes' fictional one:

 "The moral universe of occupied France was notoriously murky. What was right and what was wrong, what patriotic and what unpatriotic, may have been clear in 1944, but not before."

Oh, yes. Crime fiction. Tapestry's moral, ethical, and physical environments are the darkest I have ever read in crime fiction. Kohler and St. Cyr are called on to work in a city so darkened by blackouts that characters must feel their way through the streets at night. Plunder, greed, puritanism, lust, patriotism, violence, and luxury in the face of deprivation slip in and out of focus, the reader never sure if any one is staged to cover for another. I'm not yet sure if Tapestry is good history, but it sure is good noir.

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 J. Robert Janes will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon 2013 and what I'll do there

I'll be moderating two panels at Bouchercon 2013, which begins Thursday, Sept. 19, in Albany, New York.

First up, on Thursday at 4 p.m., is "World War II and Sons," in which I whip authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, Martin Limón, and Susan Elia MacNeal into fighting shape with a discussion of crime fiction set in wartime and its run-up and aftermath.

Then, after a quiet evening with a good book followed by a solid eight hours of sleep and a frugal yet nutritious breakfast, it's "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" on Friday at 10:20 a.m., with Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods.

That's a nice mix of authors I've read and admired, authors I'd heard about but not read until now, and a couple whose names were new to me. And that means I should be in for a stimulating and entertaining Bouchercon, and I hope you will be, too.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule. See you in Albany.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Busted, Part II

Remember last week's post about my bus trip from Boston, a journey extended from eight hours to ten by highway tie-ups that pushed my arrival smack into the middle of Philadelphia's evening rush hour? You know, the post that began "Remind me never to travel by bus again"?

That was a longish trip; what could possibly happen on a short hop, like the one from Philadelphia to New York? I pondered the question Thursday as my bus sat in a spreading red pool of engine coolant on the shoulder of Route 90 in Pennsauken, New Jersey, waiting for a tow truck, a replacement bus, and an ambulance for the cardiac patient/passenger who had begun feeling faint during the delay.

The new bus arrived, the heart patient was all right, and I found Derry's own Desmond Doherty, for whose debut novel, Valberg, I inverted a few commas and made sure no dashes were used where hyphens were called for, browsing patiently in the Mysterious Bookshop in Lower Manhattan when I arrived, barely half an hour late for our meeting.

The day's haul included books by John Lawton, J. Robert Janes, and "Owen Fitzstephen," and some good Derry stories over lunch from Doherty, a lawyer with business on both sides of the Atlantic who made the brave decision not to make his debut novel the story of a lawyer with business on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book is a serial killer/police procedural/story of its city that does, however, incorporate some of Doherty's own professional experiences, including a heart-rending bit of backstory. I'll look forward to discussing the novel's sequels with Doherty, only I'm traveling to our next meeting by plane.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Life during wartime

I've just picked up Dan Fesperman's Lie in the Dark, published in 1999 and featuring Vlado Patric, a homicide investigator in wartime Sarajevo. The opening pages offer an eerie description of daytime calm in a war zone, and an unexpectedly testy confrontation between the coffee-deprived Patric and a speechifying reporter.

"I think you are oversimplifying a complex situation," Patric tells the reporter, who replies: "Yes, well that's what I'm paid for, isn't it. Take all the nice blurry grays and turn them into black and white for the public to digest before moving onto the horoscopes and the latest from the Royals." (The reporter's preachiness and self-pity are interesting, considering that Fesperman is himself a reporter who covered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, according to the book's author information.)

I am guessing that this somewhat uneasy opening is Fesperman's way of dealing with the special problems of setting a murder mystery in a war zone. It reminds me of the uneasy self-justification J. Robert Janes offers at the beginning of each of his St. Cyr-Kohler novels, about a French detective and a Gestapo investigator who team up to solve crimes in Nazi-occupied France:

I do not condone what happened during these times, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France the everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?

Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob novels and Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy handle the task more smoothly. Khadra integrates the horror and tension of 1990s Algiers into his first-person narrator-protagonist's everyday activities and observations. Kerr does something similar, plunging his blunt, wise-cracking protagonist directly into the action and offering wry observations about all that surrounds him, including noxious signs of Nazi terror. The observations are all the more striking for their off-handedness. No need for self-justification here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006