The Max

Here's one of those fun posts where I get to highlight a book's exuberantly funny lines. Along the way, I may discuss what makes some of them funny. The book is The Max, third of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's collaborations for Hard Case Crime, and here are some of those lines:

"The coke kicking in, she took a sip of her stone-cold vanilla latte. (Decaf. She wasn't reckless. That caffeine was, like, addictive.)"

"`I might have to make it into a trilogy,' she said, and Max suddenly had a vision of the great Hollywood trilogies. Star Wars. The Godfather. Shrek. Revenge of the Nerds."

And, among many others, this, from the novel's title character, which pushes the book into Detectives Beyond Borders territory:

"Yeah, okay, there was a downside, he had to be fucking Irish, maybe for the rest of his life, but hey, he could pull it off. After all, how hard could it be to be Irish? He already liked to drink and kill people, he'd be a goddamn natural."

The series has an Irish author and an American author, just as it has a protagonist from each country. Bruen has always looked to American crime writing for inspiration, and that passage, whether it comes from Bruen's pen or Starr's, is a wonderfully blunt statement of some American stereotypes about the Irish. Max Fisher, that utterly amoral, irrepressibly optimistic and impossibly lucky businessman turned drug dealer turned prison lord who embraces the stereotype, is a great American comic character.

Someone asked me if Bruen and Starr planned a fourth book in the series, to follow Bust, Slide and The Max. I didn't and don't know, but The Max leaves possibility open, albeit with a twist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Noir Con 2008, Part II — No boundaries?

OK, maybe some boundaries, though no one at NoirCon 2008 seemed to be able to figure out precisely what noir is and isn't. Happily, no one seemed to worry much about this, and the confusion gave rise to some pregnant thoughts on Day Two, Year Two of this fine Philadelphia crime-fiction convention.

And why should I worry about what is international crime fiction and what isn't at a conference with a French name ("Noir") devoted to an American art form that honored an Irish author (Ken Bruen) and a publisher (Dennis McMillan) whose offerings have included seminal Dutch and Australian crime writers?

Highlights from Day Two:

1) Jason Starr's observation toward the end of his Friday panel discussion with Ken Bruen that "The French have a much wider definition of noir" than do Americans. Could he have meant that the French critics who coined the term as applied to film and fiction in the middle of the last century emphasized atmosphere more than today's writers do?

I recall a television interview with the director Jean-Pierre Melville and the star Alain Delon included as a DVD extra with one of Melville's movies. In today's terms, Delon was a laughable parody of cool, literally staring into space and blowing smoke while Melville talked about the movie. From the viewpoint of, say, any time after maybe the early '70s, that looks more kitsch than noir.

Maybe he meant that French writers have taken noir in directions more political than American crime writers have explored (Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Claude Izzo, Didier Daeninckx)?

2) Bruen's declaration during the same discussion that, after having written a few "straight" novels, "I really wanted to write a crime novel, but I wanted to see if I could write it the way the American hard-boiled school writes."

3) The award for the publisher Dennis McMillan, whose offerings have included books from Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik and Arthur W. Upfield.

4) News from Akashic Books that another novel from Juan de Recacoechea, author of American Visa, is being translated into English as we speak.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Ken Bruen and Jason Starr in German

The German blog Krimi-Couch, which bears the charmingly straightforward tag line "denn lesen ist spannender" ("Because reading is more exciting"), brings the news that Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Bust, which may be the funniest crime novel ever, is scheduled for publication in German translation this month under the title Flop.

I recommend this hilarious tale of scamming, psychopaths, sex and kidnapping in any language (Read a chapter at the Hard Case Web sites in English or in German), but the book's German title is especially interesting. Bust in the original partakes of several of that versatile word's English meanings, including the amplitude of the key female character's bosom. The German publisher appears to have homed in on one of those meanings. If anyone out there knows of any special meanings or resonances flop might have in German, please let us know here at the Detectives Beyond Borders foreign desk.

A short item about Bruen on the same blog says just two of his more than twenty novels had previously been translated for publication in Germany. That may surprise those of us who assume readers of English are uniquely deprived of translated crime fiction.

In a late-breaking news flash, it transpires that Bruen and Starr have signed an option deal for a film version of Bust and that a screenplay has been written. The only apprehension anyone should have about a movie is whether it could possibly be as good as the hilarious, violent, still somehow tender, etc. and altogther wonderful book. (Hat tip to new father Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Disjointed again (a bit of Bruen and Joseph Brodsky)

I promised you eccentric, disjointed posting, and now, by God, I'll deliver.

First, I would not want readers to think that Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Slide is all self-reference. The self-reference, in fact, is in keeping with a larger spirit of mischief and fun that pervades the book, as in the following:

"Angela. Max wished he could strike that name from his brain, like they did in that Schwarzenegger movie, Total ... what the fuck was the name of it?"

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

I've read some non-crime this week, notably a commencement address by Joseph Brodsky called "A Commencement Address" that has not a whiff of Pomp and Circumstance about it. Brodsky warns his audience of the deadly consequences of misinterpreting the Sermon on the Mount as a text in passive resistance, of misremembering its most famous passage as ending with that bit about turning the other cheek. The verse, he reminds us, "continues without either period or comma" thus:

"And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. / And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain."

"Quoted in full," he says – or said to those lucky graduates of Williams College in 1984 – "these verses have in fact very little to do with nonviolent or passive resistance, with the principles of not responding in kind and returning good for evil. The meaning of these lines is anything but passive, for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one."

More:

"In this situation, there is very little room for tactical maneuver. So turning the other cheek should be be your conscious, cold deliberate decision. Your chances of winning, however dismal they are, depend on whether or not you know what you are doing."

Turning the other cheek as a strategy of aggression could be an intriguing basis for a crime story. What kind of a story do you think it would be?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Self-reference unto death ("Slide," by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr)

Self-reference has been a big topic here lately, and Slide, by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, is an absolute riot of the practice. The least of it is the epigraph to the novel's fifth chapter, a quotation from Bust, by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr.

In the book proper, the obnoxious, venal but hapless Max Fisher cokes and martinis himself into a belief that his quips belong in a book, "like those Hard Case books with those women on the covers. Max had never picked one up but man, those guys know how to use a pair of tits to sell a book." Guess who publishes Bust and Slide. (This self-reference is especially ironic. Though Bust is named for that particular part of a woman's anatomy, the Bruen and Starrs show far less flesh than most of the gloriously lurid Hard Case covers.)

And, in a jocosely creepy example, Slide fantasizes Bruen's own death. The novel's drug-addled, hysterical psychotic killer/kidnapper of a title character plots to kidnap Keith Richards for ransom, but:

Whoever this guy was, he wasn't Keith Richards. He was in his fifties, thick lips, with a scar to the right of his mouth, a button nose and blue eyes. The guy had to be fooking Irish.
...

The guy went. "Don't you know me? ... I'm a crime writer ... I've won the Macavity for – "

Slide shut him off, roared, "Ary Christ, shut the fook up or I'll remove all your fookin' cavities and your tonsils too! Are you somebody? Anyone give a damn about you?"

The guy looked crestfallen, stammered, "I-I got starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist ... well, maybe I caught them on an off day b-but– "

Slide gave him a slap on the mouth, said, "I don't want to hear about your bloody career. I want to hear somebody will pay cash, lots of cash to have you back.
...
The thin fook was going, "I wrote a book with another guy. Maybe he can– "

But he never got to finish as Slide lashed the crowbar into his teeth, then took out the bastard's left eye with an almighty swing. ... Slide panicked. He opened the door, kicked the body out, and went, "That should sell some books."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Ken Bruen
Jason Starr
Irish crime fiction