Kick this ball clean from my hand: Which crime novel best represents the World Cup?

(At left, a blue vuvuzela. See and hear the Vuvuzela Orchestra performing "Shosholoza.")

France made it into this year's soccer World Cup on the strength of Thierry Henry's illegal hand ball against Ireland (right).

That's why I liked a commenter's invocation of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in my post about the World Cup of Crime Fiction.

Henry is French; so is Vargas. Henry committed an illicit act; Vargas' title invokes the cleansing one's self of the taint of such an act. And the hand – what a hoot!

That makes Vargas' book the crime novel of the World Cup so far. What other books deserve the honor?

To help you decide, here's Jeff VanderMeer's World Cup of Fiction, to which this post owes its existence.

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Switzerland beat Spain Wednesday in the World Cup's biggest upset so far.

That was soccer; in the World Cup of Crime Fiction, Friedrich Glauser's diving header past Spanish goalkeeper Manuel Vázquez Montalbán plunged the food-loving, politically committed, Barcelona FC-supporting creator of Pepe Carvalho into a lengthy bout of dissipated introspection. Glauser displayed great compassion for the losers.

(Click here for P.J. Brooke's look at the past and present of Spanish crime fiction.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Group of Death

Jeff VanderMeer has organized a World Cup of Fiction, which groups the thirty-two nations of this year's soccer World Cup and asks readers to handicap the field in fiction instead of football. I'm refining his terms and restricting myself to crime writing.

Group A is the tournament’s Group of Death (and where is that term more meaningful than in a crime-fiction competition?)

For South Africa, Roger Smith, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Richard Kunzmann, James McClure (no one said the players had to be alive), Michael Stanley and Jassy Mackenzie head a lethal group of strikers that could be deep for years.

The French have Dominique Manotti, Fred Vargas and Tonino Benacquista in a midfield that plays a less attacking style than the vuvuzela-tooters but is capable of deadly surgical strikes.

France could wangle for Yasmina Khadra on its side, too, though he could make a dangerous striker for Algeria in Group C.

In Group D, Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Leigh Redhead, David Owen, Chris Nyst, and Adrian Hyland are just a few of the names on an Australian side that is a strong dark-horse contender, just as the Socceroos were in the real World Cup – at least until the competition started. (Temple, by the way, was born in – you guessed it – South Africa.)

Italy has Group F wrapped up, and I'll tab New Zealand to sneak into the knockout stage.

The Netherlands and Japan should fight it out in Group E of the Crime Fiction World Cup, hampered only by the fact that their stars, Janwillem van de Wetering and Seicho Matsumoto, are both dead.

England and the United States could make some noise in Group C.

Who do you think wins the 2010 World Cup of Crime Fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Meet the man behind crime fiction's most despicable character

Some good miscellaneous material in recent days, including this video interview that Roger Smith did with the man he says inspired the character Piper in Smith's novel Wake Up Dead.

Piper is the worst fictional human being I have met, a killer, a rapist, an utterly callous gang leader, and a perpetrator of the most despicable acts.

He does most of his fictional thing in Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison, as close to an earthly hell as anything in crime fiction. And the man whose prison tales inspired his creation, who says he committed in real life acts as horrific as the fictional Piper's, looks and sounds like the kindliest old man you'd ever want to meet.

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From Bob Cornwell comes word that Crime Scene: Italy is now available, following on similar comprehensive portraits of the crime fiction scenes in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. These are thorough and compact packages, covering authors, publishers, magazines, Web sites, bookstores and history. And all are available free to view online or download as pdf files.

High fives to Cornwell and the International Association of Crime Writers. They deserve a public service award of some kind.

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And, from Jeff VanderMeer, a proposal for funding translation of “non-realist" fiction into English — "non-realist or whatever term denotes the totality of fantasy/SF/horror/surrealism/magic realism/etc. without dividing things into the false camps of genre and literary."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

How series change over time: Montalbano and performance

Conversation during and after yesterday's Sandra Ruttan-Jeff VanderMeer reading in Baltimore turned to the joys and frustrations of writing a crime-fiction series and the changes authors make from book to book. Ruttan's new novel, Lullaby for the Nameless, jumps back and forth between plot lines in the present and in the past. And VanderMeer makes changes in narrative form and even, to some extent, in genre from City of Saints and Madmen to Shriek: An Afterword to his new novel, Finch.

Talk of these radical formal and stylistic changes within a series struck me all the more because of the subtle changes within the series I'm currently reading, Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano novels. Early in the series, Camilleri exploited his theater background for metaphors and similes. This tendency is especially notable in Excursion to Tindari, the fifth book, published in 2000 and translated into English five years later.

That novel includes an admonition to "Calm down, you look like a character in a puppet theatre." A few pages later, "As if following a script, Montalbano first wrung his hands ... " and, my favorite of the bunch: "`The stakes are extremely high.' He felt disgusted by the words coming out of his mouth. ... He wondered how much longer he could keep up the charade."

Elsewhere, Montalbano impersonates Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot and, as if to underline the motifs of performance, toward the end of the novel Montalbano reflects on the town of Tindari, destination of the couple whose murder triggers the story: "What Montalbano remembered of Tindari was the small mysterious Greek theater." And that's not Camilleri's only invocation of Athenian drama. Several novels in the series feature family dynamics unmistakably redolent of Greek plays and epics.

That's why there's a decided edge of humorous introspection to an exchange in August Heat (Italian publication 2006/English translation 2009) between Montalbano and his junior colleague Fazio as the two speculate over the case of man whose stepson has been found dead"

Montalbano: "In short, you don't see Speciale as a
murderer?"

Fazio: "No way."

M: "But you know, in Greek tragedy—"

F: "We're in Vigàta, Chief, not Greece."

M: "Tell me the truth: Do you like the story or don't you?"

F: "It seems okay for TV."

(Click here for more on how series change over time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Crossing borders in Baltimore

Attended a reading and signing tonight with Jeff VanderMeer and Sandra Ruttan in Baltimore. VanderMeer is author or co-author of titles that include Why Should I Cut Your Throat? and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, so you know his imagination ranges widely.

His talk and, more important, his fiction, including his current Finch, bring in fantasy, noir and hard-boiled, and why not? The man's all about crossing borders. In Finch, a non-human force has stepped in to occupy the city of Ambergris, rent asunder by civil war between competing merchant families.

Finch, a human, is "asked by the occupiers to solve a difficult double murder" amid the city's seedy underbelly, and if that reminds crime-fiction readers of Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Rebecca Cantrell, J. Robert Janes, David Peace and so on, great. VanderMeer could well get this crime-fiction readers reading fantasy, just as Brian Lindenmuth got me reading comics. Furthermore, VanderMeer cited John Burdett, Colin Cotterill and Derek Raymond among his favorite crime authors, and that prepares me for a richly detailed setting and a dark story for when I read Finch.

VanderMeer also said: "I don't really see any difference between the setting and the character," which endeared him to your humble blogkeeper.

Ruttan's Lullaby for the Nameless has just been released, the third novel in her Nolan, Hart and Tain series, and the triple protagonists are one indication of what she does differently. No surprise, then, that she expresses a certain nostalgia for Ed McBain and the large cast of his 87th Precinct novels. Oh, and the opening of Lullaby for the Nameless focuses as harrowingly and unsparingly on the victim as does any Scandinavian crime writer you'd care to name.

And here's a tantalizing hint of what she may be up to in the future: "I think I'm becoming a little more interested in the subtle crimes we tolerate day to day," italics mine.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009