Good sentences, period.

Catering to the proverbially shrinking attention span of today's readers (but really to that of this blog's writer), here are some enjoyable excerpts from Detectives Beyond Borders' recent crime reading. Who says context is everything?

"Smolorz, you'll draw up a list of all private menageries in Breslau and the neighboring regions, also a list of eccentrics who sleep with anacondas."

— Marek Krajewski, Death in Breslau 

"The dick books ["Dick books" = true-crime pulp magazines. ed.] are shot. I figured I'd hang on till I retire, but I don't see them lasting five years."

— Joseph Koenig, False Negative 

"The puns and double entendres that he purged from his writing he saved for Greenstein, who mistook him for a wit."

— ibid. 

"He'd considered himself the glue that held the Press together, and was disappointed in a way that it hadn't fallen apart immediately without him."

 — ibid. 

"Sneaking in back doors was for weak men and Canadians."

—Johnny Shaw, "Blood and Tacos,"  featuring Chingón, the World's Deadliest Mexican 

"In ten minutes I had a clean and tight dressing on my ear and he hadn't spoken once about the Bhagavad Gita."

—Eric Beetner, Dig Two Graves 

"(N)either man felt like chatting. Instead their silence included Lars neglecting to tell Trent that the green salsa was the hottest one."

— Eric Beetner, The Devil Doesn't Want Me

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

False Negative: Where the hell is my newspaper?

I like get a malicious kick out of am scandalized that Joseph Koenig's False Negative has a protagonist who works for the Atlantic City Press and that it  mentions the Philadelphia Bulletin plus at least two newspapers from the Jersey Shore without, however, mentioning  the newspaper I work for. The omission may accurately reflect the time in which the novel is set (the 1950s, possibly though not definitely 1953, if it matters), but I and several colleagues enjoyed it nonetheless.

I'm not sure Koenig ever worked for newspapers, but he writes convincingly about writing, whether for newspapers, novels, or true-crime pulp magazines, and I may be back with more on the novel.

In the meantime, here's an excerpt from False Negative of the Hard Case Crime Web site. False Negative is a newly published book, the first new novel in two decades from the author, who made a splash in crime fiction in the 1980s before dropping from sight. This 2005 article by Sara Weinman makes Koenig out to be a bit of a shit but therefore an interesting character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013