Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler turns 124 127 years old today, so I thought I'd bring back some old posts about his influence on crime writers beyond his own American (and English) borders.

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Four years ago the Los Angeles Times asked writers what they would give Chandler as a birthday gift, but I'd like to discuss taking rather than giving, namely what other writers have taken from Philip Marlowe's great creator.
Two years ago, in a post called "Chandler in South Africa," I noted Roger Smith's graceful extended tribute to Chandler in his novel Mixed Blood.

Last year I discovered Claudio Nizzi, Massimo Bonfatti, and their loving, amused, and amusing tribute to Chandler (and just about every other crime, movie, and pop-culture trend) in their Leo Pulp comics.

Matt Rees, Welsh-born and Jerusalem-based author of mysteries set in the Palestinian territories, told Detectives Beyond Borders that: "My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett." Moreover, he said the social chaos of the territories reminded him of the worlds those two authors portrayed so well: "In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler."

In Ireland, Declan Hughes invoked Chandler in discussing his own country's Celtic Tiger economic explosion and concurrent boom in crime and crime fiction: "The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.”

Also in Ireland, your humble blogkeeper noted the debt to Chandleresque plotting and wisecracking in Declan Burke's first novel, Eightball Boogie. Colin Watson's delightfully opinionated social history of English crime writing, Snobbery With Violence, cites Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," for his observations about crime writing and English writers.

An afterword to Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian crime novel American Visa noted the author's references to Chandler, Hammett, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. I've also detected more than superficial signs of Chandler's influence in novels by Australia's Peter Corris and noted the traces of Chandler some have found in the work of Algeria's Yasmina Khadra. Finally, Chandler is one of many crime writers upon whom Australia's Garry Disher muses in his wildly self-referential and wildly funny story "My Brother Jack."

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And now it's your turn. What other crime writers from outside the United States have felt Chandler's influence? How has the influence shown itself?

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Late-breaking Chandler tribute: I've just read the following in William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around Rosa):

"Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

Andean Express: Bolivian not-exactly-noir

Juan de Recacoechea may indeed be "Bolivia's heir to the classic noir of Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler," as a blurb for his novel Andean Express proclaims. But this heir is more a second cousin than a direct descendant.

Andean Express, second of the author's novels published in English translation by Akashic Books, is more like 1940s American movies that are called film noir now but were referred to as melodramas when first released. It also feels like a road movie, with all the sense of discovery that implies, and, at times, like a coming-of-age tale.

Melodrama? The novel assembles a disparate collection of characters on a train from La Paz bound for Chile in 1952. Romantic yearning? Some of them dream of journey's end, when they will see the ocean for the first time. Road movie? The novel is full of glimpses out the train's windows and onto solitary herders, isolated villages, and the vast, lonely, windswept altiplano.

Since the journey takes place on a train, you know scores will be settled, burning passions acted upon, and a character cheated at cards. And, of course, one will die, a mystery to all but the killer.

"Are you on the run?"

"You don't need to be too smart to reach that conclusion. The mine bosses' political police have my number. If they catch me they'll take me straight to jail. I have to make it to Chile. I'll live in self-exile until things change. You don't know much about politics, do you?"

"I don't, unfortunately. I don't like politics."

"Whether or not you like it isn't the point. It's part of your life. In Bolivia, anyone who stays out of politics is despicable. ... things can't go on like this. Or do you think we're in the best of worlds?"

"I don't know."

Lest you think things are about to get polemical, here's how the above exchange ends:

"That's more like it. You and I will make a good team. I'll go to the dining car and have a cup of tea. Can you loan me ten pesos?"

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Here's a bit of what I wrote about Recacoechea's novel American Visa. Like two other novels I had read recently, its "lively eye for its surroundings manages to keep it oddly upbeat despite the straitened or dangerous circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves." The same is true of Andean Express.

(Read an interview with Juan de Recacoechea, courtesy of solo.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Can authors and protagonists go home again?

I've recently read two novels in which author or protagonist has returned home after decades abroad: The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes and American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea.

In each case, the return is important to what the novel tries to do. In Hughes', protagonist Ed Loy's time away from Ireland lets him take a sharper view of the changes that wealth, and the crime, drugs and corruption that follow, have brought to the country. (Hughes discusses this and other issues in an interview with Kevin Burton Smith in January Magazine.)

In American Visa, protagonist Mario Alvarez travels from his small town to La Paz, "a city I struggled to recognize; half a million hungry peasants had changed its face." This, I wrote in an earlier comment, may reflect Recacoechea's own impressions after he returned to Bolivia from two decades working in Europe.

The motif of returning home, of coping with changes, is obviously rich in opportunity for drama. Give me some of your favorite examples in crime fiction, or perhaps in other art forms as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian noir

An interesting afterword follows Juan de Recacoechea's American Visa, about which I posted a comment last week. The writer and teacher Ilan Stavans, one of whose students translated American Visa from Spanish into English, calls Recacoechea's style "picaresque noir." I won't be giving away too much if I say both terms of the description fit. The novel is a kind of travelogue, its protagonist's observations on La Paz in the 1990s perhaps reflecting the author's own impressions after he returned to Bolivia from two decades working in Europe.

Stavans calls American crime fiction Recacoechea's "prime stimulation," and he notes the author's references to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. The novel is also akin in temperament to David Goodis' work in a way that might surprise some readers familiar only by reputation with that prototypical noir writer.

I'm less certain of Stavans' assertion that the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II is probably Recacoechea's main regional model. Yes, both authors take harsh looks at large Latin American cities (Taibo's Hector Belascoaran Shayne is a private investigator in Mexico City.) Both offer stark depictions of societies that crush their poor, their dispossessed, and even their ordinary workers. Yet, unlike Taibo, Recacoechea and his first-person protagonist, Mario Alvarez, never speechify. And that made Recacoechea a bit easier to read for this son of the bourgeoisie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Bolivian noir ...

... or "sweet noir," as one review called American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea. A hundred pages in, that seems a fair description of the 1994 novel, newly translated into English.

The narrator/protagonist proclaims his love of Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes, but American Visa seems closer in form to Jorg Fauser's The Snowman or Night Bus by Giampiero Rigosi. In each, a central character, down on his luck but not yet desperate, falls into a series of wanderings, mostly or entirely in cities, that are part adventure story, part travelogue. Each book's lively eye for its surroundings manages to keep it oddly upbeat despite the straitened or dangerous circumstances in which the protagonists find themselves.

In American Visa, the adventure is Mario Alvarez's quest for a visa to visit his son in Miami. Alvarez travels from his small town to La Paz, "a city I struggled to recognize; half a million hungry peasants had changed its face. These immigrants from the sterile Andean plateau had taken over La Paz's higher-elevation neighborhoods, like ants swarming over a beehive. A wild rustling accompanied their movements. This gray, unruly mass transformed the entire city into a gigantic marketplace."

Of course, an immigrant of a kind is what Alvarez himself is trying to become, a hope more difficult than in the past for a Bolivian trying to get to the United States because, as one character says, "They think we're all potential drug traffickers." The remark is plucky but rueful, rich with possibility of adventure but also tragedy. I'll be back later to tell you how the story turns out.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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