@*&%!%^%$ Tony Black!

Sure, this Scottish writer's novel Gutted is funny and violent, apt to remind readers of Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor books, though more packed with incident than those (and though the novel's one explicit Bruen tribute I've found is to the Brant and Roberts novels).

Sure, the book is packed with Edinburgh patter (unless Black is taking the piss and titillating we foreigners with made-up slang) and dark observations about the underside of the city's bright, tourist-attracting facade (though the protagonist, Gus Dury, admits a soft spot for some of the attractions.)

No, why I really can't stand Black is that I'll never be able to write a novel set in an incredible shrinking newspaper without being haunted by the thought that Black describes such a milieu better than I ever could:

"The newsroom had been decimated. I remembered the days when this place hummed with activity. Now it was a sorry reflection of its former glory. The staff numbers must have been cut by fifty per cent, padded out a bit by a few kids chasing work experience. I shook my head." 

and

"The paper used to be based in one of the city’s old baronial buildings. They sold it, turned it into a hotel. The office is now housed in one of Edinburgh’s many chucked-up-in-five-minutes jobs. I hear if times get tough the building can be quickly converted into a shopping mall. Forget about the workers that spend all their waking lives in there – best to keep those options open. The way newspapers were going since the web came along, I could see a Portakabin on the horizon." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Strange Loyalties: William McIlvanney in words and a picture

Your humble blog keeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013, Bristol.
Photo courtesy of Ali Karim

. Once again I'm rereading a novel by William McIlvanney, and once again I am struck immediately by how different he is from the legion of crime writers who acknowledge his influence.

This time the novel is Strange Loyalties (1991), third of McIlvanney's three Laidlaw novels and, like its predecessors, Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch, rereleased in trade paperback by Canongate.

A hard-drinking detective or police officer comes slowly to himself after a binge and boy, does his head hurt. You're read that scene a few hundred times, but probably not the way McIlvanney writes it. Here's the opening of Strange Loyalties:

"I woke up with a head like a rodeo. Isn't it painful having fun? Mind you, last night hadn't been about enjoyment, just whisky as anaesthetic. Now it was wearing off, the pain was worse. It always is."

First, McIlvanney comes with a funny, inventive, eye-catching way of saying, "I was drunk, and my head hurt." That's a good way to grab a reader's attention, a good thing to do in a novel's first sentence. Second, the humor is a welcome change from the pain and self-pity with which many another crime writer endows such first-person hangovers.

Third, McIllvanney immediately leavens the fun with somber self-realization that to me, at least, tugs at the heartstrings without getting maudlin.  If you've never read the Laidlaw novels, read that opening again. Don't you want to know the character who thinks those lines? Doesn't that mix make Laidlaw seem more real, more human?

So, who is like unto William McIlvanney? Allan Guthrie probably comes closest in his mix of humor and compassion, but even that top-flight crime writer doesn't do it with the concentration of his fellow Scotsman McIlvanney. Ken Bruen does something like it in Priest, though its characters lean more toward martyrdom and away from humor.

Ian Rankin calls it doubtful that he'd be a crime writer without McIlvanney's influence but, other than that McIlvanney's Laidlaw and Rankin's Rebus both work the streets of a tough Scottish city, I don't see striking similarities between the two. So I'll dump the question in your laps, dear readers: Which crime writers best combine humor and compassion? Which authors, if you want to put the question this way, will make you laugh and cry in the same book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders reads London Boulevard

A recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders touched on the relative merits of laconic and expansive prose. Ken Bruen can write both.

He's better known for his machine-gun verbal outbursts. A fair parody of Bruen on paper would include

Short sentences.

Idiosyncratic paragraphing.

Lists.

Mordant, rapid-fire jokes that bounce off the page like hailstones.

But London Boulevard is also chillingly laconic in the matter of its protagonist's reactions to the violence he inflicts, experiences, and has experienced. And that makes this 2001 novel more than just a revenge odyssey or damaged-hero story, though it is both.

It also is the author's version of Sunset Boulevard and, with a possible quibble about a surprising personality switch on the part of the Erich von Stroheim character, that aspect of the novel holds together beautifully and without intruding on the novel's suspense and mystery. Discussion of Bruen tends to focus on his raw emotion, tragic humor, and this like—on feeling rather than craft. But London Boulevard shows he’s capable of a well-crafted mystery while retaining all the rawness you’ve come to love. And that's why it's probably my favorite, and maybe the best, of the seventeen or so of his novels that I've read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Meet Zorba the crime writer

There's no such thing as the supernatural, just phenomena and states of being outside the usual whose resistance, temporary or otherwise, to explanation induces feelings of uncanniness in characters and readers.

Stuart Neville understood this well in The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve in the UK). And another Northern Ireland crime writer, Anthony Quinn, understands it as well in his debut novel, Disappeared.

A retired Special Branch agent's Alzheimer's disease induces a hyper-sensitivity and heightened self-awareness that are just as creepy as and far more convincingly real than twaddle about ghosts.

A mysterious buzzing as two police officers search a hastily abandoned cottage offers further evidence that Quinn understands — and this is crucial for successful creepy scenes — that the feeling of uncanniness is wholly interior to the character. It's nothing "out there."

The book, through its first quarter, is also full of mordant wit:

"Irwin, who was at least ten years younger, represented the youth Daly fervently hoped he had left behind."

and

"Who do you think it was? The real IRA, the continuity IRA, the INLA, or the truly, madly, deeply IRA?"

Ken Bruen is an indefatigable blurbster, but I see no reason so far to suspect him of  overstatement when he says: "Line up the Edgar for best first novel. Disappeared is a major piece of work." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

NoirCon 2012, Nov. 8-11 in Philadelphia

NoirCon 2012 is coming up in Philadelphia, Nov. 8-11. I hope you'll be there with distinguished folks like Lawrence Block, Otto Penzler, Vicki Hendricks, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, and Duane Swierczynski, and not so distinguished folks, like me.

Click on the NoirCon link for more information and a registration form. In the meantime, I'll count down the days until the convention with a few special posts including this one from the first NoirCon, in 2008.

==========

If you'll indulge me for one more post before I send NoirCon 2008 fondly into the sunset, I'd like to share a few remarks that Ken Bruen, one of the event's two guests of honor, made over the course of the convention's four days.

Most pertinent to this blog was his statement, and I don't remember the context, that Irish readers seem to lack pride in the country's wonderful crime writers. This was a surprise to me on my side of the Atlantic, considering the wealth of Irish talent about which one can read on Crime Always Pays, Critical Mick, Crime Scene NI and elsewhere.

Bruen also said that "All my influences are American. That's how I learned to read. That's how I learned to write. For an Irish person to say that is a heresy." Perhaps this accounts for his stated love for the U.S.

Finally, thanks to Bruen, I fulfilled a long-held dream of hearing an Irishman say "shite."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Bruen's "Blitz" on screen

I was apprehensive when I heard Ken Bruen's 2002 novel Blitz was being made into a movie. The book's centerpiece, Southeast London police officer Tom Brant, is a feral, funny wild man, maybe Bruen's best creation, and I thought it would take a gifted actor and daring filmmakers to manage the transfer to a new medium, if the transfer were possible at all.

The movie, directed by Elliott Lester, released last year, and featuring Jason Statham as Brant and the excellent Paddy Considine as Porter Nash, could have been worse. It drops at least one major subplot and adds a narrative element that's not obtrusive but not necessary either.  It softens Brant's character, notably in the opening scene. The pruning results in a character a bit more believable but also a bit more conventional, a bit less maniacal, and a bit less funny, and a world not quite as dark as the novel's.

The movie also tones down Nash's reaction to the flak he gets from fellow officers because he's gay.  In the movie, he's a tough, righteous cop. In the book, he's a tough, righteous cop with jaw-droppingly funny chutzpah. And that's the movie, really: a milder version of a highly spicy book. Oh, and Bruen has a cameo role — as a priest.

(I discuss the appeal of the Brant and Roberts novels here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Goodis the great

Some of the borders I've crossed recently have been ones of time, into American crime writing of the 1940s and '50s.

Based on my first readings of all three authors, I like Bruno Fischer and Fletcher Flora a little better than I like Day Keene. But none was as good as David Goodis.

I'd read some Goodis before, the short story "Black Pudding" and the 1951 best-seller Cassidy's Girl, and I'd been impressed, notably by the heart-breaking compassion he mustered for his characters. But Dark Passage (1946) is, in its opening chapters, even better, a knockout of a book.

I'll likely have more to say later, but for now it's interesting to view the novel as an argument for the old proposition that the way to become a good writer is to write, and write, and write. Dark Passage was Goodis' second novel, and it appeared seven years after his first. In between, Goodis wrote prodigiously for pulp magazines, more than five million words in five years in the early 1940s, according to his own estimate. (See Robert Polito's notes to David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.)

The result may not tug at the heartstrings quite as hard as some of Goodis' later works do, but it is self-consciously stylish without going over the top, a difficult feat for any writer, much less one not yet thirty years old. The book's first chapters are full of words repeated to amusing effect. And if you like how Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie use humor at dark moments and somehow make it seem right, you'll find the roots of the practice in protagonist Vincent Parry's conversation with the taxi driver in Chapter Seven.

But first, my favorite line of the book so far, tough, naive, funny and touching at the same time:

"Being good to people sounds nice but it's hard work."

***

Mingle with Goodis-heads and noir fans this Nov. 8-11 at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Rilke on Black (Ken Bruen on humor)

Ken Bruen's early novel Rilke on Black is funny and dark (though not as dark as it might have seemed a few weeks ago, before I read Derek Raymond.)  Still, it's full of quotable laugh lines and, perhaps more impressive, trenchant pop-music references. A few samples:

I didn’t wish him luck. As it wasn’t that kind of business. Plus, I didn’t want to. I watched him join the crowds. Thing was, he did look like Mickey Rourke. But late-night Brixton, most do, even the women.

***

A cheap walkman as music would pass the time for him. Then a new dilemma.


What tapes would he like? From the sublime to the ridiculous. I got Aretha and Whitney Houston. I drew the line at Stevie Wonder. Not even a hostage would endure that torture.

***

She’d a lush body that summoned up jail sentences.

***

Remember it, one of those songs you heard all the time, you’d no idea what it meant. In fact, if pressed, you couldn’t even say if you liked it. But you knew it and, worse, it clung. One of those songs that hung out with, “me and you/and a dog named boo”.

***

I walked towards the Oval. Just pick any pub. I did, on the Stockwell side. This is where they mug Rottweilers.

***

I met her in the Rose and Crown on Clapham Common. A pub that still merits the name. The requirement was only to be a drinker.


You didn’t have to play pool.


Munch Hawaiian crisps.


Play lotteries.


Be yuppified.


Flaunt on sexual prowess.


A pub.

===========

And, because I just found this clip of a song I've long liked, here, for reasons that have nothing to do with this post, is Maria Bethania.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

McBain around the world

I speculated idly four years ago that Ed McBain might be the most influential crime writer ever. I thought of that post again last month when preparing for Bouchercon 2011.

I'd read David Hewson's The Fallen Angel, then gone back to earlier books in the series and was surprised to see the nine books referred to as "the Costa series," after the young Roman police officer Nic Costa. The Fallen Angel is very much an ensemble piece starring Costa but also his colleagues on the Questura. "Almost like an Ed McBain novel," I said during my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon, of which Hewson was a member. Yes, Hewson acknowledged, McBain was very much on his mind when he wrote the book.

Ken Bruen has one of his characters not just read McBain novels but try to write one, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson pays tribute as well. Bill Crider's books work in mentions of McBain.  Anyone else?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What's so funny about noir?

While we're on the subject, noir and other dark crime fiction seems often to include humor (Derek Raymond, Allan Guthrie, Ken Bruen, Scalped). Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A hundred shades of emerald: Down These Green Streets

Down These Green Streets, newly published by Liberties Press under the editorship of Detectives Beyond Borders friend Declan Burke, bears an ambitious, ambiguous subtitle: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century.

Is this a book of Irish crime writing, or is it about Irish crime writing?  It's both, plus memoir, interview,  criticism, literary and film history, and a useful reading list, and that's just on my first dip into the book. Oh, and the collection does not confine itself to the 20th century, either. Early highlights:

• Ruth Dudley Edwards' evocation of Liam O'Flaherty. You'll want to read O'Flaherty if you haven't already.
• Declan Hughes on Irish identity and America's place in it.
• Alan Glynn on the Irish literary crime novel. (That's right, "literary crime novel." Glynn is the only person I know of who can use that phrase without making me wish I were somewhere else.) He'll make you want to read The Third Policeman, The Book of Evidence, and The Butcher Boy if you haven't already.
• Arlene Hunt on coming to terms with a violent world.

Stuart Neville offers a tear-jerking punch in the gut of a  story called "The Craftsman," and Ken Bruen has an emotional Jack Taylor piece I can't discuss objectively because I knew the main character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Detectives Beyond Borders on the radio — again

My 2009 appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth program will be rebroadcast today at 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Dig that nifty opening theme, and find out what kind of voices the show's host, Jean Feraca, likes! In honor of WPR's rebroadcast, I'm bringing back a blog post I made after the show first aired.

Here's a summary of  what we talked about and what I would have liked to talk about had we had more time. (If you're just tuning in now, the Here on Earth link should still allow you listen to the archived program.)

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

I'm back from talking international crime fiction on the Here on Earth radio program, and how about a huzzah for Wisconsin Public Radio for hosting a show on that entertaining, enlightening topic? The broadcast is available for listening or downloading here or here.

I learned that radio is an astonishingly compressed medium. I was worried we'd run out of things to discuss, but we got to barely a tenth of the authors and subjects I'd prepared. So in the coming days, I'll post a series of outtakes, things I'd have discussed had there been time.

I did get to tout Ireland as a hotbed of crime fiction, to offer my definition of noir and to talk about Yasmina Khadra, Seicho Matsumoto, Henning Mankell, Patricia Highsmith, David Goodis, Ian Rankin, Matt Rees, Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole. My fellow guest and I both like Jean-Claude Izzo, so we talked about him awhile. (That fellow guest was Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Akashic Books' Delhi Noir, about which he made some interesting remarks.)

But, oh, the things I didn't get to: Corporate villains. Humorous Swedes. Canadian borders. Northern Ireland. Irish odysseys. Hard-boiled crime as America's gift to the world. Translation. Miscellaneous exotica. The world of publishing.

More to come. Oh, and the show's host, Jean Feraca, with whom I had never spoken before, said on air that I had a "nice voice." Bless you, Ms. Feraca.

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

P.S.: Feraca gave me credit for a statement that I was only quoting. It was the Edgar Allan Poe scholar Shelley Costa Bloomfield who suggested that the French were ready and waiting for what Poe had to offer before Americans were: "Maybe it takes an older civilization to feel comfortable with the dark side and be able to enjoy it." I wish I'd said that, but Costa Bloomfield said it first.

P.P.S: Before anyone can point this out to me, I realize that I said, "If you will" once on the air. I shall suffer the consequences in the next life.

P.P.P.S. Finally, I think I got Seicho Matsumoto's death date wrong. That fine Japanese crime writer died in 1992. I think I killed him off twelve years prematurely.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009, 2011

Gunsel has nothing to do with guns: When crime writers become word makers

Gunsel has nothing to do with guns, or at least it didn't until the mistake became so widespread that the word's meaning changed — and a crime writer is responsible.

The word means catamite, a young man kept by a pederast. (It comes from the Yiddish word for gosling.) The story goes that Dashiell Hammett included it in The Maltese Falcon hoping that editor Joseph Shaw, fastidious about "vulgarisms," would be ignorant of its meaning and let it stay in. He did:

“Hammett laid a trap for Shaw. In his next story he included the term gooseberry lay. Shaw pounced on this and rejected it, though it wasn’t a rude term at all but tramps’ slang for stealing washing off clotheslines to sell. But Hammett also included gunsel in the story, which Shaw left in, thinking it meant `gunman.'”

Here's the passage from The Maltese Falcon:

“`Another thing,' Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: ‘Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.'”

Knowing the word's real meaning lends a chilling edge to Gutman's treatment of Wilmer.

***

I have also read that A White Arrest, title of Ken Bruen's first Brant and Roberts novel, acquired a meaning that Bruen invented in the book: an arrest that can reverse a police officer's bad luck and put his career back on track. And I think I've also read that Donald Westlake made up a term and used it so effectively that readers assumed it was established underworld slang.

Who else has done this? What other writers have fooled us into thinking that usages they made up were, in fact, established terms?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

If you like X, you'll love Y

A colleague who knows I read crime fiction asked if I liked Guy Ritchie's slam-bang English gangster movies.

I did, I said, and I suggested that if he liked those movies, he might enjoy reading Allan Guthrie and Ken Bruen, his Brant and Roberts novels and his three collaborations with Jason Starr especially.

Then I thought, isn't this a fine way for authors and publishers to find new readers? Find out what people like to do, watch or think about, then suggest books to match. And you can help! Just fill in the blanks in this simple equation

If you like non-book X, you'll love book (or author) Y

Thanks, and have fun!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Up with e-shorts!

I bought Allan Guthrie's novella Bye, Bye Baby last night, and I asked last week when someone was going to put out a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories.

I mention this because I bought the Guthrie as a downloaded e-book, and if electronic books are here to stay, we might as well take advantage of what the medium can do. I don't mean weird technological gimcrackery that in most cases adds up to nothing more than what a simple paperback does at a fraction of the cost, I mean the flexibility to publish narrative forms such as novellas and short stories that might be economically unfeasible as traditional books.

Bye, Bye Baby is about seventy pages; hard to imagine a publisher taking a chance on a traditional book that size (though Five Leaves Publishing Crime Express series does so with, among other novellas, Guthrie's Killing Mum, and Barrington Stoke with his Kill Clock). But lower production and distribution costs might encourage them to do so with books in electronic form.

And where is a reader to turn who loves an author's short fiction and would like it collected in one place, as I would with Phillips or Jean-Hugues Oppel or Dominique Manotti? (Ken Bruen, too, though he's popular enough that some publisher might be able to sell his collected shorts as a traditional book.)

Short-story collections by a single crime author are few and far between, and I suspect uncertainty about their sales prospects helps account for this. So why not sell collections as cheap e-books, or even let readers build their own books electronically out of the short stories they want to read?

What are the barriers to doing things this way? And which crime writers would you like to see come out with collections of short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Jack Taylor trailers

The TV3 production based on Ken Bruen's novel The Guards starts in thirty-one minutes. If you're not in Ireland, watch some trailers here. (Hat tip to Noir Con.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Do hard-edged crime series get harder as they progress?

I've just read back-to-back Ken Bruen: The Killing of the Tinkers and Sanctuary, second and seventh of the Jack Taylor novels.

I don't have the books at hand, so I could be talking through my hat, but it seems to me The Killing of the Tinkers had a harder edge. Taylor often muses about people dying because he screwed up. Here we see an example of it. Perhaps this accounts for my impression.

Do harder-boiled crime series fall into any sort of pattern with respect to the grittiness of their stories? Do novels get harder-edged as a series progresses? Does the opposite happen, or does the answer vary from series to series?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Grim laughs: A question on humor and crime fiction

It's early in The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack Taylor has just been beaten up, and his client/employer asks what happened:

"They surprise you?"

"They bloody amazed me."

Bruen's characters don't applaud their own wit or the author's. This makes the dialogue less stand-up yuk fest, more real conversation, and all the funnier and more poignant for it. Bruen adds a clever spin on slightly different meanings of surprise, so you know the man is a nimble wordsmith as well.

That's how Ken Bruen does it; what do you think about the touchy combination of humor and crime? When does it work? When doesn't it? What are your favorite examples?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Is crime good for crime writers?

Does real violence inspire crime fiction?

Yes, says Ken Bruen, who said he "didn’t want to write about Ireland until we got mean streets. We sure got ’em now."

Yes, say Roger Smith, who told Detectives Beyond Borders that "During the apartheid years, writing crime fiction in South Africa seemed beside the point. But now, sadly, South Africa is one of the most crime-ravaged countries in the world, and writing crime seems all too appropriate" and Wessel Ebersohn, who said: "If violence is what you want to write about, South Africa is the place to be."

Maybe, says Deon Meyer, who tells BOOK Southern Africa that "Real world crime (everywhere) is mostly sad, sordid, domestic, related to alcohol and drug abuse and tragic socio-economic circumstances. Crime fiction asks for intriguing, often sensational, always wrapped in riddles ... the sort of thing that is very scarce in reality."

Over in Iceland, where almost no one gets murdered, authors such as Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurdardòttir have said that such killings as there are tend to be similarly petty, a drunken brawl that gets out of hand, say. Maybe that's why they turn to history, geography, hints of the supernatural — and their own imaginations.

Smith, cited as exemplifying the proposition that real-world influence on crime fiction is decisive, filters that belief through a rich lens of techniques and influences from crime fiction, so there may be no one right answer.

What do you think? Does real-life crime influence crime writers? In what ways?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Papers of Tony Veitch, or showing, telling and compassion

"Show, don't tell" is one of those writing mantras that I think I believe in but have never examined thoroughly.

I guess the idea is that readers don't care what the author has to say, they want to see what the characters do. The Scottish novelist William McIlvanney intrudes on his own narrative far more than most crime writers do, often with thrilling results. Here's McIlvanney getting inside his protagonist's head in The Papers of Tony Veitch:

"He could recall giving up any belief in an overall meaning to living because any such meaning would have to be indivisible, unequivocally total, giving significance impartially to every drifting feather, every piece of paper blowing along a street.

"Eck was like one of those pieces of paper. You couldn't say the meaning of things was elsewhere and Eck was irrelevant. That was a betrayal. All we have is one another and if we're orphans all we can honorably do is adopt one another, defy the meaninglessness of our lives by mutual concern. It's the only nobility we have.

"Laidlaw tried to reinstate his energy by declaring war, over his whisky, on all brutalisers of others, all non-carers. Yet the very thought embarrassed. He would have been such a compromised champion, a failure opposing failure."

McIlvanney invokes compassion implicitly and, elsewhere, explicitly, compassion for victims, for perps, compassion for those who feel hopeless compassion. I've noticed a similar tendency in Allan Guthrie's novels and in Ken Bruen's Priest.

And now, two questions: 1) How do you feel about showing vs. telling? and 2) Is it any surprise that authors of hard stories about hard men should be attracted to compassion as a theme and a human attribute?

(Read about William McIlvanney here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010