A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015, reissue department: Laura

Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940a and '50s, edited by Sarah Weinman for the Library of America, is probably the year's most celebrated set of crime fiction reissues, and for me, Vera Caspary's 1943 novel Laura is the collection's novel worthiest of celebration. Here's what I wrote about the book in a review of the entire collection for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

 "And what of Vera Caspary's unclassifiable Laura? The title character of Otto Preminger's 1944 movie version is a gauzy, unattainable mystery woman who drives men to fascination, even obsession. Johnny Mercer's lyrics to the film's much-recorded theme song include lines such as `Laura is the face in the misty light' and `That was Laura, but she's only a dream.' Great stuff, but not much to do with Caspary's novel. 

"Her Laura Hunt, unlike Gene Tierney, who played her in the movie, is not especially beautiful. Rather, she is a successful advertising copywriter to whom three men — a detective, an essayist and newspaper columnist, and Laura's unworthy fiance — are attracted without her having to do much about it. Far from a temptress or a scheming femme fatale, she's a kind of maypole around whom the men dance, and she behaves, all told, with remarkable self-possession.

"Each of the three men (the fiance in the form of a police report), and Laura herself, gets a turn as narrator, the fiance the least reliable, the columnist the funniest:

 "`I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less than modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay 'Of Sound and Fury' is reprinted here:

 "'When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.' "

And here's Sara Paretsky writing about Laura at the Library of America Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

I write about eight women crime writers in The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Philadelphia Inquirer published my review of Women Crime Writers: Eight Novels of Suspense from the 1940's and '50s, edited by Sarah Weinman for the Library of America.
I had fun writing the piece, especially quoting this timely bit from Vera Caspary's Laura:

"I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less than modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay 'Of Sound and Fury' is reprinted here:  

" 'When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.' " 

 © Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Vera Caspary, and mysteries within mysteries

"(S)he was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about murders, she had said. They're presented as a problem, m'dear, her father said. What's more, they generally show the murdered person as someone you can't waste any pity on. I'm sorry for them, she said. I hate it when they're found with daggers sticking in them and their eyes all staring from poison and things like that."

That's from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel The Blank Wall, included in the new collection Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels in the 1940s and '50s, edited by Sarah Weinman for the Library of America.  That paragraph will catch the eye of readers today, I suspect, and it makes a good starting point for discussion of the entire collection. What makes these eight writers different from their predecessors? From their successors? From their male contemporaries?  What traits do the eight share with all those groups? It might also make for interesting comparison with Raymond Chandler's famous assessment of Dashiell Hammett's contribution to crime writing in "The Simple Art of Murder."

But it's not the funniest meditation on mystery stories in Women Crime Writers. That honor goes to Waldo Lydecker's narration in Chapter II of Vera Caspary's Laura:

"I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less than modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay `Of Sound and Fury' is reprinted here:

"`When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.'"

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Sarah Weinman will discuss Elisabeth Sanxay Holding on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., in (yikes) two weeks. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and it happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Weinman and Abbott on Eight Women Crime Writers: Provocative but not polemical

Sarah Weinman

Megan Abbott

Sarah Weinman had a good interlocutor for Wednesday's launch of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and the 1950s, newly out from the Library of America and edited by Weinman.  Her questioner was Megan Abbott, and between them, they talked not just about the eight writers in the collection, but about the audience for those writers, about the world in which they wrote, about the reception for their work, about their equivocal place in the crime fiction canon, and about how the collection was put together.  And they did it all without polemics.

Among the provocative notions that emerged: Abbott's suggestion that women may be better suited to writing noir than men because, while men believe that they can make a difference, and hence tend to write stories in which redemption plays a role, "I don't think any woman ever believes that." Now, a statement like that, broadcast in the wrong circles to the wrong people (the brainless kind), could obviously draw much flak.

Here, though, while Abbott's remark send a flurry of excitement through the audience (they packed the house at New York's Mysterious Bookshop), the idea served to stimulate discussion, to be revised, argued, and defended as necessary.  That's what intelligent, interested people do, and it was a pleasure to spend a couple of hours among them.

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Sarah Weinman will talk about Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose novel The Blank Wall is part of Eight Women Crime Writers, on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: The Blank Wall

I've read two books in recent months that expanded my conception of noir.  One was Craig Rice's The Lucky Stiff. The second is The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.

The first is a hard-boiled screwball comedy whose ending turns a running joke on its emotional head and lends the book unexpected poignance. The second is a domestic murder mystery whose poignance lies in the protagonist's remaining at the novel's end exactly what she was at its beginning.  If that sounds unpromising, think of David Goodis' Street of No Return.

The Blank Wall is included in Woman Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, a two-volume set edited by Sarah Weinman and newly published by The Library of America. Weinman will discuss Elisabeth Sanxay Holding as part of a panel I'll moderate next month at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and it features authors, editors, and other experts talking about their favorite crime writers from the paperback-original and pulp eras.  The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m. See you there.

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Sarah Weinman will discuss the new collection and other interesting subjects with Megan Abbott on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

What to read while you're waiting for the new Dashiell Hammett book

This is a good time to be reading Dashiell Hammett, not that there is ever a bad time to read the greatest crime writer ever.

Last night I reread "$106,000 Blood Money" and the first chapters of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon. My favorite bit from the day's reading was this exchange, from "$106,000 Blood Money," between the Continental Op and Dick Foley about the fate of a man the latter was tailing:

"At three o'clock in the morning my bedside phone took my ear out of the pillows. The voice that came over the wire was the Canadian op's.  

"`Exit Arlie,' he said." 

This week's big Hammett news is the release of The Hunter and Other Stories. While waiting for your copy, why not satisfy your Hammett jones with a book from Vince Emery Productions? Or browse Mike Humbert's Dashiell Hammett Website? Or the two Hammett volumes from the Library of America? (One contains Hammett's five novels, the other short stories and some highly entertaining, illuminating nonfiction pieces.) Or pick up The Glass Key or "Arson Plus" or "The Scorched Face" or...

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Prose Wars™ II: The Articles of Confederation vs. the Constitution

Yesterday's inaugural Prose Wars™ post pitted a page from Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime against a parenthetical remark from Adrian McKinty's upcoming novel In the Morning I'll Be Gone, with McKinty winning handily.

Today, two of the founding documents of the United States of America face off, with the Constitution kicking the Articles of Confederation's butt. No shock there; the Articles are the Wally Pipp of founding documents to the Constitution's Lou Gehrig.  Here's the preamble to the Articles, preserving the spelling and inconsistent punctuation as reproduced in the Library of America's Debate on the Constitution:

"To all to whom these Presents shall come, we, the undersigned, Delegates of the States affixed to our Names, send greeting: Whereas the Delegates of the United States of America in Congress assembled, did on the fifteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven hundred and Seventy seven, and in the second year of the Independence of America, agree to certain articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhodeisland and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, in the Words following, viz. "Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhodeisland and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia."

Here is the preamble to the Constitution:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Case closed.

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A previous Detectives Beyond Borders post shows how editing made the Declaration of Independence better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Hard-boiled at the beach

I'm bursting with enthusiasm for my adopted country, for its misfits, its losers, its hard cases, and its beaches.

I've continued my project, announced here, of reading classic American hard-boiled and noir, and I'll likely continue to do so over the next few days at an undisclosed location on the Atlantic coast. And that means blogging may be light here at Detectives Beyond Borders until next week, lest I get sun screen and beach sand all over my keyboard. In the meantime, a few notes:

1) I like Jim Thompson's The Getaway better than Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. Each is saturated with sympathy for its characters, each occasionally lapses into speechifying, but Thompson, perhaps more in this novel than in his others, has considerable fun on the way to his hellish destination.

2) Why isn't Dan J. Marlowe better known? He did his best writing in the know-it-all, smirk-at-everything, over-the-top 1960s, yet his heist novels avoid both nostalgia and jokiness. And The Vengeance Man combines Ross Thomas' eye for political shenanigans with Jim Thompson's fatalism.

Happily, readers will soon be able to learn more about Marlowe and his interesting life (He was a professional gambler, a Rotarian, a Republican city councilman, and a friend of a notorious bank robber.) Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, here's an appreciation of Marlowe from the biography's author, Charles Kelly.

3) Why is Paul Cain's Fast One not included in the Library of America's American Noir of the 1930s and 40s collection? It's the best, toughest, hardest-hitting American crime novel whose author is not named Chandler or Hammett. I'll be sure to ask the LofA volume's editor, Robert Polito, the reason for the omission when we meet in good fellowship at Noircon 2012 in November.

© 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."

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Crime in the canon

Remember a few years ago when everyone was getting all worked up about literary canons and whether or not they were good things?

Geoffrey O'Brien sidesteps such matters neatly when talking about David Goodis. The American literary canon, he said -- and he used the word without hesitation or explanation -- exists, but it's expanding constantly into the future, as time passes, and also into the past.

O'Brien's remarks carry considerable weight because he's editor-in-chief of the Library of America, probably the closest thing to an American literary canon, and because LoA has just published David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s. O'Brien joined the Library of America in 1992 and has been editor-in-chief since 1998, and he says he's been reading Goodis since he was 14 years old. I don't know about you, but I like the idea of genre fiction having a mole on the inside of high American culture. During his tenure, Philip K. Dick had joined the canon, as have Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and now, with his own volume, Goodis.

So, any more Goodis on its way to the canon? "We will continue to talk about Goodis," O'Brien told a questioner at the Free Library of Philadelphia. "That's for sure."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012