Crime writers I have shot in November

Rob Brunet (right) and me (left) in Toronto.
I shot him right in his kitchen.

I haven't read many crime writers the past few weeks, but I have shot a bunch of them. I shot them in the street, I shot them in public places, and I shot them in their homes.   One of them had a broken ankle by the time I left, though he also had a broken ankle when I arrived.

John McFetridge at the Art
Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. I
shot him at the museum.

Clea Simon with Jon Garelick in
Harvard Square, Cambridge.
I shot them at the bookstore.

Linda L. Richards and your humble blopkeeper
captured by a young crime writer about whom you
may hear much in the near future. She shot us
in a bar.

That's all OK; some of them shot me.

(Click this link and this one for more crime writers I've shot so recently that the forensics results are not back from the lab yet.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Rob Brunet almost fell on his ass
answering the door. I shot him anyhow.

Linda took me up to a gorgeous bridge
in Vancouver. Then she shot us both.

Detectives Beyond the U.S.-Canada Border

In Stanley Park, Vancouver.
Photo by Linda L. Richards

How a book for reluctant readers might help reluctant writers, plus a cover photo by me

My latest cover photo with accompanying novel has landed.  Linda L. Richards' When Blood Lies, like the book that supports  my previous cover shot, Reed Farrel Coleman's Love and Fear, is part of Orca Books' Rapid Reads line.

I've known the author for a few years, and I wrote about her 2008 novel Death Was the Other Woman, a Sam Spade-like story told from an Effie Perrine-like character's point of view. The Dashiell Hammett love continues here. The protagonist is named Nicole Charles, and the book's epigraph is a nod to The Thin Man.

Linda L. Richards

Rapid Reads target "a diverse audience, including ESL students, reluctant readers, adults who struggle with literacy and anyone who wants a high-interest quick read," and I can add reluctant writers to that potential audience.

I am one such, and the brevity of these books, plus their stripped-down narrative, vocabulary, or both make it easier for me to see how the authors build their plots and what they do to keep the story going. Since plot is not the strong point of my occasional efforts at fiction, I took mental notes as I read Richards' and Coleman's books. Perhaps other would-be writers who want to learn how to build a story could do the same.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My cover arrives, with a book attached

My copy of Love and Fear, by Reed Farrel Coleman, arrived today, its cover a photo I shot a block from where I work.

I'll be interested in what's under that cover, too, both because Coleman is good at writing emotionally wounded P.I.s, and because the book is part of Orca Books' Rapid Reads line. The series consists of short novels for adults, inspired, Orca says, by the success of its previous books for younger, reluctant readers.

Allan Guthrie's 2007 novella Kill Clock persuaded me that such books can coincide nicely with my own fondness for concise narration in the Hammettian style. So I'll read this book with special interest, though probably more slowly than some readers, because I'll be busy sneaking peeks at the cover.

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The first link in this post will take you to the spring 2016 Rapid Reads releases. I also shot the cover for a second book in the series, Linda L. Richards' When Blood Lies.



© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My third and fourth book covers as a photographer: The Year of the Orca

Linda L. Richards' novel When Blood Lies sees the light of day in April (but is available for preorder now), with a cover photograph by me.

From left: Me, Linda L. Richards.

The publishers are the good people at Orca Books, who have also just brought out Reed Farrel Coleman's Love and Fear, with a cover photograph by me. 2016: Feel the Orca.

Linda and Reed join Ed Gorman and Charlie Stella on the select but growing list of authors for whose books I have shot covers. That's a good bunch, and you should be reading all of them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Tumor: How a crime fiction cliché gets knocked on the head and doesn't recover

I bought the graphic novel Tumor on the strength of its introduction by Duane Swierczynski, who begins by noting the absurd prevalence in hard-boiled crime fiction of one-punch knockouts, speedy recoveries, and meticulous recollection by the victims:

"Even modern-crime writers can't resist a good cosh to the brainpan. Check out George Pelecanos' Nick Stefanos in Down By the River Where the Dead Man Go:

"`I felt a blunt shock to the back of my head and a short, sharp pain. The floor dropped out from beneath my feet, and I was falling, diving toward a pool of cool black water.'

"The problem, of course, is that such blows to the head are completely ridiculous. It's not easy to bounce back from a severe concussion, And even if you do, it's unlikely that you'll remember the blow in any kind of detail. ... Plus, it's kind of hard to knock someone out with a single blow."

The center of Tumor, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and artist Noel Tuazon, is a broken-down Los Angeles private investigator named Frank Armstrong who must solve one last case before the book's titular malady kills him. The client is a gangster and the case is to find his daughter, and if that all sounds conventionally Chandlerian, keep your eye on the tumor.

Armstrong blacks out, his sense of time is compressed, stretched, and fragmented in ways that seem far more convincing a rendering of brain injury or disease than one finds in most crime writing. And, through the book's first three chapters, at least, there is no hint of excessive cleverness, no evidence that Fialkov is doing anything so conventional as straining to defy convention. I'm not sure I could say the same for most comics since, say, 1987.

Tumor reminds me in this regard of a comment by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Linda L. Richards when I wrote about her novel Death Was the Other Woman in 2008. The novel's protagonist is a secretary/assistant to a PI, like Effie Perrine in The Maltese Falcon.  Here's the the pertinent part of Richards' reply to my review:

"For me, there was never a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. I wasn't trying to be clever or find a new place from where I could spin on an old tale. As I wrote the book, it seemed to me I was merely stating the obvious. The between-the-wars PIs were so damaged. And they were drunks. There was simply no logical way they could be ingesting all that good Prohibition booze in the quantities stated and still be getting through their cases as calmly as it appeared to happen."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bad guys and good pictures at Off the Cuff

Photo by Peter Rozovsky in some
big city not far north of here.

"Is it just my nature?" asks Linda L. Richards. "Why am I suspicious of everyone?"

Linda talks about good guys, bad guys, and unreliable narrators as part of the latest discussion at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff site. But can you believe her?

Fellow author Sam Wiebe joins the discussion, hosted by Kalteis and Martin J. Frankson.

Once again, Kalteis, a fan of photography, illustrates his virtual roundtable with one of my noirish shots (above right). So go on over, feed your head, and feast your eyes.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Out of the past

I don't know when Linda L. Richards wrote Death Was the Other Woman, which appeared in 2008, and Death Was in the Picture (2009), but the timing of their publication is fortunate, if one can use that word to denote the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Richards' protagonist, Kitty Pangborn, is a woman in reduced circumstances. Wrenched by the Crash of 1929 from the life of ease her family had enjoyed, she goes to work for a private investigator, and she's glad for the job.

"It was the Depression," Richards wrote in an essay for Crimespree Magazine. "Money was scarce and jobs difficult to come by. If you had a job, yet the job itself was imperfect, you wouldn’t just chuck it and get a new one, as we would in the 21st century. Jobs were precious, something to hold on to. You would do whatever you could – whatever you had to do – to make it work out, even if that meant doing the boss’s job for him when he wasn’t looking."

It's grimly amusing to think that when Richards wrote that essay, the notion of clinging desperately to a precious job was something out of a horrible past. Perhaps Kitty Pangborn, conceived as a tribute to and more realistic reimagining of crime fiction's hard-working female sidekicks and secretaries of the 1930s, can be a solace to harried workers in the 2000s.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Word of mouth

One of the joys of a convention such as Bouchercon is learning about authors and books one had not read before and passing on one's own knowledge. Christa Faust got me interested in Martyn Waites. I have apparently turned Dana King on to Linda L. Richards.

What authors or books have you learned about by word of mouth? What writers or books have you passed on to others in the same way? I'd be especially interested if your discoveries were outside your normal area of reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Death Was the Other Woman and a question about alternative histories

This novel slips under the Detectives Beyond Borders wire because I mingled in good fellowship with author Linda L. Richards at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, because its protagonist has an interesting genesis, and because Richards is Canadian, which puts her beyond those borders that this blog likes to cross in its search for subjects.

Richards' inspiration was the opening scene of The Maltese Falcon, where Sam Spade's loyal secretary, Effie Perrine, opens the door to "Miss Wonderly," then sits and clacks away at her typewriter as the visitor spins out her yarn. What, wondered Richards, would someone like Effie do while the boss was off getting drunk or getting bashed in the head? Here's Richards, from an essay she wrote for Crimespree Magazine:

"(Q)uite often, these hard drinking PIs had a secretary. We seldom saw any of them do very much, but they were a solid presence in the stories in which they cropped up; gently esteemed by their bosses and treated with more respect than most of the women who appeared in the same tales.

"As I read – and read and read – I began to look for the female hands that were making the fruitful outcomes possible. You’d never see them straight on, of course. It’s possible even the authors responsible didn’t see these women at work. But the times dictated that these women do their stuff quietly, careful not to bruise the delicate larger egos of their often sodden bosses. I saw it all emerge. And I saw the reasons why.

"It was the Depression. Money was scarce and jobs difficult to come by. If you had a job, yet the job itself was imperfect, you wouldn’t just chuck it and get a new one, as we would in the 21st century. Jobs were precious, something to hold on to. You would do whatever you could – whatever you had to do – to make it work out, even if that meant doing the boss’s job for him when he wasn’t looking."

This gives Richards a perfect set-up for a kind of alternative history, and she follows through nicely. Her Kitty Pangborn is no mere vicarious fantasy of a woman stepping into a man's job. She does no shooting, for example, and she is never drugged, slugged or shot at. But the story is decidedly a mystery, and Kitty does her share of sleuthing, snooping and, above all, thinking and reflecting. The thinking, the reflecting, and her narration of the events that led her to the side of P.I. Dexter J. Theroux lend the story a wistful, coming-of-age air. Readers who liked Fredric Brown's great Fabulous Clipjoint might feel at home here.

Richards handles her other big narrative challenge nicely, too. She portrays the past – 1930s Los Angeles – without turning it into a museum piece. Kitty's back story helps here, too. She is the product of a once wealthy family that lost everything in the Depression. Thus she knows of the era's glitzy nightclubs but has fallen far enough from that world to be awed when she visits them. This gives Richards narrative license to paint word pictures of the scenes we know so well from movies set in the early 1930s. You know them, those vast rooms all in the best silver-and-cream that black-and-white movies could muster, all raised seating platforms and bold, curved modernist edges.

P.S. In another gender-based variation on a hard-boiled theme, Richards has an awkward, countrified young man turn up to look for his wayward sibling – a little brother, that is, rather than Chandler's Little Sister.

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Death Was the Other Woman takes a familiar situation – hard-living P.I., loyal secretary – and tells the story from an unfamiliar point of view. What other crime writers have chosen alternate viewpoints for classic stories? What classic crime-fiction situations are ripe for such treatment?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008