Not that it really matters, but I was just thinking that when I'm king of the world ...

Today I play newspaper columnist again and delight you with random observations disguised as work.

1) Based on the open chapters of Irregulars, Kevin McCarthy would have made a splendid member of my wartime and its aftermath panel at Bouchercon 2013.

2) Dashiell Hammett is popularly thought of as the antithesis of the old-style, rationalist, traditional mystery, and he made great fun of, say, S.S. Van Dyne. But an old-fashioned mystery-type solution lies at the heart of the mystery in Hammett's splendid 1924 story "Women, Politics and Murder." That solution takes up maybe a single paragraph, though. Rather than steamroll or satirize or eradicate the tradition, Hammett's early stories build around it, in the manner of a great city growing up around a settlement of rude huts.

3) Moshe Halbertal's book Maimonides: Life and Thought, discussed in this space Tuesday, suggests that Maimonides in some ways anticipated 20th-century ideas about the limits of language. I reflected on my own experience, and I thought, "Some people reach those limits earlier than Halbertal, Maimonides, and Wittgenstein thought." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A few more reasons Maimonides ought to be every crime fiction reader's favorite medieval Jewish sage:

1.  Samuel Ibn Tibbon, who translated Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew (and quite a translator he seems to have been), called Maimonides: "a wise artisan with an understanding of mysteries."
2. He carried out his philosophical work by means of deduction.
3. He believed the goal of religious law is to know, and he "went so far as to make rationality into a religious obligation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Is your favorite crime fiction hero Kantian, or Aristotelian?

Don't be bad because
that would feel good

Be good, but not too good

My current reading, Moshe Halbertal's Maimonides: Life and Thought, has nothing to do with crime fiction. Or does it?

Maimonides has to be one of the more fascinating humans who ever lived, and reading about his life is good mental exercise. He was a 12th-century Jewish sage infused with Aritotelian philosophy and Muslim learning, and he sought bold and controversial syntheses and reconciliations among those systems. He wrote in Hebrew. He wrote in Arabic. He wrote treatises on Jewish law and on philosophy, and, in his capacity as court physician to Saladin's vizier, on hemorrhoids and asthma. He was among the early advocates of good nutrition as a pathway to good health. He, in other words, rather than that guy on the beer commercials, may be the most interesting man in the world.

Halbertal discusses two moral traditions with which Maimonides grappled as he sought to define what constitutes a good man. One, of long standing but later exemplified in Immanuel Kant's work, is that morality consists in doing one's duty. "Kant's philosophical position," Halbertal says, "reflects in many ways a venerable approach that sees the moral life as one in which a person successfully resists his desires."

The alternative is to develop one's character to the point that "one will act virtuously by reason of his personality and will have no need to use his will to suppress his inclinations," to develop a middle way between extremes, a la Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

This got me thinking that modern crime-fiction good guys, at least in hard-boiled crime fiction, are more Kantian than Aristotelian, and Chandler's man walking down these mean streets may be more Aristotelian. Fighting demons seems more in tune with the times than does striving for a balanced character. (Think Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor or Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder fighting their own demons as much as or more than they fight crime.)

What do you think, readers? Is your favorite crime-fiction hero a fighter against his or her own urges, or a well-balanced human being? What does being a good person mean in crime fiction? And do readers even care about good guys anymore?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Who in crime fiction should have hurricanes named for them?

Hurricane Sandy is on the way, and I've been sealing my windows and stocking up on dried fruit and trite storm metaphors. Between that and those pesky side projects, I've neglected my crime reading, so here's another miscellaneous post to tide you over until after Sandy shall have cut its grim swath of destruction up the Eastern Seaboard and as far inland as Ohio.

1) Last year after Hurricane Irene, I put up a post about storm-related Bob Dylan songs and albums, pointing out the lyrical and historical weakness of "Hurricane." Since then, some blog or Web site has ranked the song near the top, maybe even number one, on its list of Dylan songs. I don't know about you, but I prefer that my rock and roll not falsify history or attempt rhymes like "We're going to put his ass in stir / We're going to pin this triple MUR / der on him." The record is beautifully produced, though, which may fool some people into thinking "Hurricane" is a great song.

2) An article in my newspaper today quoted a supermarket manager's surprise that many shoppers were buying perishable food, considering that the principal reason for stocking up ahead of a hurricane is as a hedge against power outages. It was a marvelously understated way of saying people are stupid*, which may explain why my newspaper did not blow up his comment in a large-type display box.

3) The week's non-crime reading is The Guide for the Perplexed. I may not believe what Maimonides seeks to prove is true, but his tools, at least in Part One — textual analysis, a knowledge of figures of speech, careful attention to the meanings of words — ought to endear him to all copy editors, since we are perpetual guides to those who are perplexed and worse.

4) Finally, who (or what) in crime fiction deserves to have a hurricane named for him, her, or it? I'll start you off with:

Hurricane Stieg, a massive blow that generates countless smaller storms but has no lasting effect.

Now it's your turn. Best suggestion wins my undying admiration.

==========

* An alternate interpretation would have it that he was expressing admiration for his customers' adherence to the cook now, eat later school of disaster preparation.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012