Crime in Ireland, crime in the wider world, and a question

Declan Burke, author of The Big O and keeper of the Crime Always Pays blog, sets his sights on the dimensions and foundations of the Irish crime-fiction boom here. He offers a lively review of the theories, and one might surprise you: "Money is the great leveller, and in an Ireland where the vast majority of the population have benefited from the economic boom, the erstwhile great and good can no longer depend on deferential treatment, while the moneyed classes are no longer deserving of their pedestal."

Further to the south, I've finished Solea, final volume in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy. The novel is just as romantic as its predecessors, Total Chaos and Cheops, just as besotted with the light of Marseilles and just as pained by the memory of lost love. But this novel thinks globally, too. The narrative is punctuated with U.N. and other data about the hellish intermingling of the criminal and "legitimate" economies and with harsh criticism of governments, especially France's, for failing to act.

Izzo presents the information as research by a reporter whom the protagonist, Fabio Montale, is trying to find and protect. The excerpts are sprinkled throughout the novel, set it in italic type in chunks sometimes a page or two long. The presentation, set off narratively and typographically from the main action, functions like a play within a play, making its impact precisely because of its distinctive presentation.

And now, a question: That's how Jean-Claude Izzo presented blocks of factual information; how do your favorite writers do it? What thrillers make history or diplomacy come alive without making the story die? What police procedurals do a good job with forensic detail? What mysteries taught you much about an unfamiliar city or a new field of endeavor?

Or tell me about some novels that failed to do the job.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Declan Burke
Irish crime fiction
Jean-Claude Izzo
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More musical notes

Second page, first chapter of Jean-Claude Izzo's Solea, and the protagonist is already listening to music:

"When I came in, Léo Ferré was singing:

"`I sense the arrival
of trains full of Brownings,
Berettas and black flowers
And florists preparing bloodbaths
For the news on color TV ... '"

That's a stunning passage for the starkness of its content, to be sure, but also because of the slight awkwardness presumably introduced by the translation and because of the song's unfamiliarity, at least to me. The last two reasons may be more essential than the first to the passage's success.

Too often, popular music fails as an indicator of character in crime fiction precisely because it's so popular. If it's part of everyone's mental landscape, how can it signify a character's uniqueness? For me, a song can work better in fiction if I don't know it. When that happens, the author and I have to do the work. My experience is not filtered through countless listenings, half-heard snatches, radio, records, background music, television, commercials, ring tones and media hype.
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Jim Fusilli has an interesting, ambivalent take on music in his story "The Ghost of Rory Gallagher," from the Dublin Noir collection. The central character is obsessed with the Gallagher of the title, a fiery Irish rock guitarist who died in 1995. That character listens to Gallagher with a passion that I'm guessing Fusilli shares.

On the other hand, the character's grasping, overweening love for the musician is a lampoon of the hysterical worship of rock and roll guitarists that has been around at least since a graffito proclaimed that "Clapton is God." The character is a villain, an unscrupulous trader whose depradations bring ruin to scores of people and who is willing to pay vast sums of money for rare Gallagher recordings. It's easy to read this as a criticism of rock and roll's failed promises of escape, equality, love and justice.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jean-Claude Izzo
French crime fiction
Jim Fusilli
Irish crime fiction

A piece of prescience from Jean-Claude Izzo

Remember the French riots of 2005? Here's a passage from Chourmo, the second volume in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy:

"[Pertin] wasn't directly responsible for Serge's death. Or Pavie's. But he was the symbol of a police force I hated. A police force in which political ideas and personal ambitions were placed above the values of the Republic, like justice and equality. ... If the suburbs exploded one day, it would be down to them. Their contempt. Their xenophobia. Their hate. And their shabby little schemes to become, one day, `a great cop.'"

Izzo published those words in 1996.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jean-Claude Izzo

Romance and violence

Where music, poetry, memories and the Mediterranean go, romance is sure to follow. That was true in Total Chaos, the first novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy, and it's even more the case in Chourmo, the second book.

Just six short chapters in, the protagonist, Fabio Montale, has yearned for lost loves, lost friends, lost opportunities, even for the tolerable aspects of his lost job as a police officer. These chapters are melancholy and gorgeous and full also of Izzo's sharp and sometimes unexpected political observations. The melancholy is enhanced by the reader's knowledge that the lost cousin whom Montale searches for has already been killed.

If you read French or Italian, Ile noire, Jazz al Nero and Andrea Fannini offer interesting discussions of Izzo. That last entry, a discussion of a book of Izzo's short writing called Aglio, menta e basilico – Marsiglia, il noir e il Mediterraneo, offers insight on the social and political concerns of Fabio Montale and the man who created him. And culinary concerns, too. The first part of the book's title means "garlic, mint and basil." Fabio Montale may be more melancholy in outlook than Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano or Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Pepe Carvalho, but he eats just as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jean-Claude Izzo

L'histoire du polar marseillais / crime fiction from Marseilles

I've posted here, here and here about Total Chaos, the first novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy. Two recent discoveries, plus the arrival of my copy of Chourmo, the second volume, brought me back to that atmospheric tale, at once downbeat and full of Izzo's love for Marseilles.

The Ile noire blog explores, in French, the early history of Marseillais crime fiction. That's a concept that we readers of international crime fiction ought to like. Ile noire is a bilingual site, mostly French with a bit of Corsican. I learned that bonavinuta means welcome and a dopu means later! or until the next time. The obvious similarities between the Corsican words and their Italian counterparts (other Corsican words are more like French) is a rich little lesson in language and history – and I owe it all to international crime fiction.

An Italian site reviews a collection of tales and other writing by Izzo that bears the delicious title of Aglio, menta e basilico – Marsiglia, il noir e il Mediterraneo (Garlic, mint and basil – Marseilles, noir and the Mediterranean). The sensual appeal of that title is beguiling, as are the reviewer's descriptions of how Izzo's detective protagonist Fabio Montale –"a Mediterranean man" – loves jazz, hip-hop, eating, drinking, gossiping for hours in bars ... What a life!

Izzo, reviewer Andrea Fannini concludes, is "a French, indeed, a Mediterranean poet."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Jean-Claude Izzo

No full review of "Total Chaos" yet, but ...

It's coming, it's coming, maybe. Circumstances will conspire to make my blogging spotty for the next week or so, and I don't even have my copy of Total Chaos handy for reference.

For now, though, I have one more comment relating to music. Jean-Claude Izzo seems to have had music very much on his mind as he wrote Total Chaos. This shows not just in the frequent invocations of music to set mood and define character, but also in a small aspect of the book's construction. The protagonist and two friends who figure prominently are of Spanish or Neapolitan stock. The milieu of the novel is 1990s Marseilles, which has new minorities, some African but mostly Arab. Throughout the novel, the protagonist/narrator, Fabio Montale, compares and contrasts the older immigrants with their newer counterparts. These observations ae commentaries on the main action, something like a secondary theme recurring in a symphony and responding to the main theme.

As in a symphony, the observations build to a climax. As Montale's world reels into total chaos (bodies pile up, killers and victims turn out to be connected in unexpected ways, and fascists of an especially evil kind turn up in high places — or dead), the comparison of poor white Italian and Spanish immigrants with poor dark-skinned Arabs intensifies into identification. In one of the novel's numerous flashbacks, Montale and friends comtemplate with grim amusement the situation of Spanish and Neapolitan immigrants to Marseilles. "What are we, after all?" one friend asks, to which the other responds "Arabs!" and all burst into laughter, the climax and the realization of all that had been implied first by comparison and then by identification.

And this may be the taking-off point for a post about politics in crime novels. Cheerio!

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Jean-Claude Izzo's "Total Chaos": Music and Poetry

I'm nearly through Total Chaos, the densely atmospheric and downbeat first novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy.

A few notes before a full-scale comment in the next day or two:

1) Too many noirish writers these days use a protagonist's musical tastes as shorthand for his or her state of mind. I'm not sure when writers started doing this in a big way; maybe Ian Rankin's John Rebus popularized it, with his taste for the Rolling Stones. In any case, the device has become a cliche, and it can seem cheap. You know, the author is too lazy to write how his hero feels like a boozy piece of crap, so he types the words "Tom Waits" and feels that he's done his job. (I wonder if writers picked this up from the by-now stereotypical moody saxophone soundtrack of countless crime movies and TV shows.)

Two things set Izzo apart from this group. The first is that his Fabio Montale's musical tastes are better and more varied than those of most modern noir protagonists. He listens to Paco de Lucia and lots of Michel Petrucciani, for example. French singers. Italian singers. Other characters listen to Marseillais rap or to rai. This music is different enough that it serves as a real character marker and mood setter rather than just an easy label.

The second is a frequent poignance of presentation. Montale hears music coming from another room or from inside an apartment. Outside, he muses on the music and the person playing it, and on his separation from her. This, I think, contributes to the sense of wistfulness and fatalism that some have seen in the trilogy.

2) There's poetry here. Characters recite it, read it, talk about it, reminisce about it. The poetry is usually intense and romantic, and so is the effect. In only one scene does the poetry seem an affectation, because there is too little poetry, and too much talk about poetry. I felt torn from the novel's fictional world and plunked down in a lecture from Izzo about what he liked. When reading a novel, I care nothing for the author, everything for the characters.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Marseilles Trilogy, part I

Two thoughts on the beginning of Total Chaos, the first novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy (which also includes Chourmo and Solea):

1) I don't know what the weather is like in the opening chapters, but it feels like rain. Either like rain, or like relentless sun beating everything into silence.

2) Total Chaos has not been made into a movie, as far as I know, but, based on the novel's early pages, I imagine a film shot through with dissolves, sudden transitions and flashbacks to capture leaps of time and place -- a challenge, in other words, for a director who wants to keep a film watchable. On paper, on the other hand, these opening chapters are gorgeous.

P.S. The trilogy was the basis for a 2001 French television miniseries starring Alain Delon, that classy portrayer of gangsters in atmospheric settings.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006