Leitmotifs, tag lines, and a question for readers

In Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy novels, it's the protagonist checking under his car for mercury tilt switch bombs. In Fred Vargas' Debout Les Morts (translated as The Three Evangelists), the glue is merde, in its various semantic and syntactic forms--that, and the tag line "il haussa les épaules" ("he shrugged [his] shoulders.")  And Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels always repeat the protagonist's back story, the part about his return from Vietnam to find his wife involved with another man whom he kills in a particularly creative manner and about the reason he avoids prison for the crime.

I've written before about leitmotifs in crime novels, what they contribute to a book's texture, its feeling. (This is not the sort of thing one often reads about in discussions of books.)

Max Allan Collins

"Leitmotifs in fiction are more than quirks," I wrote, "less than plot elements. A leitmotif should, according to a definition of leitmotifs' use in music, be "clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances." Used well, it indicates an author in control of his or her material, with a firm idea of what kind of story he or she wants to tell. Leitmotifs might not come to mind right away if someone asks you what happens in a given novel, but they are part of what a novel is about, part of the world it creates."

Now it's your turn: What are your favorite tag lines and recurring motifs in crime novels or stories? What do such refrains add to a story?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2017

At the 2017 Edgar Awards, with acceptance speeches!

Last year's Edgar Awards speeches by Sara Paretsky and Walter Mosley so impressed me that I thought the two authors would make a good presidential ticket. The only problem, I wrote, would be deciding who would take the top spot.

"It would have to be Sara Paretsky," Mosley said as we collected drinks at the Edgars bar (one of several bars, really) this year, which is one example of why I enjoy this annual gala: Mingling is fun for we fans, and sometimes the stars say entertaining things.

Max Allan Collins

Mosley was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master at last year's Edgars; Max Allan Collins was one of this year's honorees, and a chat with him before the awards dinner was a highlight of the evening. I first met Max at the 2014 Bouchercon in Long Beach, where he was a panelist on a discussion I moderated on "Beyond Hammett and Chandler: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras." Max was on that panel to talk about other authors, but I read one of his Quarry novels out of curiosity and liked it so much that I read in short order the rest of the books then available. (One more Quarry title has appeared since, and another is due later this year from Hard Case Crime, which has republished the entire series.)

Lawrence Block,
winner of the Best
Short Story Edgar

Max discussed Roy Huggins and Ennis Willie on that 2014 panel, and he was pleased to talk about Huggins with me again this year, about Huggins' influence on subsequent generations of crime writers through his co-creation of The Rockford Files. He also had some nice things to say about one of his publishers, complete with examples to back up his praise. Collins' appreciation of the crime genre and its history is bracing, and you should talk with him if you get the chance. In the meantime, hear and see his Grand Master acceptance speech on the MWA website at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZe5x2f-iBU

Lisa Lutz, Megan Abbott

The evening's other new Grand Master, Ellen Hart, exemplified something I love about crime conventions and other events: the chance to get acquainted with authors and genres out of my wheelhouse.  Hart is a lesbian, and she writes mysteries with lesbian protagonists that sound to me like cozies. Neither has been a part of my reading experience, and I found quite moving Hart's statement that her protagonists had been criticized for not being gay enough. That, I would imagine, is one more burden she has to bear that most other authors do not. You can hear and watch Hart's speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWiLaWsVId4

Donna Andrews

Among the awards, Adrian McKinty's capture of the Best Paperback Original award for Rain Dogs was a highlight. McKinty was home in Melbourne, but his wife, Leah, did a nice job accepting his prize. I've been a McKinty fan for years. You should be, too.

*

Charles Todd, Hank Phillippi
Ryan, Wendy Corsi Staub, nom-
inees for the Mary Higgins
Clark Award. Todd won.

Visit the MWA website at http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html for a complete list of the Edgar Award winners and nominees.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Max Allan Collins has fun with history

Max Allan Collins has his usual fun with history in Quarry in the Black, published in 2016 and set in 1972, during the Richard Nixon-George McGovern presidential campaign.

One example is Quarry's dismissive reference to Watergate as a third-burglary — fun because that echoes Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler's dismissal of the scandal that would bring his boss down, and also because Collins is a liberal Democrat.

In a grimmer vein, the novel cites a legacy of anti-black discrimination in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb I suspect many people never heard of before the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, 42 years after the time of the novel's setting.

Max Allan Collins.
Photos by Peter
Rozovsky

Historical novelists, or those who simply set their books in the best without necessarily exploring that past seriously, have the disadvantage of hindsight: They know how the history turned out, and their job then becomes to wield that knowledge lightly, to remember at all times that the characters cannot possibly know what the author does. Collins' Ferguson passages veer close to bookishness, to my mind, but the Watergate references as well as an allusion to Rosa Parks are delightful, a wink from Collins to his readers right over the unsuspecting heads of his characters.

Your question is who else does this well? Who else writes crime fiction set in the past, uses history lightly, and never forgets that the characters do not know how events will shake out? John Lawton provides a beautiful example in A Little White Death. Who else does it as well or almost as well?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Max Allan Collins on Jack Carter's Law

How tough and convincingly authentic is Ted Lewis' 1974 novel Jack Carter's Law?  Here's what Max Allan Collins had to say in his introduction to Syndicate Books' recent reissue of the novel:

"Spillane's fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis's London, and while [Mike] Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods."

Maybe that bleakness, that deadpan is what makes so many of Carter's observations so unsettling and so funny at the same time, including this, about the two gangster bosses for whom he is an enforcer and planner:

"The room I am in is all Swedish.  It's a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they'd let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees ... the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple's closing-down sale."

Jack Carter's Law is bleaker and wittier than the just about anything in the great Richard Stark's bleak and witty Parker novels. And it has the style that modern-day makers of gangster movies such as Guy Ritchie can only dream about.

===========

Jordan Foster will discuss Ted Lewis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Where does Spillane stop and Collins start?: A job for the style detective and some questions for readers

I've read a few crime fiction collaborations by authors who have also established literary identities on their own, and I sometimes play the idle game of trying to guess which partner in responsible for a given narrative passage or line of dialogue.

The Consummata is not a typical collaboration. Mickey Spillane began the book as a sequel to a novel of his that had appeared in 1967, and he gave the unfinished manuscript to Max Allan Collins years later. Collins then completed the novel, which finally appeared under the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2011.

I don't know how complete the book was when Spillane handed it over, and I don't know what changes Collins made over the many years it was in his custody. But I detected a few small stylistic changes in the novel's climactic section that could suggest a different hand at work, or perhaps the same hand many years later.  This was mostly a matter of repetition of words, one in particular, and a mildly political jab I fancy likelier to have come from the liberal Collins than the right-wing Spillane. Some of the wit in the section is also slyer than what I associate with Spillane, more a wink than a hearty clap between shoulder blades.

(My favorite sentence in the novel, however, does not figure in this discussion: "He conked his head on the porcelain edge of the crapper.")

Have you ever read a collaboration between two authors?  Have you ever tried to guess which author wrote what? What is likely to make you attribute a given passage to one rather than the other? Tone? Prose style? Something else?

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

(When you're done, read an interview from the Rap Sheet in which Max Allan Collins talks about Spillane, his own work, and a lot more. And read Collins on anything and everything at maxallancollins.com. Collins was on a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. The man would be worth listening to on the subject of crime fiction and its history even if he hadn't written any of the stuff himself. Collins was my intro to Roy Huggins and Ennis Willie, for example.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Mickey Spillane could write for the critics, whether he admitted it or not

"`A man of such determination I must kiss,' she said."

*

"From nowhere. From everywhere. ... She is a rumor. A wisp of smoke. A legend."

They just don't write like that anymore, and that's good. Not too many people write like the following anymore, either, which is too bad:

"The coin flips again, comes up tails, and an intern looking for a gold star goes to the trouble of fingerprinting an accident victim whose I.D. somehow got lost in the shuffle, and those prints get sent to a local precinct house and on to Washington, and you? You're not even awake yet." 

All three examples are from The Consummata, started by Mickey Spillane as a sequel to his 1967 novel The Delta Factor, abandoned, completed by Max Allan Collins, and published by Hard Case Crime in 2011.    I don't know if the first two examples are bad writing as much as they are badly dated; perhaps they would have seemed fresher a half-century ago.  The third example, though, is wryly comic and works just as well today as it could have when it was written. (All three examples are from the first half of the book, so I'm guessing they're Spillane's rather than Collins'.)

Spillane may have sneered at critics, but the hell with him; the man had chops even if not every sentence has aged well. (Here's a post about Spillane's late-career novel Dead Street, also published by Hard Case. The book is a worthwhile mix of bluster, nostalgia, and, I suspect, Spillane having a bit of fun with his own tough-guy reputation. The book's cracks about 21st-century events rendered in typical tough-guy Spillane style are great fun and a reminder that, though people may think of him as a 1950s writer, he wrote almost until his death in 2006 and he still had something left in the literary tank at the end.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Max Allan Collins, Tim O'Mara, and other professionals, plus a question for readers

You have to figure that someone with something over a hundred books to his credit knows how to get the job done, and Max Allan Collins does.  I first made the acquaintance of Collins' Quarry novels as I prepared to moderate a panel at Bouchercon 2014 of which Collins was a member, and I reacted, in part, thus:

"His three most recent Quarry novels, the latest in a series that began in the 1970s, suggest that Collins shared the savvy professionalism of the pulp and paperback-original writers who will be the panel's main subject."

The three most recent Quarrys at the time were numbers eight, nine, and ten, and book eleven, Quarry's Choice, is newly out from Hard Case Crime.  How does an author keep faithful readers coming back to a series without, however, boring them? By retaining familiar set pieces, but putting a slightly new spin on each.  By occasionally introducing major changes in the protagonist's life without ever deviating from his or her essential character markers.

Collins does it again in Quarry's Choice. Quarry readers, for example, will know the character's backstory, how he returned from Vietnam, found his wife in bed with another man, and killed the man the next day. They will be familiar with Quarry's telling of the story near the beginning of each book, complete with the lover's coarse dismissal of Quarry just before his own death, how Quarry wound up being recruited to work as a contract killer.  That coarse dismissal is always the same, and it's a pretty funny line, a familiar old friend to readers. And yet the story varies in the manner of telling just enough from book to book to avoid putting readers off.

And I like, too, the balance that Quarry manages to maintain between nice guy and the sort of amorality characteristic of a man who kills people for a living.  Even when Quarry does the sort of thing to melt one's heart, Collins is savvy enough to infuse the situation with just enough menace to create suspense and tension.

***

I knew I was likely to like Tim O'Mara's Dead and Red when it opened with the narrator/protagonist not hearing the shot that killed the man sitting next to him in a taxi, and with everything fading not to black, but rather to white as the narrator lapses into unconsciousness. And I like the combination of menace and comedy that characterizes the relationship between the protagonist, Raymond Donne, and a fellow ex-cop.  Small touches, perhaps, but the sort of thing likely to keep me reading..

(O'Mara is a teacher by day, and a crime writer when not teaching. Could his protagonist's name be a tribute to Raymond Chandler and John Donne?)

***

And now your turn, readers: What does professionalism mean to you in crime writing? Forget inspiration and genius for the moment, and just tell me which writers are simply good at their jobs.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon 2014 in a few more words and pictures

Gary Phillips brought up the mysterious Roosevelt Mallory during the  "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.  I now have Double Trouble, third of Mallory's four Radcliff novels, on order.


I've already mentioned my discovery of Dolores Hitchens, Charlotte Armstrong, Roy Huggins, and Ennis Willie in the course of my preparation for the panel, thanks to panelists Sarah Weinman, Sara J. Henry, and Max Allan Collins.

This was an especially rich Bouchercon for new discoveries, and I'm grateful to the panelists who helped me make them. (I intend no slight to the fifth panelist, Charles Kelly. I'd already started reading his author, Dan J. Marlowe, two years before the convention.) And here are a few more photos from Bouchercon 2014, all photos by your formerly humble blog keeper, with the exception of the Double Trouble cover.

At left is Ingrid Willis, who did such a fine job as chair of this year's Bouchercon. The noirish fellow at right is Stacey Cochran, who is doing the same job for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. I've already registered. Have you?

Finally, two pics of my Bouchercon peeps and one from after the con. At left, Ali Karim points to the visual welcome from the Hyatt Regency Long Beach. At right/below, Mike Stotter contemplates the world through the prism of David Morrell's Macavity Award for Murder As a Fine Art. Below left, a mammoth reflected in the Lake Pit at the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits. The mammoth is a reproduction based on fossil evidence. The oily slick is real.  (Read all my Bouchercon posts from before, during, and after the convention.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bouchercon, Days 1 and 2

A few highlights of Bouchercon's first two full days:

Sara Blaedel

John McFetridge

Both panels I moderated Friday went supremely well. Many thanks to panelists Gerard Brennan, Paul Charles, Stuart Neville, Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, Saeah Weinman.

Two women at the bar mistook me for Jon "Crimespree/organizer of Bouchercons/center of the crime fiction universe" Jordan, though one conceded she was drunk at the time.

Mark Billingham

Kwei Quartey

Ali Karim, Stav Sheewx

Mike Stotter, Bob Truluck

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Roy Huggins

First things first: The book 77 Sunset Strip is not a novel, its cover billing as "An original suspense novel by Roy Huggins" to the contrary. Rather, it is portions of three stories, two published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946, one in Esquire in 1952, linked by the flimsiest, most cursory narrative thread imaginable and published as an "original" novel in 1958, which just happened to be the first season of the Huggins-created television series 77 Sunset Strip.

Fortunately, two of the portions are superb, easily justifying Max Allan Collins' assertion that Huggins was "a fine crime writer, and he may have become one of the giants of the genre had he not gone Hollywood." But, Collins goes on, "had he not gone Hollywood, we would not have 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files."

One often encounters the largely spurious distinction between storytellers and wordsmiths. Huggins was both. His writing is full of narrative or descriptive bits that would be routine but for Huggins' verbal twists, his knack of imparting a sense of foreboding to even the most trivial observations. His protagonist, a private investigator named Stuart Bailey, is knocked unconscious and — stop me if you've heard this before — comes to in a motel room to discover he's alone.   "Nobody lived in this room anymore," Bailey thinks, and that packs a melancholy punch that, say, "Harvey and Muriel were gone" or "the room was as empty as the feeling in my gut" just can't match. (The story has Bailey falsely suspected of murder, on the run, on his own, short of just about everything a man needs to survive. I'll give my right arm if that's not The Fugitive in embryonic form.)

The first story similarly demonstrates Huggins' flair for enlivening by verbal power alone a routine P.I. fiction set piece, in this case that of the slightly seedy investigator — in Los Angeles, naturally— reflecting wryly on the joys and hazards of his profession:

"Sunset Strip us a body of County territory entirely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, a mile and a half of relentlessly contemporary architecture, housing, restaurants, bistros, Hollywood agents, and shops where the sell is as soft as a snowflake and just as cold."

Find me a word-picture of L.A. this side of Raymond Chandler better than that one. And how about Bailey's observation that "if a private investigator keeps an open mind and avoids drafts he can learn an awful lot about his fellow man."? I like creative twists on de rigueur crime-fiction scenes, and I love avoids drafts.

The third story-portion of 77 Sunset Strip is a piece of high-concept piffle, a strained English-style country-house mystery adapted to mid-century Los Angeles with a ludicrous solution and a touch of 1950s techno-paranoia thrown in. But the first two parts of the book are so good that the letdown in Part Three hardly matters.

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

Max Allan Collins will discuss Roy Huggins on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, Calif., next month. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras," and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs

I needed a Doc Savage novel for one of my Bouchercon  panels, and I thought Port Richmond Books might have one or two if anyone did. "Oh, yeah," owner Greg Gillespie said, with a solemn nod. He ducked into an office and fetched not one, not two, but a box full of Docs and then, before I could pick my jaw back up from the floor, he handed me another armful, some omnibuses, some single-novel volumes, mostly 1960s reprints of the books, which first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. (I bought two books, not two boxes of books.) Port Richmond Books  — Your Doc Savage Headquarters.

I also bought 77 Sunset Strip, a novel by Roy Huggins, who created the television series of the same name.  Max Allan Collins will discuss Huggins on the same moderated-by-me Bouchercon panel where Sara J. Henry talks up Doc Savage's main author, Lester Dent. Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs.

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

The panel in question is Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Gary Phillips, Charles Kelly, and Sarah Weinman will join Max and Sara on the panel. See you there.

I took some photos on the way to and from Port Richmond.  Can you detect a theme common to my photography ad my shopping?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Sara J. Henry joins Team Detectives Beyond Borders for Bouchercon 2014 panel

Sara J. Henry has joined the "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel that I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, Calif.

Sara is the author of the novels Learning to Swim and A Cold and Lonely Place, the latter of which will be up for the best-novel Anthony Award at Bouchercon. For my panel, she'll discuss Lester Dent, the prolific principal author of Doc Savage, with a few remarks about Charlotte Armstrong, whose A Dram of Poison won the best-novel Edgar Award in 1957.

I met Sara at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, where she made her first big crime-fiction splash when everyone but me mistook her for Sarah Weinman. That's why I'm especially tickled that Sarah Weinman will also be on the panel. (Get a sneak peak at Sara and Sarah here, and see what all the confusion was about.)

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

Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Not everyone on the panel is named Sara or Sarah, spent formative years in Ontario, or is haunted by a crime-fiction doppelganger. Max Allan Collins, Charles Kelly, and Gary Phillips will also take part. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Max Allan Collins on Jack Carter's Law

Max Allan Collins will be on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 next month in Long Beach, Calif. He'll discuss writers from the past (The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras), but I decided to read some of his own work as part of my preparation. I read his Quarry novels, liked them, read the graphic novel Road to Perdition, and liked it.

Then I decided to take a break with Jack Carter Law's, second in Syndicate Books' welcome reissues of the great Ted Lewis' catalogue, and lo, this new edition of Lewis' chilling, funny, deadpan 1974 classic comes with an introduction by—Max Allan Collins.

Collins notes Lewis' bleak sense of place and Carter's deadpan first-person narration. (Carter is also the protagonist of Get Carter, published originally as Jack's Return Home, then retitled after the success of the celebrated movie that starred Michael Caine. He is also the protagonist of Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, coming soon from Syndicate.) Did I mention bleakness?  Here's Collins comparing Lewis and Carter to Collins' beloved Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer:

"Spillane's fever-dream Manhattan is never as real as Lewis's London, and while Hammer is a good guy who defeats bad guys with their own methods, Carter is simply a bad guy with methods."

Maybe that bleakness, that deadpan is what makes so many of Carter's observations so unsettling and so funny at the same time, including this, about the two gangster bosses for whom he is an enforcer and planner:

"The room I am in is all Swedish.  It's a big room, low-ceilinged, and when Gerald and Les had it built on top of the club they'd let a little poof called Kieron Beck have his way with the soft furnishings. Everything about the room is dead right. The slightly sunken bit in the middle lined with low white leather settees ... the curtains that make a noise like paper money when you draw them—everything is perfect. The only things that look out of place are Gerald and Les. So much so that they make the place look as if you could have picked all the stuff up at Maple's closing-down sale."

Jack Carter's Law is. so far, bleaker and wittier than the just about anything in the great Richard Stark's bleak and witty Parker novels. And it has the style that modern-day makers of gangster movies such as Guy Ritchie can only dream about.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Off the Cuff on names, plus why the hell am I flying to Bouchercon (when I could go by train)?

(Trees early in the morning in Fullerton, Calif., December 2013.
Photo by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper)

I've been reading Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels, which makes Dietrich Kalteis and Martin J. Frankson's latest Off the Cuff post especially timely: It's about character names in crime fiction. "For example," writes Frankson:

"is it credible to have a twenty-year-old Edith or Beryl or Victor? It’s possible, but those names may be unknown in certain demographics. Similarly, how many fifty-year-olds are named Kanye or Jadyn? If one really wants to name a character as such, a bit of backstory behind the mismatching name-to-age might be interesting in the story."

I would add any name ending in -ee to that latter group, along with Jen, and all the world's non-Irish Brendans.

The photo, reproduced above, with which Dietrich illustrates the discussion, is also timely. I've been posting about Bouchercon 2014, which takes place next month in Long Beach, Calif., about 25 miles west and south of Fullerton, where I took that photo of palm trees at sunrise last year.

I took the photo from my compartment in the Southwest Chief, at the end of a glorious two-day train ride from Chicago to Los Angeles. So why, given the chance to repeat the trip for Bouchercon, am I willingly subjecting myself to the misery that is American commercial air travel?

(See all Off the Cuff posts.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The books my Bouchercon panelists die for

Five members of panels I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach next month contributed to Books to Die For, John Connolly and Declan Burke's 2012 collection of essays by crime writers about their own favorite crime novels and stories. Here's some of what my panelist/contributors had to say about the writers who influenced them:

"Dexter's books are essentially puzzles. He once said that he was as anxious for the detective to manage without a pathology lab as he was for the crossword puzzler to manage without a dictionary."

-- Paul Charles on Colin Dexter 

"For all the talk of Hammett and Chandler as the founders of the hard-boiled feasts--and I revere them as much as the next guy or gal--it's Spillane and [James M.] Cain who were the most influential."

-- Max Allan Collins on Mickey Spillane 

"As she grew more successful and confident, the humanity began to drain from her books. Most of us would not act like the unruffled, aloof Tom Ripley, but every one of us could see himself falling into the abyss of cowardice and mendacity that finally drives poor Guy Haines to kill."

-- Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train 

"The greatest thing I've gained from Ellroy is the will to take my characters farther and deeper into the dark places than I, or the reader, might be comfortable with."

-- Stuart Neville on James Ellroy 

"This was not literature that uplifted the race. Cooper wasn't profiled in the pages of Ebony or, I imagine, discussed much, if at all, among the self-identified arts and literature crowd. The Urban League wouldn't be inviting him to speak at their annual dinner."

-- Gary Phillips on Clarence Cooper Jr.'s The Scene

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

Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 on Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m.  Max Allan Collins and Gary Phillips will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday at 3 p.m..

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Max Allan Collins just wants to have fun

Max Allan Collins will discuss other writers during a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 next month, but his own work is worth reading as well. His three most recent Quarry novels, the latest in a series that began in the 1970s, suggest that Collins shared the savvy professionalism of the pulp and paperback-original writers who will be the panel's main subject.

The three books—Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry, each published by Hard Case Crime—begin with the hitman/entrepreneur protagonist, Quarry, embarking on a job. (Collins sets the books in the Reagan era and has just enough fun with the period's social, political, and, most of all, musical trappings to remind readers of the setting without getting in the story's way.)

Quarry became a hitman after military service in Vietnam, where he learned to kill; killed his boss after the boss cheated him; then created and exploited a niche in the murder market: He uses his boss' old files to track the contract killers long enough to figure out who their targets are, then goes to the targets and offers to kill the killers for a handsome fee—which he does in due course, about a third of the way through each book. And that's where the real fun starts, and Quarry is forced to turn detective and figure out who the bad guys really are.

This format lets Collins exploit any number of crime and adventure conventions. Quarry is a disillusioned Vietnam vet, though without the psychological baggage. He's a tough-guy ass-kicker with a bit of the wise-cracking self-awareness of the Saint. He's a mildly self-effacing babe magnet, with an amiable susceptibility to women, a Shell Scott with more sex and fewer extravagant anatomical similes. And, when compelled to figure out who's really who, and who wants what and why, he makes a more than credible detective.

Along the way, the books' (possible) crime-fiction references include Richard Stark's Parker: Quarry in the Middle has one character apprehensive that Quarry plans to rob a casino, a la The Handle. But Quarry laughs and reassures his nervous interlocutor that he, Quarry, is part of no plunder squad. (One of Collins' other series pays amusing tribute to crime and espionage classics in such titles as A Shroud for Aquarius and The Baby Blue Rip-Off.)

I don't know how the Quarry series has changed over the years, whether the earlier novels are more straightforward hitman tales than these later ones. Nor do I know whether those early books partake as freely of the crime-fiction smorgasbord. But Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry take a '50s-style tough guy, give him a '60-style back story, and set the results in the 1970s. Pastiche? Maybe, but by God, Collins pulls it off, and has lots of fun doing it.

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

Max Allan Collins will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday, Nov. 14, 3 p.m. at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Ferdowsi is a bit like Max Allan Collins, too

Rostam rescues Bizhan from the pit,
from a 17th-century manuscript of
the Shahnameh, London, British Library

I've been reading Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels in preparation for a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in November. I've also been reading the Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, a book in connection with which I invoked Raymond Chandler yesterday.

One of those books includes a sequence in which the hero falls for the wrong dame and winds up getting drugged, kidnapped, and imprisoned despite the following precaution:

"He always carried in his boot / A blue-steel dagger."

Can you guess where in my recent reading that's from? (Hint: The book was written in the 10th and 11th centuries.)

While you're doing that, join once again in a favorite Detectives Beyond Borders game, and name some great literature that shares elements with crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: The Wrong Quarry, Max Allan Collins' '60s-style original

Max Allan Collins will be on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in November.  He'll discuss writers from the past, so I thought I take a look at his own writing to see what it owes to those authors and how it differs from their work.

For one thing, Collins has written about as much as some of the old-timers did, a list prolifically long, especially by today's more polished standards. And The Wrong Quarry (2014), most recent in Collins' long-running series about a U.S. Marine sniper turned hit man, stays faithful to terse, tough-guy narrative, a la Richard Stark or Ennis Willie, while seasoning things with more contemporary touches and topical references (Ronald Reagan, Deep Purple) that keep the story from sliding into nostalgia or pastiche.

The sex is just a little more explicit than that of early 1960s sleaze paperbacks without, however, getting as graphic as the more graphic of today's crime fiction.  I especially like the novel's handling of a gay character, flamboyant and safely exotic, in the approved 1940s-1960s manner, yet thoroughly aware that such flamboyance is a front and a shield. Collins' Web site says his rock and roll band plays an "engaging mix of classic rock and their own '60s-style originals." That's The Wrong Quarry: A fast-paced, entertaining '60s-style original.

While I read the novel's second half, I'll ask readers to ponder these questions: How do books or a movies preserve the feeling of a previous time or style without turning into nostalgia?  What are your favorite examples?

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Max Allan Collins will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday, Nov. 14, 3 p.m. at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchecon panels: "The third time he pulled the trigger she disappeared"

This post's title is the end of Ennis Willie's story "Con's Wife." The story's first line is "He had three eyes."  For all the talk about Willie's tough-guy persona and his raw, first-draft prose style, and his roots in sleaze magazines and paperbacks of the 1960s, the man could write.

He's Richard S. Prather without the jokes, Mickey Spillane without the political frothing to which Spillane could descend at his worst.  His protagonist, Sand, is what Carroll John Daly's Race Williams would have been if Daly had been a better writer.

Willie is also a bit of a mystery man, at various times thought to be a) African American, b) Mickey Spillane, or c) dead, though the truth turns out to be simpler and, hence, more mysterious than the speculation.  You can read him in two collections available from Ramble House: Sand's Game and Sand's War, which include novels, stories, and appreciations from leading hard-boiled writers and commentators, including Bill Crider, Max Allan Collins, and Bill Pronzini.

So get your Willie. He's tough, fast, satisfying and, thanks to Ramble House, cheap. (Read the first chapter of Death in a Dead Place, included in Sand's Game, on the Ramble House Web site.)

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Max Allan Collins will offer some comments on Ennis Willie as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: "I met Gloria at a fly-by-night school in Long Beach"

This post's title is taken from The Double Take, by Roy Huggins, a great creator and co-creator of television series (Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files) who, according to Max Allan Collins, might have become one of the giants of crime writing had he not gone Hollywood.

Collins knows his Huggins, and he'll talk about Huggins as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in the very same Long Beach where Norma Shannon met "Gloria" in The Double Take.

Roy Huggins

The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

In the meantime, read the Thrilling Detective Web Site on Huggins,  Stephen J. Cannell's memories of Huggins and a summing up of Huggins' television career from the Museum of Broadcast Communications, complete with an impressive list of credits.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014