More crime in New York

Alison Gaylin. Photos by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond
Borders

Another day, another crime fiction event at Mysterious Bookshop. This time it was Alison Gaylin talking about her new novel If I Die Tonight on Tuesday with Megan Abbott for a crowd that included Sarah Weinman and other luminaries I'd have had a chance to talk to if I hadn't had to get back to work.

Elsewhere, well, from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side, New York is just a fine place to do some shooting. And let me tell you: The hotels up there are nicer than the ones down here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

What they said at the 2016 Edgar Awards, or Paretsky-Mosley for president

All photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky

Star systems sometimes work. Two of the biggest stars at the Mystery Writers of America's 2016 Edgar Awards dinner also cut two of the evening's most impressive figures. Walter Mosley, honored as the organization's 2016 grand master, spoke with exemplary humility, passion, and great good humor, often about subjects this country finds it difficult to discuss.

Sara Paretsky

And Sara Paretsky, named a grand master five years ago and the MWA's outgoing president, reported on her term in a way that suggested she could run any damned thing she wanted to.  I was even more impressed after a discussion with her at a post-awards party. Mosley and Paretsky would make a dynamic, popular, and, for all I know, capable presidential ticket. They could flip a coin to decide who would be president and who vice. W. Paul Coates, who introduced Mosley, would make a fine press secretary.

Martin Edwards

Other speakers were thought-provoking and inspirational in the best possible non-maudlin way. Margaret Kinsman, a scholar who received the MWA's Raven Award, said: "I would like you storytellers to know we in academics are some of your biggest fans."

Martin Edwards, whose book The Golden Age of Murder won the Best Critical/Biographical Edgar, said he had "tried to address the rather patronizing attitude ... to these thoughtful mysteries of the 1920s."

Janet Rudolph

It was good to see Janet Rudolph receive the Ellery Queen Award. I've written for her Mystery Readers Journal, and she's been a friend to Detectives Beyond Borders for going on 10 years and to the crime fiction community at large for two decades before that.  And it was pleasant to see that Reed Farrel Coleman took the loss of his status as crime fiction's best basketball player with something like good grace.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walter Mosley

(Find a complete list of the 2016 Edgar Award nominees and winners at the Edgars Web site.)

Duane Swierczynski

Megan Abbott

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

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.

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

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.

==========

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 

Project Noir Songs goes to Brazil

I knew Elizeth Cardoso’s “Ocultei” was a great melodramatic noir song before I understood the words. (Cardoso and the song are Brazilian, and she sings it in Portuguese.)

Atmosphere was everything: the languid, matter-of-fact singing of the opening verse giving way to vocal tremor, then building to intensity a good deal stronger than that of your average torch song. The jacket photo of Cardoso, eyes closed in concentration as she sings, a bead of sweat (or a tear) below her left eye.

Then I learned what she was singing (Lyrics translated freely if not downright ineptly by your humble blogkeeper):

  Ocultei
  Um sofrimento de morte
  Temendo a sorte
  Do grande amor que te dei

 (I blocked out
  A torment of death
  Fearing the fate
  Of the great love I gave you – and this is the matter-of-fact part!)

  Procurei
  Não perturbar nossa vida
  Que era florida
  Como, a princípio, sonhei

 (I tried
  Not to disturb our life,
  Which was going so well
  As I, at first, dreamed – A note of foreboding as sure any in a good '40s or '50s melodrama, the pause between third and fourth line adding to the effect.)

  Hoje, porem,
 Abri as portas do destino

(Today, however,
  I open the doors of destiny – and we skip to …)

  O meu ardente desejo
  Que Deus me perdoe o pecado
  É que outra mulher ao teu lado
  Te mate na hora de um beijo

  (My most ardent desire
– May God forgive me the sin! –
   Is that another woman, by your side,
   Kill you during a kiss.)

She loves him, she hates him, she begs forgiveness, she fantasizes another woman into his arms even as she dreams of his death. That's enough seething emotion to burn holes in the page or on the screen, I'd say.

And now I'm happy to be able to say you can listen for yourself. Though written by Ary Barroso, one of Brazil's best-loved popular composers, "Ocultei" is one of his less-recorded songs. I bought my copy in Brazil twelve years ago, and I'd never been able to find another recording or clip of Elizeth's version — until yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizeth Cardoso.

***

I'll be presenting Project Noir Songs at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia in November, a preliminary act for a Newport Folk Festival 1965's worth of crime-fiction talent including Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, and Joyce Carol Oates. Yes, I'm excited!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The man who created The Girl Who ...

You knew this was coming. A new book about Stieg Larsson includes an exchange of e-mails between the author of the Millennium trilogy and his editor, two of which the Wall Street Journal has published (a hat tip to Loren Eaton for calling the article to my attention).

One of the e-mails reveals disarming humility from Larsson on points his detractors have singled out:

"I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. ... I think the first few chapters are a bit long-winded, and it's a while before the plot gets under way."

Elsewhere he is less humble. "I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed," he writes, according to Laurie Thompson's translation from the Swedish. That sounds to me like a man a little too proud of what he thinks he's doing.

Some of that pride comes from Larsson's handling of gender roles.

"I have also deliberately changed the sex roles," he writes. "In many ways Blomkvist acts like a typical `bimbo,' while Lisbeth Salander has stereotypical `male' characteristics and values."

Fair enough, if rather rough, elementary and schematic. Contrast Larsson with Megan Abbott, a better writer by orders of magnitude, talking about her novel Queenpin in a 2008 interview with Detectives Beyond Borders:

"The men are in there primarily to mediate the two women's relationship with each other, much as female characters function so often in classic noir triangles. Ultimately, though, the gender switch changed everything and nothing. On the one hand, it struck me how little difference it made; that mentor/protégé relationships are always about power and ambition, and this was no different. On the other hand, the particular complexities in relationships between women really interest me, as do the forms female power can take, forms that may be different from male power."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fresh noir

It's been a recurring motif of my thinking about crime fiction: the occasional work that finds some new theme, setting or technique to bring back the kick that noir and the hardest of hard-boiled used to have.

Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's Scalped did this for me most recently. Novels by Megan Abbott and Declan Burke had done so earlier. The three works accomplished this in different ways, primarily (though not exclusively) through setting and artwork in the first case, character in the second and action in the third.

What about you? What relatively recent crime writing has found new ways to deliver that nasty kick of a Hammett, a Chandler, a (Paul) Cain, a Jonathan Latimer, a Goodis or a Jim Thompson? How did it do so?

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

P.S. I was remiss yesterday in not thanking Brian Lindenmuth for bringing Scalped to my attention and letting me read his bound collection of the first five issues.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The taking of Meme 123

I've just received a visit from an old friend, the Page 123 meme. You know that one. It's the one that asks you to:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open it to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Pass the meme on to five more people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

This meme first came my way April 22 , and my reply gave rise to a stimulating interview with Megan Abbott, whose novel Queenpin I happened to be reading at the time. So I have fond feelings toward Page 123, and I thank Sidhubaba, from the city formerly known as Calcutta, for sending it my way again.

The meme has been around awhile, though, and I may be unable to come up with five people who have not been tagged already. But I am happy to fulfill the rest of the assignment, and shortly thereafter, I will add the book in question to the roster of Forgotten Books that deserve to be better remembered.

The book is The Etruscan Bull by Frank Gruber. Happily, Page 123 begins with a new sentence, which means no worrying over whether a sentence that spills over onto a second page is the last sentence of Page 122 or the first sentence of Page 123.

Sentences 6, 7, 8, Page 123 of this enjoyable, humorous, action- and history-packed thriller are:

"A gun in Carmela's fist roared and a bullet kicked some splinters from the wall only inches from Logan.

"Logan fired once at the car itself, shifted to cover Rocco again. `Stop him, Rocco, or you get it — "

Shooting is usually good for a dose of excitement, and the sentence's ending in a dash, breaking off before any of you find out what happens, is a nice touch. If only the Carmela in question were a woman! That might have nudged the passage into the Page 123 Hall of Fame.

And now, readers, let's blow this meme to the stars. I invite all of you to take the Page 123 challenge with your current book. Let me know what happens!

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Frank Gruber

Noir, sex and betrayal: Part II of an interview with Megan Abbott

In the second part of her interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Megan Abbott talks about some of the tensions and traditions that lie behind her novel Queenpin, winner of the 2008 Edgar Award for best paperback original. The novel tells the story of a young woman attracted by the aura of a powerful gangster named Gloria Denton, the queenpin of the title.

(Read Part I of the interview with Megan Abbott here.)
=================================

Queenpin is full of intimate, commanding, almost-threatening, almost-sexual gestures from Gloria Denton toward the protagonist. Is my imagination overheating, or is this another hint of dangerous, because forbidden, sex? If so, were such elements present in early crime stories? Or did I answer that one when I referred to gansels?

In part, I think a sexual edge generally shows itself in mentor/protégé tales (or in a lot of the intense male friendships that appear in hardboiled fiction, e.g., Glass Key, Long Goodbye). And stories of entering a life of crime are always a seduction of one kind of another. It's hard to avoid it — and when it's a story of a young person wanting to be like or become their mentor, or a mentor wanting to shape their student into a younger version of themselves — well, that line between identification and desire can become pretty hard to detect. The intimacy and fear of betrayal mimics or even supplants a romantic relationship. Gloria treats the protagonist with more respect and more gallantry than her lover ever does.

So much for sex; on to power and betrayal. Gloria Denton radiates power, yet you also have her display the scars that torture has left on her. It's clear why she shows these to the kid/protagonist. Why do you show them to the reader?

As a reader, I always like moments of unveiling. Up until that time, the world the protagonist is entering has been just about glamour. And then she has to see the price, even if she may not be able to understand it yet. And, to me, it's Gloria's first intimate gesture toward the protagonist. It's a warning but also a sharing thing. A confidence.

Plenty of crime movies are about a gangster's rise. Plenty of noir is about falls into abysses of one kind or another. Without, I hope, giving away too much, Queenpin contains elements of both. Is this new?

Gosh, I think the criminal's rise, except in the most giddy of gangster fantasies, is almost always presented as a terrible fall as well. But I guess that the kind of fall is different than in noir. The fall is kind of glorious in classic gangster tales, as in Scarface, rather than a quicksand descent into darkness or an existential dead-end as in most noir. And I think the former is closer to what I have in Queenpin. The common separator of hardboiled vs. noir — hardboiled novels offer some kind of order restoration at the end — well, I think for me that's more where Queenpin fits.

Were there any real-life queenpins?

There are a few, but my biggest inspiration was Virginia Hill, the one after whom Bugsy Siegel purportedly named the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas. She moved money and goods for the mob and somehow lasted for years in the most treacherous of positions. She had figured out long ago how to run with the wolves, and that kind of smarts was so dazzling to me. There were so many legends about her, and she was one of those figures where you think the legends, as over-the-top as they are, don't even come close to capturing what went on in this woman's life, what went on behind her eyes.

Without plot spoilers, can you discuss how notions of betrayal figured in your thinking as you were planning and writing Queenpin?

It was at its center. I really wanted to do a classic mentor-protégé tale, and I wanted the threat of betrayal to be about so much more than business. I wanted it to hurt. Teachers and students always want things from each other that they can't even name. They want everything. And when you transplant that dynamic to the crime world, the stakes become so high. I hoped readers wouldn't always be so sure where their allegiances lie either. I know mine shifted. As a reader, I like that unsteady feeling. It keeps me on my toes.

(Read Part I of the interview with Megan Abbott here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Megan Abbott

Noir, sex and betrayal: An interview with Megan Abbott, Part I

Noir is like obscenity: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For this reader, noir hits me hard in the stomach with an ending in which a protagonist goes knowingly to his or her fate. Call it resignation, even if that resignation is sometimes triumphant. By that yardstick, Megan Abbott's third novel, Queenpin, is noir, even if she does not quite agree with my assessment of its ending.

Queenpin tells the story of an innocent kid, a bookkeeper, who gets caught up in the glamour of gambling and drawn into the aura of a powerful gangster. It's an tale often told, but Abbott tells it with a difference: The two principal figures are women.

Megan Abbott is the author of two previous novels, Die a Little and The Song Is You. She is the editor of A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir and author of The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. With credits like that, it's no surprise that she has a keen eye for the sexual tensions that mark noir and hard-boiled fiction and an awareness of noir's history and traditions.

Queenpin won this year's Edgar Award for best paperback original novel from the Mystery Writers of America. Fresh from her post-Edgar euphoria, Megan Abbott talks to Detectives Beyond Borders about the novel and about the seamy tradition that it both honors and extends.

(Read Part II of the interview with Megan Abbott here.)
=======================

What is noir, and how does Queenpin fit that definition? How does it vary from it?

I tend to flee from the definition debates on noir. I always think our definitions really just reveal our passions for a particular corner of noir, and I'm no different. My favorite noir books and film share a kind of doomy romanticism, a dark glamour, the feeling of being in thrall to one's own desires. I think my attraction to that quality lurks behind Queenpin. I wanted to write one of those voice-driven, desire-leads-to-doom tales so central to noir — one of those whispery-insinuating unreliable narrators in the vein of my favorite hardboiled/noir novels, from Cain through Vicki Hendricks.

The plot, too, is inspired by common noir themes: paranoia and betrayal — two themes that I think explain the persistence of noir. Time and again, we go through periods in our culture where we feel we have no control over the path things are taking, and noir's themes so speak to those anxieties, while noir also creates an escape from them by elevating them, making them seem both alluring and monumental.

What are the precedents for the story of an impressionable kid who comes under the sway of a powerful gangster? To what extent is Queenpin a deliberate riff on such precedents?

A deliberate riff, most definitely. I love those stories. The Grifters and Goodfellas/Wise Guy were probably the largest influences. I especially love the minutiae of the teaching process in those cases. There is so much detail about passing along the tricks of the trade. And the threat of betrayal always hangs heavy. Also stories like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — the mesmer-like quality of powerful teachers. It's always so interesting how it can be framed as a coming-of-age tale in which the student must, in same way, reckon with either disillusionment or betrayal to find their own identity.

If the precedents are primarily male, why did you make the change to women in the lead roles? How does the switch affect the story? And does English even have a word for a female gansel?

The limits of our language, right? Even in talking about the book, I often resort to moll, but moll suggests that the woman in question is the mistress or plaything of the (male) gangster, so it doesn't really work.

My abiding interest was to write a basic hardboiled tale but one in which a woman-woman relationship was foregrounded. The men are in there primarily to mediate the two women's relationship with each other, much as female characters function so often in classic noir triangles. Ultimately, though, the gender switch changed everything and nothing. On the one hand, it struck me how little difference it made; that mentor/protégé relationships are always about power and ambition, and this was no different. On the other hand, the particular complexities in relationships between women really interest me, as do the forms female power can take, forms that may be different from male power. For instance, Gloria, the older woman, has specific ideas about the way women can retain power, and sexual discretion is one of them.

The queenpin is Gloria Denton, but you never name the protagonist. Why?

The book stemmed from a short story I wrote for Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir, edited by the wonderful Duane Swierczynski, and I'd never bothered to give either character names in that. When it came to writing the novel, I couldn't settle on a name, so I kept substituting nicknames instead — sugar, tiddly wink, Dolly Dingle. Then it struck me that I should keep it that way. The protagonist is so young and formless and is in many ways defined by others — especially Gloria. There is no there there, yet. She hasn't earned a name.

The protagonist tells us she'd do anything for her low-life lover, "even that." "Even that" is left to the reader's imagination. To what extent did you set out to make sex dangerous again? Assuming that was part of your intent, how much of a challenge did it represent in this permissive age?

I didn't have any aims in that area, and I'm embarrassed to say I have a pretty hard time writing explicit scenes and generally find ways to avoid or evade it. At the same time, 1930s-40s hardboiled novels, especially those by James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Chandler, are so suffused with eroticism because of their sudden gaps and omissions. You come just this close, and then the door shuts, and as a reader you become suddenly aware of yourself, of how much you've been filling in the space between the ellipses. Those books just crackle with it. I've always been a sucker too for the way Cain, in Postman and Double Indemnity, will bring us along just so far and then push us away. We start to feel just as guilty as his confessor heroes. And we should.

(Read Part II of the interview with Megan Abbott here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Megan Abbott

Meme me up, Scottie

I have been tagged by Declan "Dad" Burke at Crime Always Pays with the following meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

My answers:
1) The book is Queenpin by Megan Abbott.
2) I have just opened it to page 123.
3) Ignoring the sentence that carries over from page 122, I have counted off the first five sentences, which got me to:
4) "Through everything. The dress I'd finally peeled off at 3 A.M., shivering and shaken to the core. She'd asked me to hand it to her through the partially open bathroom door."
4a) Wow!
5) I tag, with apologies, Patti Abbott, Sandra Ruttan, "Linkmeister," Juri Nummelin, and Adrian Hyland.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008