Dead protagonists and other clever ways to end a series

A few months ago I read a novel that ended when its protagonist died. Needless to say, it was the final book in its series.

With the subject of series’ conclusions much on people’s minds these days thanks to Ian Rankin, John Rebus, and that courageous gay activist J.K. Rowling, I now turn my thoughts to last things as well. To avoid plot spoilers for anyone who might be reading the book in question, I won’t name my dead protagonist. But can you name any? You get half-credit for Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle killed off in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” but was forced by public outcry to revive later. You get similar partial credit for coming up with Michael Dibdin’s Blood Rain, which ended with Aurelio Zen being blown up by a Mafia bomb … only to begin a slow recovery from his injuries when Dibdin decided to revive the series three years later.

If you can’t think of protagonists who died, what other clever or satisfying ways have authors chosen to end series?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Blogger shows author some love, or More about Michael Dibdin

I got on Michael Dibdin’s case yesterday; today I’m pleased to pass along a thoughtful article from Booklist via the Librarian's Place that says his Aurelio Zen series “launched what eventually would become the still-flourishing renaissance of the Italian crime novel.”

But Dibdin was even more influential than that, according to author Bill Ott: “(W)ith Zen came the distinctive world-weariness that eventually would define the new European procedural, not only in Italy but also in Scandinavia.”

That, readers, is big. And Ott just might be right. The dates work. Dibdin published the first Aurelio Zen novel in 1988. That predates Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Andrea Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano. Ian Rankin published his first John Rebus novel in 1987, but the series did not hit its stride for a few years. In sum, Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen may be the most influential crime-fiction character of the past twenty years.

What do you think? Who is more influential as a world-weary fictional detective than Aurelio Zen? If you haven’t met Zen, who are your favorite such detectives?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Self-reference that makes you scream (or smile)

I must not be a post-modern type of guy because I don't generally like self-reference, and I hate self-reference that compounds the sin by referring to its own self-referentiality.

I don’t like wiseacre private eyes in detective stories who say things like “What do you think this is, a detective story?” I don’t like it when a character says, “You watch too much television,” and I hated it when a tough quipster of a fictional private eye said to another character, “You don’t watch enough television.” You want to pay tribute to or poke fun at a genre, be my guest. Just don’t hit me over the head with it.

Thus, the following, from Michael Dibdin’s Back to Bologna, made me wince from beginning to end, which probably made it more of a scowl than a wince:

“He knew that he had fired his current girlfriend, but only because he did that to whoever happened to occupy that position on the last day of each month. Private eyes couldn’t have stable, long-term affairs. They were complex, alienated loners who had to walk the mean streets of the big city, men who might be flawed but were neither tarnished not afraid. Above all, they had to suffer.”

The first sentence is funny because it’s unexpected. The second is a warning. The rest is cliché, more grating, not less because the author calls the reader’s attention to his awareness that it’s cliché. “Mean streets.” Heh-heh. Good one, Michael. I get the Chandler joke.

And now, readers, you have the floor: Give some clever examples of self-reference, or some examples that drove you nuts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007
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Michael Dibin's Italian overtures

You know those novels each of whose short opening chapters introduces one character? I finally figured out what such introductions remind me of: the overture to an opera, in which each little musical theme stands for one character or one predominant situation or emotion from the piece that is to follow.

That's how Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna begins. In the first chapter, two amusingly disgruntled police officers find a body that may be that of a prominent businessman. Call that a lively introduction that ends in a burst of percussion. In the next, we meet the worried protagonist, Aurelio Zen, out of step with his lover, his job and even himself as he recovers from surgery. The tempo here is slow, melancholy, and the key might be mournful minor with a passage here and there in a livelier major key (Zen is, after all, the hero.)

Next come two students and the Romanian girlfriend of one, and after that Zen's lover, Gemma. Her theme, like Zen's, might be more complex than the others, since her chapter has her thinking about Zen, and Zen's has him thinking about her.

And now I'll stop with the music because I don't want to take this too far. But it's at least plausible for Dibdin if for anyone. He wrote an entire Aurelio Zen novel, Cosi Fan Tutti, using the plot of Mozart's almost identically named opera.

And now, use your imagination, readers: Back to Bologna's beginning is reminiscent of opera. What crime fiction reminds you of something else? Whose prose style or narrative structure reminds you of music or city traffic or guns firing or a gently babbling brook (or of anything babbling gently, for that matter)?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The last of Zen

In the June 30 Guardian, Mark Lawson found Michael Dibdin's new End Games shot through with clues that Dibdin had turned his mind toward "last things," a poignant reminder of Dibdin's death in March at age 60:

Paradoxically, though, End Games is not obviously an acknowledged finale, though there is, for the reader particularly alert to clues, a rather circuitous inclusion of the word "tomb" in a climactic, and otherwise optimistic, paragraph, as well as an odd, brutal reference to a medical condition that seems to have no functional purpose within the book. Otherwise, it is energetically and meticulously written, and the longest novel in the [Aurelio] Zen series. There is, perhaps, one other subtle indication of a writer knowingly book-ending his career or, at least, one sequence of novels. In the last paragraph of Ratking, the 1988 story that introduced Aurelio Zen, the detective, walking home, notes that "the sky was clear and littered with stars". Almost 20 years on, as he enters the final pages of what we now know to be his last case, Zen looks to the heavens and regrets that light pollution has largely obliterated this natural illumination: "[Within] his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a medieval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Language schools and other shady settings

I don't know why I think of this now, other than the shark-like principle that governs blogging (For sharks, the credo is keep swimming, or die. For bloggers, it's keep posting, or die), but I realized that Peter Lovesey's The Summons was not the first crime novel I had read in which a language school is a focus of shady dealings. In that book, a character's desire to cover up dodgy matters at such a school is presented as credible motive for murder. Some time earlier, I had read Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, whose protagonist gets himself in a whole lot of trouble, starting with his job at a sleazy language school.

In neither novel do the principal crimes take place at language school, but both books present such schools the way earlier writers presented saloons or used-car dealerships. They are places where bad, dishonest things are just waiting to happen.

So, dear readers, name some other prototypically disreputable locations from your crime reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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When authors spring a surprise in mid-series

A discussion at the Oz Mystery Readers group sparked thoughts of the ways crime writers shake things up mid-series. Peter Lovesey, whose novel The House Sitter is the Oz group's current subject, has brought Peter Diamond back into the Bath police force and killed off his wife. In He Who Fears the Wolf, Karin Fossum pulls her protagonist into the background and makes him part of an ensemble cast in which suspects and victims are far more prominent.

The late Michael Dibdin livened things up in the fifth of his Aurelio Zen books by basing the story on a Mozart opera. And then there's that gushing fountain of ideas, Donald Westlake, who has shared chapters with other authors, who has had the characters in his comic Dortmunder series plan a heist based on an imaginary novel in his decidedly un-comic Parker series, and who has used the same opening chapter in novels in two different series, with the action in each book then following a different character.

How have your favorite writers changed things up in mid-series? Did the changes work? And tell me about some of the stranger changes. Can you think of anything wilder than Dibdin's wonderful opera plot in Cosi Fan Tutti?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Michael Dibdin is dead at 60

Through the Rap Sheet comes the sad news that Michael Dibdin, author of the Aurelio Zen crime novels, has died at age 60. The item links to an obituary from the Telegraph that offers interesting insights into Dibdin, that cleverest of crime authors. A biographical note here includes a bibliography.

Here is what I wrote about Dibdin, Zen and the novel Cosi Fan Tutti in my first post on this blog (Cosi Fan Tutti is almost surely the only crime-novel version of a Mozart opera that you will ever read) :

3) Cosi Fan Tutti, by Michael Dibdin, is an exception to my general distaste for novels set in "foreign" countries by writers not from those countries. Such books often degenerate into travelogues. This novel is formally daring, and talk about surprise endings! Dibdin, an Englishman, spent several years teaching in Italy, and his charmingly named protagonist, Aurelio Zen, offers a kind of Baedeker's guide to official Italian corruption and internecine rivalry, each novel set in a different region: Naples here, the Vatican, Venice, the south in other books. And Rome. Always Rome. "Zen" is a name characteristic of the protagonist's native Venice, but it also has overtones of the detachment with which this Zen moves through the sometimes deadly worlds of Italian officialdom and gangsterdom. Of course, the character's other name, Aurelio, is another clue that he is wise and given to occasional musing, if not outright meditation.

Aurelio is the Italian form of Aurelius, as in Marcus Aurelius, that most philosophical Roman emperor.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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When "serious" writers sink so low as to write stories with plots ...

... they write crime novels. Michael Dibdin reviews John Banville's Christine Falls, which Banville wrote under the name Benjamin Black. The review is full of cute (or cutesy) lines such as "Intercourse between the detective story and mainstream fiction is traditionally regarded as one of those things we don't mention, though everyone knows it goes on."

Dibdin makes an especially interesting point about the test Banville set for himself in writing a crime novel: Can he plot?:

"The answer is yes. It's almost impossible to tell someone who hasn't read it what Banville's prizewinning novel The Sea is 'about,' but the problem with Christine Falls is saying anything at all without ruining a compelling novel set in the redolent, boozy, dank, stifling Dublin of the 1950s, a city dominated by a tight-lipped and even more tightly networked mafia made up of a few prominent clans."

So, when "serious" writers want to tell a story, they're not afraid to write a crime novel, even though they do so under an assumed name (unless they're Joyce Carol Oates).

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Detectives Beyond Borders

Welcome to my new forum devoted to international crime fiction – "international" in my case meaning outside the United States. The Web is all about openness and freedom of information, so I have no compunction about taking David J. Montgomery's 10 Greatest Detective Novels idea, ringing some changes on it, and coming up with a debate/discussion of my own. He focuses on American writers; I'll take the rest of the world and ask these questions:

– What are your favorite crime novels and stories set in countries other than your own?

– Why do you like these stories?

– Is living in a country a prerequisite for writing a successful crime story set in that country?

– What makes crime stories especially attractive to the armchair traveler?

– Do people even read in armchairs anymore?

Setting has been integral to some of the finest crime fiction through all periods. Think the misty docks and streets of Conan Doyle's London. Think Hammett's San Francisco, Chandler's Los Angeles, Lawrence Block's New York. Or think Georges Simenon's Paris, its suburbs, and the villages where Maigret loves to relax, drink white wine, and play cards. Given the importance of setting, it seems natural that crime stories should prove especially attractive to those of us who like to travel in our minds as well as in trains, planes, cars, buses and boats. Indeed, this is a good time for such readers, with Soho Crime, Bitter Lemon Press and Serpent's Tail, among others, offering much of interest.

I'll begin with some of my favorites, along with a few books I don't much like. Feel free to disagree with me, especially on the latter. Nothing would please me more than to be talked into recognizing virtues I had not seen before in an author – or to be forced to better understand and justify my dislike.

In no particular order, here is some of my favorite non-American crime fiction:

1) Lovely Mover, by Bill James, though several of the other novels from the middle of James' Harpur & Iles series are about as good. The series hits its stride around its seventh book and becomes a kind of grand and cracked portrait of Britain's shifting urban and social landscape, of the murky boundaries between police and criminals, of suburban social climbers who happen to be killers and drug dealers, of the strange ways people build families in changing times. The books are violent, dark, and often very funny. And James just happens to be the best prose stylist who has ever written crime fiction in English.

2) Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong. A clear-eyed view of 1990s Shanghai that meets every traditional requirement for a full-blooded crime novel. The setting is evocative, the protagonist is unusual (though not the strongest feature of the book), the supporting characters are compelling, and the story has a surprise ending that could only have happened in China.

3) Cosi Fan Tutti, by Michael Dibdin, is an exception to my general distaste for novels set in "foreign" countries by writers not from those countries. Such books often degenerate into travelogues. This novel is formally daring, and talk about surprise endings! Dibdin, an Englishman, spent several years teaching in Italy, according to various accounts, and his charmingly named protagonist, Aurelio Zen, offers a kind of Baedeker's guide to official Italian corruption and internecine rivalry, each novel set in a different region: Naples here, the Vatican, Venice, the south in other books. And Rome. Always Rome. "Zen" is a name characteristic of the protagonist's native Venice, but it also has overtones of the detachment with which this Zen moves through the sometimes deadly worlds of Italian officialdom and gangsterdom. Of course, the character's other name, Aurelio, is another clue that he is wise and given to occasional musing, if not outright meditation.

4) "Brown Eyes and Green Hair," a short story by Pentti Kirstila available in "The Oxford Book of Detective Stories (An International Selection)." This delightful, deadpan, at times almost surreal story by the Finnish Kirstila is an exception to the rule that writers from Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and Iceland are morose -- and is the only Kirstila to have been translated into English. Let's raise a fuss and get more of his work translated and published. (Some of his writing is available in German and in some less widespread European languages.)

5) Points and Lines, by Seicho Matsumoto. This Japanese police procedural is a kind of road movie on the rails, a look at people and places in 1960s Japan through the eyes of a police inspector who travels the length and breadth of the country by train as he tracks down clues to a young couple’s death.

6) No Happy Ending, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The protagonist shares a cramped Mexico City office with a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewer engineer. The book begins with a Roman soldier found dead in a bathroom. What more could you ask for? Like Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Taibo's one-eyed hero, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, bumps up against official corruption and violence. Unlike Zen, Shayne attacks it headfirst. He also has a profound sympathy with victims of police and other official and corporate brutality.

7) The Prone Gunman, by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Another author with a distinct political viewpoint. His short, grim novels have a certain formal similarity to Jim Thompson's. But Manchette's protagonists are not fortunate enough to die. Rather, they are brought low, chewed up, and spit out, destroyed or disoriented but still alive, by powerful forces who use them to achieve their own ends before discarding them.

8) Thumbprint and Fever, by Friedrich Glauser. This 1930s Swiss writer, translated and brought back into print by Bitter Lemon Press, offers that rarest of detective protagonists: a man who has hit rock bottom professionally without lapsing into alcohol and self-pity. Sgt. Studer works in small corners of a big world: Villages, prison cells, cramped apartments. An insane asylum. An isolated Moroccan Foreign Legion post. He is mordant and humane in a world of which his creator takes a deadpan view. Some say Glauser influenced his countryman Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Maybe, but Glauser was better.

9) The Amsterdam Cops series, by Janwillem van de Wetering. This Dutch author has been a businessman, a world traveler, a reserve Amsterdam police officer, and a student at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. All, especially the last three, figure prominently in this series, which includes 14 novels and two overlapping short-story collections. Detective twosomes are a nickel a dozen; Van de Wetering offers the only three-headed protagonist I can think of: the grumpy Adjutant Henk Grijpstra, the younger and sometimes vain Sgt. Rinus de Gier, and their unnamed commissaris, or chief, an elderly mentor with sometimes excruciating knee pains who is a sly collaborator and a kind of guru to Grijpstra and de Gier. Start with Hard Rain, in part for the larger role it gives the commissaris. Van de Wetering has an interesting approach to translation: He does his own, and he regards the results as versions, rather than translations, of the original. The one book in the series that I read in Dutch has slightly different chapter divisions from the English version and an opening chapter with more physical description. And the first in the series, An Outsider in Amsterdam, reflects the Dutch language's more frequent use of the present perfect where English would use the simple past. This results in occasional odd sentences such as "I wonder if he has done it."

10/11) Tales From Two Pockets by Karel Capek and The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky. These books of tales are full of sharp observation, wry and wistful humor, and detection of the classic and other kinds. Both just might lay to rest the notion that "literary" crime fiction equals bad crime fiction.

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OK, what do these stories have in common, other than that none is set in the United States or in an English village and each offers a vivid sense of place? Damned if I know. Maybe I'll know better once I hear from you.

What about books that didn't make my list? Ruth Rendell's superb The Veiled One seems far more interested in its killer's psyche than in the story's setting. The great Ken Bruen's Brant and Roberts novels are like Ed McBain 87th Precinct gang whacked out on beer and cocaine. Their violent, good-hearted, hilarious characters clang and crash together in stories that are all action, all character, without much focus on the setting. By all means, read them. (Bust, on the other hand, Bruen's excellent collaboration with Jason Starr, could qualify for this list with an asterisk, as an Irish writer's view of New York.)

Two books I did not care for helped form my thoughts on international crime fiction. The one Magdalen Nabb "Marshal Guarnaccia" story that I read got the details of its Florence-area setting convincingly right, but the story could have happened anywhere. John Burdett's Bangkok 8, on the other hand, was all local color, all weird exotica, all too much like a travelogue, albeit an especially weird one, for my tastes.

A last note: I've omitted Murder Must Advertise, the one Dorothy Sayers novel that I've read, though it is set in a country where I've never lived. Yet I might include Peter Lovesey's fine The Last Detective, which takes place in the same country. The reason is simple: In crime fiction, the past is not a foreign country. Sayers, and perhaps Christie, Chesterton and all the rest, created worlds so familiar to crime-fiction readers that they are no longer foreign.

Thanks, and keep those posts coming,

Peter

© Peter Rozovsky 2006