Crime-fiction lines that make you laugh

I've just finished one novel by a chuckle-inducing Australian and started another by an equally mirth-provoking Irishman, so I thought I'd give the gift of laughter for Christmas and list some of their funniest lines. Then I'll ask you to tell me some of your favorite laugh-getters or satirical crime-fiction jabs.

From Shane Maloney's Nice Try, a story of love, murder, revenge and Murray Whelan's fight to give up smoking as Melbourne bids to host the 1996 Olympic Games:

"Like an economist, I worked backward, fabricating arguments to fit my conclusions, bolstering them with statistics plucked from thin air."

"According to what I'd read in the papers, he was a key player in preparations for the Seoul Olympics. You know, the ones with the persistent background odor of tear gas."

"At one time, the area had specialized in textile and footwear manufacturing, back before wiser heads than mine decided that the country needed fifteen-dollar Indonesian running shoes more than it
needed jobs."

"My heart, never reliably buoyant, sank. But I knew immediately what I must do. What any reasonable, thinking, politically aware member of the Labor Party would do under the circumstances. I left the scene."

From Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code:

"The other port was in Wiltshire, beside what humans referred to as Stonehenge. Mud People had several theories as to the origins of the structure. Hypotheses ranged from spaceship landing port to pagan center of worship. The truth was far less glamorous. Stonehenge had actually been an outlet for a flat, bread-based food. Or in human terms, a pizza parlor. ... And anyway, all that cheese was making the ground soggy. A couple of the service windows had even collapsed."

"Nobody had a clue what had happened until they replayed the incident on the screen of Kamal the chicken man's camcorder. ... The traders laughed so much that several of them became dehydrated. It was the funniest thing to happen all year. The clip even won a prize on Tunisia's version of the World's Funniest Home Videos. Three weeks later, Ahmed moved to Egypt."

And now, readers, what makes you laugh in crime fiction or at least smile widely?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The deep, somber, serious side of Shane Maloney, plus the ever-popular question for readers

Longtime readers of this blog know that Australia’s Shane Maloney is a funny guy, whether venting his spleen about translation, offending audiences at exclusive private schools, or writing crime novels about a beleaguered political functionary, single father and would-be nonsmoker named Murray Whelan.

I’ve read books one, four and five in the Whelan series, which took him from “minder, fixer and general dogsbody for the Minister for Industry” to respectability as a member of parliament. Now I’m reading number three, Nice Try, in which Whelan is detached from his job as senior adviser to the minister of water supply and put to work on Melbourne’s bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games.

I mention this because Whelan’s musings about encroaching middle age, moments of professional truth and the like seem more heartfelt this time, not just on his own behalf, but for his boss, Angelo Agnelli. The latter, especially, is a surprise, since Whelan in past books has regarded Agnelli with clear-eyed and amused condescension. Why the change? I wondered. Could it be – and I invite Australian readers especially to comment on this – because Maloney was part of Melbourne’s bid in real life and thus might have been disillusioned or disappointed when the bid failed?

On an unrelated note, Maloney does a nice bit of character development in the opening chapter. The character in question is a beautiful blonde female aerobics instructor, and you can imagine what fun an author of a novel whose protagonist is a single father might have with such a character. Maloney has that fun, and entertainingly so. But he also writes that “she had an open, frankly inquisitive face and wore her mandatory smile with a slightly ironic twist that didn’t quite match the earnest, professional cheerfulness of her workmates.”

The contrast piques the reader’s interest. That’s nice work on Maloney’s part.

How else do authors make you interested in their characters? What do they say about their characters that makes you want to know more?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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What are your favorite political pot shots in crime fiction?

Here are three selections from crime novels I've read in the past few months or am reading now:

"She kept saying things like `the continuance of this program is a litmus test of our national decency' or, worse still, last week's corker, `without initiatives such as this one, we may as well be Republicans.'"

"Extramarital affairs were bad enough in the Democratic heartland, but porking a conservative was unforgiveable."

"Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Republican Party was beyond the pale."

Rather characteristic of what pundits like to call the poverty of American political discourse, is it not — the narrowing of discussion to insults flung back and forth between members of two, and only two, irreconcilable political parties? Except that the examples are from Australian novels, and I've substituted Democrat for Labor and Republican for Liberal, switches that are least roughly accurate ideologically.

The novels in questions are, respectively, Dead Set by Kel Robertson, Crook as Rookwood by Chris Nyst, and The Big Ask by Shane Maloney. The latter two ought to make you laugh at loud amid the suspense, and the first shows similar potential. (If you like an occasional laugh with your fictional violence, in other words, try Australian crime fiction. Humor, if not always as bawdy as these examples, abounds.)

And now, the questions for readers: You've seen what Shane Maloney and Chris Nyst can do. Now, what are your favorite and funniest political wisecracks? If they're from crime fiction, so much the better!

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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You slept with a WHAT???

If Shane Maloney and Chris Nyst ever get together for a drink, the two entertaining Australian crime novelists may find they share certain views on politico-sexual morality.

Here's a worried political fixer in Nyst's Crook as Rookwood:

"Sharpey's missus Lainie was certain to go totally ballistic if that young bloke from the Age published the breaking story that the newly appointed Foreign Affairs Minister Gary Sharpe had been bunning the ex-Victorian National Party leader Frances Hutton. ... Extramarital affairs were bad enough in the Labor heartland, but porking a conservative was unforgiveable."

And here's Murray Whelan in Maloney's The Big Ask, upon catching his boss in bed with a ... well, let Whelan tell the story:

"(H)is behaviour was even more scandalous than alleged in the shit-letter. Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Liberal Party was beyond the pale."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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New crime fiction from Australia

The Age newspaper of Melbourne offers this long list of books of all kinds scheduled for publication in 2007. It includes Shane Maloney's next Murray Whelan novel (Sucked In) and books from Garry Disher (Chain of Evidence) and Peter Temple.

No first-book-in-the-series jitters here

I recently read a comment from someone who found Stiff, Shane Maloney's first novel about Murray Whelan, a bit disappointing after having first read some later books in the series.

I mention this because my reaction was quite the opposite. If anything, Stiff is slightly more polished than the The Big Ask and Something Fishy, the fourth and fifth in the series (and I liked both, as avid followers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know). The melodramatic aspects are nicely timed, for example, and there are no examples of the one tiny gripe I had with the later books: the whiz-bang, leave-'em-hanging cliffhangers with which Maloney sometimes ends chapters.

I wonder if Maloney's attitude toward his subject has changed as he moved through the Whelan series. In Stiff, he may have been making an earnest and serious attempt to write a funny book. In the later installments in the series, he keeps up the humor, but he sometimes seems not to take his own efforts that seriously, or rather, to poke fun at them. (That self-referentiality can be marvelous fun, especially in The Big Ask.)

In any case, I recomment all three novels highly, and I'll soon read the remaining books in the series. I thank my Australian readers for introducing me to Shane Maloney, one of the highlights of my crime-fiction year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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"Stiff," by Shane Maloney

We have a result in the race to determine which crime fiction I read next. Late returns give Shane Maloney's Stiff the edge in tight balloting over David Owen's A Second Hand and Chourmo, the second novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy.

All three, each in its own way, get off to starts that make me want to read more. Owen's Pufferfish is even blunter on A Second Hand's first page than in the other three novels in the series, and Chourmo's opening chapters are full of yearning and tragedy that make me feel funny discussing the book in the same post as its more lighthearted Australian counterparts. I'll surely discuss both these novels later.

But for now, it's more of Maloney's Murray Whelan, the weary but hilarious political operative and beleageured member of Australia's Labour Party. The clinchers were probably the thick, heavy lout who storms into Whelan's office demanding political action against a tattoo artist who misspelled the lout's girlfriend's name in an elaborate design on his chest, which causes her to spurn his (the lout's) marriage proposal, and this, about a sexy female political activist:

Naturally, in keeping with their advocacy role, the folks at the League went in for the customary amount of third-worldish polemic. Ayisha, for instance, tended to go about in a red keffiyeh, sounding like Vanessa Redgrave.

Much more later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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More from Shane Maloney

With the possibility of an ugly strike looming large at the newspaper where I work, what better time to reach once more for that lighthearted political minder, Murray Whelan? In The Big Ask, Whelan got caught up in the struggle for control of a truckers' union. In Something Fishy, he's been elected to his state's parliament as a member of the Australian Labour Party, which "exists only in the imagination of its members."

This novel, the fifth in the Whelan series, is off to a more somber start than The Big Ask. But its third chapter contains a delicious description of the sort of meeting that is the lot of an opposition backbencher's life: "Proceedings drifted like the continents, the room was overheated and my attention wandered out the window."

More later.

Did I say somber? The scene where Whelan falls on the Swedish woman at the beach had me laughing out loud.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Four funniest lines from "The Big Ask"

1) "Behind the lenses of his sunglasses Farrell's face was as unreadable as a Patrick White novel."

2) "One-Stop's chambers were smack in the middle of the legal precinct, in a Queen Street high-rise commonly known as the Golan Heights. The reason for this was apparent when I read the directory in the lobby. Unless I was mistaken, few of O'Shannessy's fellow tenants had been educated by the Jesuits."

3) "Lyndal was in a plum-coloured pants-suit. Her businesslike demeanour reminded me how much I longed for her community welfare services to fall into her safety net."

4) "(H)is behaviour was even more scandalous than alleged in the shit-letter. Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Liberal Party was beyond the pale."

Readers of this blog have suggested that Shane Maloney might not travel well to the United States because of his subversiveness or that "Ultimately I suspect there is some concern that `Australian' won't translate / will be unfathomable." Maybe, maybe not. I suspect Maloney will take a few pages of getting used to for some people because of a wild, deadpan humor that may leave readers wondering whether this man takes himself and his story seriously. At the end of the The Big Ask, after all, narrator/protagonist Murray Whelan says, in effect, that's my story, and "Whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you."

I'd say Maloney's humor and his plain-spoken but evocative descriptions of setting, to name two qualities, make him well worth the effort.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Shane Maloney -- "Quintessentially Australian"

His sense of humor, that is, and that verdict comes from an Australian, so I'm allowed to repeat it. I'll fight off the ravages of an excellent vacation, a bad cold, and my company's current efforts to break and humiliate its employees, and I'll offer a few remarks on Maloney's novel The Big Ask, with more to come when I'm done with the book.

Maloney is five novels into his series about Murray Whelan, a political troubleshooter who eventually wins election to Australia's parliament. I've seen the books billed as comic thrillers. I'm not sure about the thriller part -- The Big Ask seems more like a straightforward crime story so far -- but the comic description is dead-on. A good comic novel is comic from the beginning. The Big Ask is comic even before its beginning. Here's Maloney's version of the customary disclaimer about similarity between the story and real life:

The author of this book, its setting and its characters are entirely fictitious. There is no such place as Melbourne. The Australian Labor Party exists only in the imagination of its members.

Whelan's profession is the second noticeable novelty. Politics, with its skullduggery, its negative research, and its dirty financial deeds, is a perfect forum for a crime story. I slap my forehead and wonder why no one had thought of writing a detective story with a political-operative protagonist before. (And the floor is open. Feel free to suggest any I have missed.)

Next is the dry humor. Whelan is the book's narrator as well its protagonist, and he relates often hilarious events without seeming to be aware of how hilarious they are. This sets him apart from, say, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum. When he is aware, he pokes only gentle, deadpan fun. This dry and gentle wit is all the more impressive, coming as it does in a novel whose plot concerns that most ungentle of subjects, labor strife and violence.

Here's Whelan's boss, a beleaguered government minister, confronting a labor leader, as Whelan waits dutifully by his boss' side:

`You want to talk plans, Howard," said Agnelli, `you should drop in on the Minister for Planning. He's got plans coming out his arsehole. Isn't that right. Murray?'

`Arsehole,' I agreed.

And here's Whelan with an outnumbered group of union reformers:

Roscoe looked me up and down with new interest, then unbuttoned his denim jacket and displayed the slogan emblazoned across his chest. Vote Reform Group, it read, Stop the Sharpe Sellout.

`Reform Group?' I said. `Who's that?'

`Us,' said Donny. `Me, Roscoe and Len.'

A final note: Maloney has a sharp eye for headlinese, that sometimes weird compression of language that copy editors/sub-editors are forced into when writing headlines. "STUHL SLAMS GOVT COSTS," reads one of the novel's fictional headlines, and the pitch is perfect. I can see that sucker crammed into a single column, the copy editor flipping through his mental repertoire of short, monosyllabic verbs. As an employee of the dying American newspaper industry, I was especially impressed with this.

Another final note, to Australian readers: This novel is set in Melbourne. So are Garry Disher's Hal Challis novels. Does Melbourne occupy a special position in the imagination of Australian crime writers? Is it an Australian counterpart to New York, Chicago or San Francisco?

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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A new kind of protagonist and a familiar kind of blurb

I posted a while back about amateur sleuths in unusual professions. I have just started Shane Maloney's The Big Ask; Maloney's Murray Whelan is the first political-operative crime-fiction protagonist I know of -- and he has a sense of humor.

Here's a detail I forgot to mention earlier. Stop me if you've heard this before, but a cover blurb compares Maloney's protagonist to Ian Rankin's:

"Whelan is like an Aussie Rebus."
Sunday Herald

© Peter Rozovsky 2006