The Group of Death

Jeff VanderMeer has organized a World Cup of Fiction, which groups the thirty-two nations of this year's soccer World Cup and asks readers to handicap the field in fiction instead of football. I'm refining his terms and restricting myself to crime writing.

Group A is the tournament’s Group of Death (and where is that term more meaningful than in a crime-fiction competition?)

For South Africa, Roger Smith, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Richard Kunzmann, James McClure (no one said the players had to be alive), Michael Stanley and Jassy Mackenzie head a lethal group of strikers that could be deep for years.

The French have Dominique Manotti, Fred Vargas and Tonino Benacquista in a midfield that plays a less attacking style than the vuvuzela-tooters but is capable of deadly surgical strikes.

France could wangle for Yasmina Khadra on its side, too, though he could make a dangerous striker for Algeria in Group C.

In Group D, Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Leigh Redhead, David Owen, Chris Nyst, and Adrian Hyland are just a few of the names on an Australian side that is a strong dark-horse contender, just as the Socceroos were in the real World Cup – at least until the competition started. (Temple, by the way, was born in – you guessed it – South Africa.)

Italy has Group F wrapped up, and I'll tab New Zealand to sneak into the knockout stage.

The Netherlands and Japan should fight it out in Group E of the Crime Fiction World Cup, hampered only by the fact that their stars, Janwillem van de Wetering and Seicho Matsumoto, are both dead.

England and the United States could make some noise in Group C.

Who do you think wins the 2010 World Cup of Crime Fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Dutch views

Author A.C. Baantjer's DeKok and the Dead Harlequin includes some nice bits about Dutch habits and human geography. Here's DeKok on the trail of a person of interest:

"It was not difficult to find Pierre Brassel. He was, so to speak, on display. The Dutch have a peculiar habit of never closing curtains, except sometimes, bedroom curtains. Tourists make it a point to walk the streets of Dutch cities, peeking into rooms as they pass by. Nobody takes offense. On the contrary, the Dutch take great pride in their interiors."

(Jan Vermeer, Street in Delft, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

That's an accurate observation, acknowledged by the Dutch themselves. It calls to mind those great seventeenth-century Dutch paintings in which a viewer is invited not just to peer into a house or courtyard but to do so in depth. (Space being at a premium in the Netherlands, Dutch houses tend to be narrow and thus to seem deep.)

I especially like this observation, evocative of the distinctive Dutch settlement pattern in which there are few American-style suburbs and lots of rural village/bedroom communities:

"The place was pleasantly crowded.

"Farmers came from the outlying areas around the village. Civil servants and businesspeople came from the bedroom community. Shopkeepers came from the small town. All had responded to the invitation."

Oh, and this:

"Then he thought cynically that his path, at times, seemed to be literally strewn with beautiful blonde women. But of course, there were a lot of beautiful blonde women in Holland, and a lot of them looked alike."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Dutch treat

It's hard to avoid A.C. "Appie" Baantjer if one is in the Netherlands or has contact with Dutch communities outside the country. He's written about sixty-seven novels featuring a rumpled police detective named De Cock (DeKok in English translations, for some reason). A successful television series based on the books' characters has aired for years in the Netherlands and Belgium. There are a Baantjer board game and a Baantjer museum, and the author's Web site offers novels, the game, DVDs and even a book about Baantjer's early days in the Dutch fishing town of Urk.

Here in the U.S., my Dutch teacher used both the television series and the board game as teaching tools. Though his country is small, Baantjer is a big star, in other words, in a way equalled by few crime writers anywhere.

Perhaps because of the television show's pace, humor and roster of skilled character actors, though, I've liked it better than I did the novel or two that I'd read in the series. But I think the books' appeal may come through better in DeKok and the Dead Harlequin, newly reissued in English translation by Speck Press. Here, De Kok muses about the Dutch national character:

"To form any sort of gang, or even a `group of guys,' is not all that common in this country. The Dutch criminal is by nature a pure individualist. He doesn't form groups; at most he'll work with a single partner,"

to which his occasionally impetuous but here thoughtful colleague, Vledder, replies:

"You know ... when NATO conducts exercises, the story is the Dutch army always gets the lowest ratings in unit maneuvers, but the Dutch soldier is always rated first in guerrilla warfare. Perhaps with the inspired leadership of Pierre Brassel, the so-called gang managed to overcome their natural aversion to cooperation. Who knows what he promised them."

That's a nice, low-key piece of observation, off-beat, yet pertinent to the investigation at hand. DeKok's rumpled appearance recall Columbo, but his compassion and sharp, wry observations may remind readers of Baantjer's late countryman Janwillem van de Wetering.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Netherlandish treat

Crime Time follows up its fine survey of France's crime fiction scene with an issue on Dutch crime.

Like its predecessor, this issue examines its subject in depth, as deep as 1889, in this case, the year of Maarten Maarten's Black Box Murder. It also offers a wrap-up of Web sites, publishers and publications key to tracking crime writing in the Netherlands. It's far more than just a list of names, in other words, and somene ought to hand Bob Cornwell and his Crime Time colleagues an award for this absorbing, educational entertaining effort.

Dankuwel, mijnheren Cornwell, Charles den Tex en Jos van Cann!

Switzerland is up next in the series, to be followed by Italy, Spain and Denmark.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Janwillem van de Wetering dies at 77

With a sad tip of the hat to Euro Crime comes the news that Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier ("Amsterdam Cops") mysteries, has died.

Here's what I wrote about Van de Wetering back in this blog's first post, where I listed the books among my favorite crime fiction from beyond my borders:

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."

Van de Wetering wrote several books about his experiences as a Buddhist, and his chronicle of his life in a Kyoto monastery, The Empty Mirror, is refreshingly down-to-earth about the pleasant and the harsh aspects of a would-be monk's life. Van de Wetering's other work included a biography of the Dutch author and diplomat Robert van Gulik, and Inspector Saito's Small Satori, a book of intensely philosophically minded crime stories.

Van de Wetering was indirectly responsible for the creation of this blog. I was dating a Dutch woman a few years ago, so I took special notice of An Outsider in Amsterdam. I soon read the rest of the Grijpstra and de Gier books, most in editions published by Soho Crime. That was my entrée to Soho's fine line of international crime fiction and to interational crime fiction in general. The rest is blogging history.

Click here for an appreciation and here for Van de Wetering's bibliography.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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