Olympic fact, fiction, and crime

"Even before the 2012 Games formally opened Friday night, east London, an area with some of the highest unemployment and crime rates in the country, had been visibly transformed by the world’s biggest sporting event. More than $14 billion has been poured into the London Games, for building Olympic facilities, upgrading public transportation and scrubbing the high streets near venues, the government says. The new shopping mall alone has brought about 8,000 jobs."

— New York Times News Service

"(H)e went looking for a taxi in paseo Maratimo, a street seemingly frozen in time and place as it waited for the extension which would link it to the Olympic Village. In the distance, the houses that had been demolished for the construction of the Olympic sports facilities looked more like a set for a film about the bombing of Dresden, The new city would no longer feel like the city he knew ..."

— Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Off Side

The Times strikes a note of authenticity for its American readers, calling main streets high streets. More interesting is that the most trenchant of its responses from the Other Side of the Story comes not from an activist or area resident or member of a leftist think tank, but rather from Colin Ellis, senior vice president for credit policy at Moody’s Investor Services. “Looking at the big picture," says Ellis, “we think that corporate sponsors will benefit most. The Olympics are unlikely to provide a substantial economic boost.”

I wonder

a) whether Mr. Ellis would have been brave enough to utter such a prediction seven years ago, when London was awarded the Olympics,

 and

b) what Vázquez Montalbán, that man of the left, would have thought of such an utterance from an executive of “an essential component of the global capital markets.”

***

Here's a previous Detectives Beyond Borders post that touches on the London Olympics. And here's a post about Shane Maloney's novel Nice Try, set during Melbourne's failed bid for the 1996 Olympics. What other Olympics-related crime fiction can you think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Political football: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and sports mysteries

When FC Barcelona's Jordi Alba scored the second goal in Spain's demolition of Italy at the Euro 2012 soccer championships earlier this month, and Andrés Iniesta, who also plays for Barcelona, was named the tournament's best player, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's friends, relatives, and readers must have smiled.

The late Barcelona-born crime writer was a huge fan of the soccer team, so huge that the FC Barcelona Foundation has sponsored a journalism award in his name since 2004. (Crime fiction readers may be more impressed that Andrea Camilleri named his protagonist Salvo Montalbano in homage to Vázquez Montalbán, possibly for the Spanish author's love of food as well as for his politics.)

Off Side, a 1989 novel first translated into English in 2000 and now reissued by Melville House, has protagonist Pepe Carvalho called in to protect FC Barcelona's newly signed English center forward against a death threat. (That probably dates the book because these days, English football is long on money but apparently short on world-class home-grown players. Top continental footballers are likelier to sign with English clubs than vice versa.)

Vázquez Montalbán was a sharp observer of the high and the low, and my favorite bit so far is of the high, namely of the Barcelona team's chairman at the news conference where the English star's signing is announced:

"He had been on the point of becoming, variously, a minister in the Spanish government, a councillor in the autonomous government of Catalonia, and mayor of Barcelona. At sixty years of age he had suddenly discovered tiredness, and a feat that this tiredness would cause him to disappear from the public stage that he had occupied continuously ever since he had become the great white hope of the progressive business community under Franco."

***

While commuting home to my copy of Off Side, I browsed Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around the Rosa (1955) by William Campbell Gault, which begins thus:

"THERE IS AN OLD GRIDIRON WHEEZE that states a guard is only a fullback with his brains knocked out. I have met some rather bright guards and some extremely stupid fullbacks, but what is a fact measured against the generality? I’d played a few years of guard, myself, the more prominent years with the Rams and made a lot of friends in Los Angeles. So it figured that when the boys began to clobber me, Los Angeles was the logical place to open up a business."

Since fate has me reading about football on both sides of the Atlantic, I'll ask what your favorite crime novels set in the world of sports are. That may be tricky, at least for readers of American crime fiction. Sports was once a popular category of pulp fiction, alongside crime, military, romance, and adventure, but no longer. So, your alternate question: When did sports lose favor as a crime-fiction category, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012