Writers who set books away from home — and why they do it

I started Detectives Beyond Borders in 2006 with a wariness of crime writers who set books in countries other than their own or where they did not live. They must be arrivistes, I suspected, tourists in search of tax write-offs who had no more understanding of local conditions and attitudes than does CNN. Americans (or Brits) parachuting in to tell the locals how to solve their problems.

Over the years I've asked such authors what they see in their chosen settings that a local might miss, or what they might miss that locals take for granted, and I wrote the introduction to a book of essays on the subject (Christopher G. Moore's The Cultural Detective). But not until last night did I think to ask such a writer why she had chosen the country she did.

Turns out that Cara Black, currently in Philadelphia for an American Library Association convention, has ties to France that long predate her Aimée Leduc novels. Her father introduced her to Jacques Tati movies. An uncle had literary ties to the country. Nuns from the Society of the Sacred Heart taught her a mildly archaic French that would later bemuse the children of her hosts on visits to France. There's more to her attraction to Paris, that is, than the Eiffel Tower and bargains on designer clothes.

So now I'll assume that every such writer has stories of his or her own, that there is a reason he or she writes about the Greek islands rather than the south of France, or Italy rather than Spain, or vice versa.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Bouchercon panel waiting to happen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A degenerate American in Paris

I don't know what Scott Phillips got up to when he lived in Paris, but the protagonist of his new novel, Rake, set in that city, kidnaps an arms merchant, tries to swing a movie deal, and carries on simultaneous affairs with four women (so far), each more attractive, sexually imaginative, or both, than the last.

The protagonist, as cheerfully amoral and self-involved as he is, is a new kind of American outsider: an ex-Green Beret skilled in the killing arts and unable to restrain himself from using them, but also the star of an old American soap opera that has made him a star in France.

Sure, he's am immature, self-involved jerk, but he happily admits craving the attention he gets from ordinary Frenchmen and women who confuse him with his soap-opera character, so it's hard to dislike the guy.

And now, while I finish reading this latest book by the author of The Adjustment, The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, and more, tell me 1) Who is your favorite likable bad guy in a non-cozy crime novel?, and 2) Who is your favorite ex-pat American character, in Paris or elsewhere, in crime fiction?

***

Scott Phillips was one of my "Eight crime writers worth tracking down," as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Plus ça change, plus how I spent the hurricane

Léo Malet, it is said, could never quite take crime fiction seriously, and indeed Les Rats de Montsouris, part of his Nestor Burma series, is full of parodistic touches.

One of these is just as relevant today as it was upon the novel's initial publication fifty-seven years ago, and not just because I finished reading the book while waiting for Hurricane Sandy to have its way with the Mid-Atlantic States:

"The storm came to nothing, like a project for tax reform."

***

How did I spend the hurricane? Glad you asked:

"All public transportation was cancelled, all bridges were closed, and the paper put a bunch of us up at the Loew's hotel. So I spent the night high above Philadelphia, with a fine view down Market Street east to the Delaware River and beyond ("Beyond" is, in this case, Camden, New Jersey, but that couldn't drown out the moody tenor saxophone soundtrack playing in my head. Besides. I couldn't see much; it was nighttime.) My room had two beds and a day bed, perfect for lounging. All that was missing was a pouting babe.

"I felt like Bruce Wayne pensively regarding the twinkling lights of Gotham City waiting for the bat signal (and really: a hurricane would be a fine time for the Riddler and his gang to pull a heist, as long as they didn't plan to make their getaway by bus.) I could even have pretended that one of the two bathrobes that came with the room was a smoking jacket. Instead, I went down to the bar for a good gripe session with my colleagues."

To recapitulate: I had a drink (at my own expense; my company did not cover bar tabs or incidentals), I spent the night in a historic building, and I spoke openly with my colleagues, a welcome change from the cryptic remarks and raised eyebrows by which we communicate when non-copy editors are around. Could have been worse.

***

I can now happily report that the house is in good shape, at no risk of losing the coveted Good Mousekeeping Spiel of Approval ™.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Paris throught the eyes of Léo Malet and Nestor Burma

Léo Malet was a singer, a poet, an anarchist, a surrealist, a prisoner of war, a novelist. and a crime writer.

Perhaps his surrealist leanings gave rise on the first page of The Rats of Montsouris to the odd juxtaposition of

“It was one of those summer nights we don’t get often enough. Just the way I like them: dry and stifling”.

and

“The rue du Cange was damp and torpid. … No other sound disturbed the clammy quiet.”

Or maybe a spot of slapdash writing or mistranslation was responsible. But no matter; the lapse (or quirk) appears isolated.

The Rats of Montsouris (1955) is somewhere around the seventeenth of Malet’s many novels featuring the phenomenally popular Nestor Burma, a relatively rare private investigator in French crime fiction commonly called a counterpart to Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, or both. Something more than half the books were among what Malet called his "New Mysteries of Paris," each set in one of the city's districts, or arrondissements, the series a nod to Eugène Sue's nineteenth-century "Mysteries of Paris." (Cara Black continues the tradition today in her Aimée Leduc mysteries.)

Burma likes to wander the streets, sometimes with his beautiful secretary, sometimes into artists' studios and surrealists' ateliers. But the real attraction to far is the zest with which Burma carries out his wanderings, exclaiming with wonder at a part of the city he had never seen before despite his long residence or remarking, perhaps sardonically, about some monument or public square's best feature.

I'm along for the ride, and Malet must have done something right; Nestor Burma has enjoyed a sixty- or seventy-year career in novels, short stories, television, movies, and, more recently, graphic novel adaptations by Jacques Tardi. Has any fictional P.I. not named Holmes had a longer career?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Cara Black dans le Métro

Cara Black's 12th novel, Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, brings her protagonist, Aimée Leduc, back to Paris' Marais district. This is a slight departure for Black, whose previous books were each set in and named for a different part of the city, from Murder in the Marais and Murder in Belleville through Murder in Passy.

The novel's early chapters include brief but evocative scenes in the tunnels of Paris' metro, which makes this as good a time as any to dig up an old blog post, not mine but Cara's. Her post of April 11, 2011 at the Murder is Everywhere blog begins thus:

"With metro tunnels, sewers, old quarries and catacombs crisscrossing under its streets, Paris is a city of layers,"

and it's just one of several she has put up about subterranean Paris. I suspect that some of the notes she took to write those posts found their way into Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, and I get a kick of reading the raw material of the research side by side with the finished product.

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

Cara Black will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

©Peter Rozovsky 2012

Tested by fire

James Ellroy calls himself "The White Knight of the Far Right," and Dominique Manotti is a woman of intellectual heft on the left, a lecturer in economic history and the author of crime fiction that dissects French society high and low, with a cool eye for the ruthlessness of the former and the helplessness of the latter.

Sometimes, though, their concerns converge. Here's a bit from Ellroy's White Jazz, with the forewarning that this passage is written in the style of a 1958 Los Angeles scandal sheet, with the L.A. City Council about to uproot poor Mexicans to make room for the Dodgers' new baseball stadium:

"Diggsville: The California State Bureau of Land and Way is granting shack dwellers $10,500 per family relocation expenses, roughly 1/2 the cost of a slipshod, slapdash slum pad in such colorful locales as Watts, Willowbrook and Boyle Heights. The Bureau is also enterprisingly examining dervishly developed dump dives preferred by rapaciously rapid real estate developers: would-be Taco Terraces and Enchilada Estates where Burrito Bandits bounced from shamefully sheltered Chavez Ravine could live in jerry-rigged slum splendor, frolicking to fleabag firetrap fandangos!" (Boldface is mine.)

And here's a bit from Manotti's unsubtly titled short story "Ethnic Cleansing" from the Paris Noir collection published by Serpent's Tail:

"By 6 a.m., in the building where the fire's still smouldering, only a few bodies are left, along with the fire-fighters still battling the flames and drowning what's left of the squat under gallons of water. According to the police bulletin, 123 people were living in this squat, seven are dead and fifteen others injured ... 101 people are in the municipal sports centre where identity checks are being carried out. The plan is to escort any illegal immigrants to the border and rehouse those whose papers are in order. The investigation should establish whether the fire is of criminal or accidental origin.

"TWO YEARS LATER

"A twelve-story steel and glass structure hugs the curve of the A86 motorway slip road ... The tragedy that took place here two years ago is on everyone's mind, he was thinking. Granted, the police investigation concluded it was an accident following a fight between dealers who had broken into the basement of the squat ... Granted, the city council rehoused all the legal immigrants. But not locally, not together, a long way from Paris ... "

Not so different from the Ellroy, is it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Paris Noir

1) This is not Akashic Books' Paris Noir. That book appeared in 2008. This Paris Noir appeared in 2oo7, published by Serpent's Tail, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

2) Michael Moorcock's story may be my entree into fantasy and alternative history. Its science-fiction aspect didn't do much for me, but the imitation of continental detective dialogue is dead on, and the references to the story's alternative history is unobtrusive enough to get a reader wondering and speculating without hitting him over the head.

3) Dominque Manotti's (or visit her Web site, in French, here) and Jean-Hugues Oppel's contributions are terse, cutting, and politically aware, in a manner that I am coming to think of as typically French.

4) When is someone going to publish a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

I love Paris in November

In the tradition of my crepuscular view of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge, here's a little thing from 2007 that I'll call Paris at Night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Les six mille froids

Per a recent comment string in which James Ellroy's name came up, here's a picture from a bookshop window in Paris in November 2007.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Cara Black

The author of the Aimée Leduc series of mysteries, each set in Paris and named for a district of the city, posted a complimentary comment here last week. In return, I thought I'd investigate her work. Murder in the Marais, the first in the series, delves into ugly details of World War II and unsettling parallels in 1990s France.

I know that much from reviews of the novel, which I've just begun reading. What I know first hand, from the opening chapters, is that Black has a nice touch for atmospheric dialogue. Leduc's early encounter with the old man who hires her for the job that sets the plot in motion has an edgy intensity. She's reluctant; he never answers her questions directly, communicating the urgency of his request instead with appeals to the memory of Leduc's father. The indirection works, and it captures what many of us must have felt: annoyance at a persistent petitioner, and annoyance at ourselves for somehow being moved, despite ourselves, to hear the petitioner out.

I mentioned that each book in the series is named for a district in Paris: Murder in Belleville, Murder in Clichy, etc. I wonder if Black took her cue from the pioneering French crime fiction writer Léo Malet, who planned to set one book featuring his anti-hero detective Nestor Burma in each of Paris' arrondissements, or districts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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