A crime writer whose name is a soft drink, and an antipodean award

While I travel across the country, interesting things happen in crime fiction around the world:

If you should happen to be in Belfast next Thursday, December 12, No Alibis bookshop will present

INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION RESEARCH 

State, Crime and Investigation in Kondor Vilmos’ Crime Fiction 

Dr Kálai Sándor, University Debrecen. Introduction by Dr Andrew Pepper, School of English, QUB h, 5-7. University Square, House 11, Room 101 Refreshments provided.

I wonder what Dr. Pepper's students call him. And I suspect that Dr. Andrew Pepper is also crime novelist Andrew Pepper.

*

Down in the Antipodes, Paul Thomas has won the Ngaio Marsh Award for his novel Death on Demand.  I'd read Thomas' Guerrilla Season years ago and found the humor annoyingly wacky and obtrusive. But Thomas has chops, and I said back then that

" ... slowly I began to realize that damn, this man knows how to tell a story. I’ll be reading more of this guy and, without knowing anything about his body of work, I’d bet Paul Thomas could write a first-rate, not necessarily comic thriller if he set his mind to it."

Asked recently to name his favorite hero and favorite villain from crime fiction, Thomas chose Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and, for the bad guy, P.G. Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts. I note Thomas' predilection for characters whose creators attended Dulwich College.  And I think the time has arrived for me to read more of this guy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Back down under

I finished Paul Thomas’ Guerilla Season this afternoon, then hopped out of bed and went to fetch the mail, which included Diamond Dove in a sturdily wrapped package from Judith Eardley Books in Healesville, Victoria. So nobody should accuse me of parochialism in my Australasian crime reading; I’m breaking out of Melbourne and Tasmania and experiencing a bit of New Zealand and the Northern Territory.

Actually, I’m not sure how much I learned about New Zealand from Thomas’ book, other than a few wonderfully musical place names. A cover blurb on my edition, published in the United Kingdom, calls Thomas the “Down Under Carl Hiaasen,” and the comparison seems apt. The novel includes some of the features that can make Hiaasen so annoying. Everything is whacky and rapid-fire. The gruesome killings are farcical. Everybody is a quirky quipster, and the novel is peopled less with characters than with pasted-together sets of wry or blunt remarks, so much so that the occasional moments of drama or personal conflict seem contrived. The pacing is unrelieved rat-tat-tat, complete with sentence-fragment transitions to convey the frenzied zaniness of it all.

I’ve never been able to make it past the first chapter of any Hiaasen novel, and for a while there, I thought the same would be the case with Guerilla Season. Then the action began. Police chase down a shadowy group that claims responsibility for killings. Spies, blackmailers and shady businessmen materialize, and sex is hinted at. The scope grows from alleged Maori terrorism to international espionage, and slowly I began to realize that damn, this man knows how to tell a story. I’ll be reading more of this guy and, without knowing anything about his body of work, I’d bet Paul Thomas could write a first-rate, not necessarily comic thriller if he set his mind to it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Paul Thomas
New Zealand crime fiction