An Iceman at the Pen & Pencil; Hugo Hamilton's eight honourable gobshites

Detectives Beyond Borders took the evening off to attend a wine tasting at his club. But, always on the job, I snagged a movie tie-in edition from a crime writer/fellow club member, one of whose books has been made into a movie that will be in theaters in May.

The author is Anthony Bruno, the book is The Iceman, the stars include Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, and Ray Liotta, and you can watch a trailer here.

When not imbibing Hollywood glamour at third hand, I began reading Hugo Hamilton's 1997 novel Headbanger. The book is a bit literary in its opening pages, by which I mean that Hamilton strains to draw parallels among crooks, cops, and civilians. But it's hard not to love a novel that includes a bit like the following:

"`Embibing Emporium' was another Dublin idiosyncrasy that sprang to mind. As a Garda, Coyne took an interest in the precision of language, and one of these days he would walk straight into that pub, slap a concise Oxford down on the bar counter and say: you pack of eight honourable gobshites, you can't even fucking spell. Look, it's I, not E. Imbibing."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

Cops at the circus

Two out-of-town visitors found their way to the Pen & Pencil Club this evening, where one of the regulars warned them about the rough treatment fans of the Philadelphia Eagles football team sometimes hand out to supporters of visiting clubs.

"But I wouldn't worry about these two," the regular said, turning to us while indicating the visitors. "They're Chicago law enforcement."

Imagine my delight, then, when I read the following in the last chapter of Jim Tully's Circus Parade:

"Gorilla Haley's skull was fractured. He became insane. He later became a member of the Chicago police."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Babylon, I'm going to babble on

Lawyers are well represented among the pirlas who bedevil my evenings at the Pen & Pencil Club, but I always love reading about the law in older societies.

Most recently the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Hammurabi got me thinking about the societies of ancient Mesopotamia — and about what kinds of crime stories one could set in those societies.

As nearly as I can tell, legal life in the ancient Near East involved property, contracts, and beer. The forty-first article of the Laws of Eshnunna, for example, specifies that

"If an unbarum, a naptarum or a mudum wants to sell his beer, the sabitum shall sell his beer for him at the current price."

And what are unbarum, naptarum and mudum? "Social classes who seem to be entitled to a ration of beer." *

(Sumerian beer tablet)

Not that Eshnunnites were entirely licentious. The forty-second article provides penalties for possible results of excessive consumption of that price-controlled brew:

"If a man bites the nose off another man and severs it, he shall pay 1 mina of silver ... "

The edict of Hammurabi's great-great-grandson Ammisaduqa, meanwhile, suggests that beer was a valued, carefully regulated commodity and that Mesopotamian barmaids were not to be messed with:

"A taverness who has given beer or barley as a loan may not collect any of what she had given as a loan. A taverness or a merchant who ... dishonest weight shall die."

I don't know about you, but I see vast potential for Prohibition-like gangster tales and strong female characters.

###

* Pritchard, The Ancient Near East (Princeton 2010), page 153, note 10.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Leo Pulp

Half the fun of reading the Italian graphic novel Leo Pulp is trying to find a character not based on some real or fictional personage.

Author Claudio Nizzi has squeezed them all in (or paid tribute to them) under their own names or thinly disguised: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dick Tracy, Darryl F. Zanuck, Marilyn Monroe, Sunset Boulevard, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato, Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Peter Lorre, Greta Garbo, the Black Dahlia, Red Harvest (maybe), The Maltese Falcon (explicitly), Little Sister, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, even, God help me, Joel and Ethan Coen. (The Farewell My Lovely-inspired Velma appears here as Velma Lebowsky.)

Perhaps the only character wholly original to the book is Leo Pulp himself, the tough, long-chinned P.I. who charges twenty-five bucks a day — unless the name is a tribute to Léo Malet, creator of Nestor Burma.

One review compared Leo Pulp illustrator Massimo Bonfatti to the old Mad magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones, and the parallel is apt. Both artists used every square inch of space, offering a busy feast for the eyes like a cartoon Pieter Breughel. The book is sprinkled with gorgeous panels, lovingly rendered in depth and detail in the style of George McManus as well. This is a book worth looking at as well as reading.

***

Self-question for the evening: Why should I get so upset just because someone at the Pen & Pencil Club just said: "The price point is choice!" when I think he meant "It's cheap!"?

Did I mention that the young pirla was smoking a cigar?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The animals one meets in bars, and more Queen and Country

America's oldest press club hosted different varieties of animals Wednesday when the Philadelphia Zoo's president and CEO dropped by with a Zoomobile, an animal caretaker, and some feathered guests.

The creatures were adorable and impressive, the discussion informative, and the animal visitors quieter than and at least as well-behaved as the Pen and Pencil Club's usual clientele. The club's programs are off the record, but zoo CEO Vik Dewan had interesting things to say about running a zoo in a time of declining government support and greater sensitivity to animal welfare. Zoos in the future will not look like they do now, he suggested, and it sounds as if interesting thinking is going on in the zoo world.

***

Back to books. I learned from the extras included in the "Definitive Edition Vol. 3" of the Queen and Country graphic novel, subjects of critical comment in this space yesterday, that author Greg Rucka's inspiration was a British television series called The Sandbaggers — "the best damned television show you never saw," according to a Web site devoted to the show. This may be worth a look.

Has anyone out there seen the show?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

DBB welcomes Noircon

Early arrivals are on their way to #Noircon2010 in Philadelphia, which opens Thursday evening. Here's what they can expect when they get here.



See you at the hotel bar and the P&P.

***

I was a convention virgin when I signed up very late for Noircon 2008, but I got experienced quickly, and before the event was over, I resolved to sign up for that year's Bouchercon. I attended, and the rest is convention history — an ongoing history, I am happy to say. So I have a certain sentimental attachment to Noircon 2008, because a crime fan never forgets his first con.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Canada, the civilized

I made a caustic post in 2008 about Philadelphia fans' destructive rampage after the Phillies won the World Series. It's only fair that I report fans in my native Montreal are no better, and they have no championship to show for it — yet.

(Back in 2008, an acquaintance tut-tutted and brushed aside my complaints about those Philly fans, who overturned cars and looted a luggage store. "Just having a little fuuuuuun," he insisted in his infuriatingly condescending nasal drone. This was the same pirla who insisted that English is not a Germanic language.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

First a pirla, now a Nutter

Mayor Nutter — Wednesday, March 24

Mayor Nutter had a tough 2009, fighting with City Council about the city budget and other issues and then having to coax financial help from the state General Assembly to balance a budget deficit. Come talk with the mayor about how the city teetered on the edge but did not topple into the fiscal abyss.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Un pirla* al club Pen & Pencil

I was having a glass of wine at Philadelphia's press club the other night when I learned, loudly and repeatedly, from one of my fellow visitors that English is not a Germanic language. Where are the rowdy airline crews when you need them?

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

* Pirla.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Where is the justice in crime fiction?, or Noam Chomsky gets his ass kicked

We were talking about Madness and Civilization the other night, and not as commentary on our fellow drinkers at Philadelphia's press club.

The talk got me interested in Michel Foucault, that French historian, philosopher and public intellectual (though he might have rejected the intellectual designation), and I realized that he belongs here. He wrote and talked about crime, punishment, madness, sex and death, after all.

It's his invocation and critique of justice, though, that caught my attention because I realized how rarely crime writing concerns itself with justice, at least in the social, society-building sense. How many crime novels take the perp through the criminal justice system, for example? What does it imply about Western crime stories that they generally end just before the justice system swings into action (or before it gets a chance to do so)?

(See Foucault debate Noam Chomsky here and here. See Chomsky shrink before your eyes, especially around 3:50 of the second clip. Click here for the only effort I know to bring justice into the crime-fiction discussion.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Flight dreck, Part II

My theory about flight crews? Glad you asked. But first, rest assured that the theory is grounded in repeated observation, refined only later into a general proposition.

One night I was having a drink at the Ledes and Layoffs Club in Philadelphia, my peace disturbed by a too-loud group pounding tables in bad rhythm and jocosely threatening not to pay for their rounds. "An airline crew," the bartender whispered. "They work for Northeast."

Next week, different crew, same airline, same behaviour.

Some months later, the club a bit more crowded, the music a bit louder, the behaviour a bit worse. "These guys fly for Northeast, too?" I asked.

"Nope," the bartender said, "Epsilon Airlines."

Now, what may we conclude? That commercial-airline flight crews, worn to a frazzle and wound tight by endless rules and procedures and by the tight quarters in which they work, rendered light-headed by jet lag, go nuts when let loose in a strange city? Or maybe these three crews (from two real airlines whose names have been changed to avoid embarrassing the club or its customers) were just jerks.

In any case, next time I go to Europe, I may take the train. (Read more about flying here, including a comment that suggests another plausible explanation for flight crews' blowing off steam.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Andrea Camilleri's humor

I stopped by Philadelphia's press club after a bad night of work at my newspaper this week (though "bad night of work at my newspaper" is a pleonasm – unless one works there during the day). An acquaintance of mine from Italy's Lazio region sat at the bar chatting with two friends who the bartender told me were from Rome.

I understand enough Italian to pick out a word here and there and even to follow the thread of a conversation if I concentrate hard enough, which I could not do because a vacuous blowhard with an extremely loud voice sat across the bar from the Romans commiserating with his female friend about cruise ships and Jamaica.

Not only did he hear what she was saying, but he knew where she was coming from. If he had decided to not even go there, I would have slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, ordered him to shut up, and paid for their drinks and their taxi home.

What does this have to do with Andrea Camilleri and his protagonist, the unparalleled Inspector Salvo Montalbano? Montalbano also hates clichés and psychobabbling banality. Here's Montalbano on the phone with his lover, Livia, in The Smell of the Night (titled The Scent of the Night for delicate-nosed U.K. readers):

"`Come on Livia, don't get upset, try to be patient.'

"`You would try the patience of a saint!'

"Oh, God, not another cliche! Sow your wild oats, count your chickens before they hatch, or eat like a horse, when you're not putting the cart first!

"He realized he couldn't put up with this conversation much longer. Aside from the clichés and stock phrases, he couldn't stand the sallies of cheap psychoanalysis that Livia all too often liked to indulge in -- the kind of stuff you get in American movies ... "

This by itself would be good enough to make Montalbano an enjoyable version of the gruff but loveable old uncle. But what follows elevates him to something like a great comic creation. As he and Livia argue, parry, thrust, and make plans, Montalbano muses upon their strange contentiousness of their phone conversations:

"The best of it was that this animosity remained independent of the unshakable intensity of their relationship. But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average, at least once every four sentences? Maybe, thought the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old ... we feel ever more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."

That's lovely, I think, an aching and tender insight, and its resonance grows when one reflects that Camilleri was about eighty years old when the novel was published in 2005. But the scene gets better:

"As he was reasoning along these lines (and he liked this line of reasoning, as it was reassuring and banal, like the sayings one finds on the little slip of paper inside Baci Perugina chocolates) ..."

Bellissimo! What a perfect topper! Montalbano is irritable, Montalbano is wistful, and Montalbano slips with comfort into banalities just as bad as those he finds so maddening in Livia. What a perfect little parable of human relations! Has anyone written about love with such tenderness and humorous understanding?

(For more rhapsodizing about Andrea Camilleri and Salvo Montalbano, read Uriah Robinson, the King of Camilleri, on his Crime Scraps blog.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
Andrea Camilleri
Italian crime fiction