Adrian McKinty wins another award

Adrian McKinty's novel Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly has won Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. The award follows his capture of the Best Paperback Original prize at the Edgar Awards in New York this past spring for Rain Dogs. Here's what I had to say about Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly earlier this year.

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 Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series, now six novels into what was once called the Troubles Trilogy, keeps getting better and better.

The language is gorgeous, the characters are endearing, the atmosphere full both of humor and of off-hand, everyday life, menacing and otherwise. With this much good crime writing coming out of Northern Ireland, how can anyone mention the Nordic countries in the same breath? Hell, how about the rest of the world? With McKinty ably supported by a cast that includes Stuart Neville just as a start, why is Northern Ireland not routinely numbered among the world's great crime fiction locations?

McKinty's books portray their settings as vividly as do Arnaldur Indriðason's Erlendur novels, set in Iceland (and they're a lot funnier). His Sean Duffy is as endearingly flawed as Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano (Poetry and music are to Duffy what food is to Montalbano, and the two characters lead similarly complicated romantic lives, although— but you'll have to read Book Six, the recently released Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, to complete that thought.)  McKinty's Belfast is every bit as vivid a crime fiction locale as Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseille.  And he turns as unsparing an eye on that locale as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did on Sweden in their Martin Beck novels

Not only that, but McKinty deftly takes on any number of traditional mystery and crime tropes, and the Duffy series and their protagonist are erudite without being condescending. McKinty has also long attacked the notion that a writer's style ought to be workmanlike and invisible. He champions David Peace and James Ellroy, for example, so you know you're bound to find a gorgeous passage or two, prose you can relish for its own sake, in every book.  And if you listen to books, you're in for a treat. Gerard Doyle, the reader of the Sean Duffy audiobooks, is a master of accents, and he gives each character a distinct voice without ever descending to bathos and exaggeration. The audio versions pair the best of crime novels with the best of audiobook readers.

(The five previous Sean Duffy novels are The Cold, Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; In the Morning I'll be Gone; Gun Street Girl; and Rain Dogs. I've been a McKinty fan for years. Read all my Detectives Beyond Borders posts about his work.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Why you should be at Crimefest 2015

I always enjoy Crimefest in Bristol, England, not least for its stellar lineup of guest authors.  P.D. James appeared there. So have Bill James, Peter James, and Dan James. 

Maj Sjöwall

I met that affable superstar of Scottish crime writing, William McIlvanney, at Crimefest, and I heard Declan Hughes sing country and western to a fellow author at the hotel bar. (As a singer, Hughes is a damn good author and playwright.) It was Frederick Forsyth's entertaining and informative presentation at Crimefest 2012 that finally got me to read his classic Day of the Jackal.

Your humble blogkeeper
with the great Bill James,
author of the Harpur & Iles
novels, at Crimefest 2010

But this year's special guest is as special as any guest at any crime festival anywhere. Maj Sjöwall wrote the classic Martin Beck series of crime novels with Per Wahlöö, and she'll be at Crimfest 2015 to be interviewed by Lee Child and to present the Petrona Award for best Scandinavian crime novel.

Your humble blogkeeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013

Sjöwall and Wahlöö blazed a number of crime fiction trails (or at least were there at the very start), among them those of social criticism, a multiplayer cast of detectives, and elevation of the investigator's personal life to importance comparable with that of the mysteries he or she investigates. Their ten Beck novels, from 1965's Roseanna to The Terrorists in 1975, were among the first to examine a society critically as well as tell a crime story, and authors to this day cite them as influences.  

The best photo ever of Ali Karim
(right), with Peter Guttridge at
Crimefest 2013. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

So this is big, a chance to hear and meet one of crime fiction's modern greats, and I'll be there, May 14-17 in Bristol. (The award  Maj Sjöwall will present is named for the blog maintained by the late Maxine Clarke, a longtime reviewer and supporter of crime fiction. She posted the first ever comment here at Detectives Beyond Borders, back in September 2006.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Giorgio Scerbanenco, dark maestro of Italian noir

I can't quite figure out whom Giorgio Scerbanenco reminds me of most. He can be as dark as Leonardo Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as Camilleri, as noir as Manchette, as hope-against-hopeful as David Goodis, but with a dark, dark humor all his own.

In short, the first-ever English translation of his 1966 novel A Private Venus (Venere Privata) has to be the year's biggest event yet for readers of translated crime fiction, and I hope its status as a new book in English makes it eligible for the big crime-fiction awards in the U.S. and U.K. next year.

Here's a passage that sums up the novel's intriguing mix of involvement, alienation, social observation and wry, dark self-awareness:

"Everything was going wrong, the only thing that worked was the air conditioning in those two rooms in the Hotel Cavour, cool without being damp and without smelling odd; everything was going badly wrong in a way that the confident, efficient Milanese who passed, sweating, along the Via Fatebenefratelli or through the Piazza Cavour couldn't begin to imagine, even though they read stories like this every day in the Corriere. For them, these stories belonged to a fourth dimension, devised by an Einstein of crime, who was even more incomprehensible than the Einstein of physics. What was real was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn't feel so bad about smoking ... "

***

Not much is available about Scerbanenco in English.  This edition of A Private Venus, from Hersilia Press, includes a short autobiography called "I, Vladimir Scerbanenko." This outline of Italian crime fiction includes a few remarks. If you read Italian, Wikipedia offers a detailed summary of the novel. The Italian Mysteries Website offers a brief discussion of Duca and the Milan Murders, a 1970 translation of Traditori di tutti, second of Scerbanenco's four novels about the defrocked Milan physician Duca Lamberti. (A Private Venus is the first.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Alexander Cockburn visits the projects

Alexander Cockburn's post-mortem attack on Christopher Hitchens appears in a column that includes a reference to "The EU `project,' a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with `iconic,' `meme,' `parse' and `narrative' ..."

Maj Sjöwall might disagree, because the Project is what she called the crime novels (The Laughing Policeman, Roseanna, et al.) she wrote with Per Wahlöö. The Project, she says in a BBC documentary about Nordic crime fiction (go to the 25:30 mark), "was our way of creating a realistic crime novel that would look at society from a left-wing perspective."

The Project sought to expose the lies and hypocrisies of Sweden's post-war utopia: "The fact of the matter is that the so-called `welfare state' abounds with sick, poor and lonely people living at best on dog food who are left uncared for until they waste away and die in their rat-hole tenements."

I'd have thought Cockburn would like that sort of thing. I guess one's feeling about project depends on who's doing the projecting.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nordic not-really Noir: The BBC documentary

(Cheerful blogger with non-
gloomy Icelandic crime writer
Arnaldur Indriðason)

Hat tip to Adrian McKinty, who posted a link to the BBC documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction. A few comments:

First, the title. Alliteration to the contrary, none of the authors interviewed or discussed really writes noir, not Stieg Larsson, not Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, not in the books of hers that I've read, Karin Fossum. The central characters are not losers. The books are about anger, compassion, isolation, or resignation. They don't encompass the essentially noir emotion of depair. Gloom, yes. Doom, no.

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Val McDermid noted the cold, gloomy landscape in Nordic crime writing and suggested this makes a wonderful stage for crime.  She gets no quarrel from me. Here's some of what I wrote about Arnaldur Indriðason in the book Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction:

"People disappear in Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but the soil has a way of yielding them up again. An earthquake cracks the land, drains a lake, and uncovers a body; a victim turns up on a construction-site excavation; in spring, corpses come to light in a lake, where winter ice had concealed all signs of their disappearance. ... The landscape swallows up victims, whether of murder, accident or natural disaster; geological disruption lays them bare again."

Iceland, says one expert interviewed for the BBC piece, is "a place where people can disappear." Rozovsky said it first.

*

I was glad to hear McDermid note that Arnaldur's books are shot through with "these dark and awful bits of humor." And I loved a remark from Håkan Nesser, always amusing in a way not normally associated with Scandinavians, that "We're not supposed to talk like I do, we're supposed to just sit there and stare blankly out into the, whatever, darkness."

*

The program offered lots of Larsson but also a bit of Ibsen, intriguingly citing the nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright as a prototype for Scandinavian crime fiction's tendency to explore the outward, social manifestations of inner trauma. Jo Nesbø, among the program's featured authors, numbered Ibsen among his influences when he spoke with Detectives Beyond Borders last year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Andrea Camilleri, heart and sole

Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have come to feel like old friends whom I am always happy to see and to report on to our mutual acquaintances.

In The Potter's Field, thirteenth novel in the series, Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid.  Out of bed, his choice of reading matter, always a delight to Camilleri's readers, is a special treat this time. (OK, I'll give it away: Salvo, whose reading in previous novels has included Georges Simenon and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, this time chooses a novel by Andrea Camilleri.) 

The political gibes, as barbed as ever, are delivered with greater concision even as they ripen into a kind of weariness at the state of the world, though the gibes are as funny as always.  Camilleri has deepened and mellowed his protagonist's view.

In previous books, this has taken the form of increasing tenderness in Salvo's regard for his distant lover, Livia. Here, he feels the pain of a friend's betrayal more sharply than a younger Salvo would have, and his kinship with his fellow creatures even turns him briefly off seafood after he admires the fish at an aquarium in Genoa. (Can I have veal milanese? he asks a waiter. "Sure," the waiter replies,  "if you go to Milan." Salvo settles for an excellent plate of fried sole.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Television program examines Nordic crime fiction

If you have a television handy, MHz Networks will examine the question of what makes Scandinavian crime fiction so popular. The show will be telecast tomorrow and then repeated severval times over the next few days.

I'd call modern Nordic crime writing's birth in Naj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck novels spectacular, rather than humble, as the program notes say. But that's a quibble. Here's the information

Lone Wolves & Dragon Tattoos: How Scandinavian Crime Fiction Conquered The World

Air: Sunday, July 31, 9:00 pm on MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1
Future Airs: 08/01/11, 12:00 am MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1; 08/02/11, 9:00 pm MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1; 08/03/11, 12:00 am MHz1 WNVC-DT 30.1

  Broadcast In: OTHER

With Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy topping the bestseller lists and Kenneth Branagh starring as Henning Mankell's Detective Kurt Wallander on TV, Scandinavian crime fiction has never been hotter. But what is it about these characters and the worlds they inhabit that hold such universal appeal?

Lone Wolves & Dragon Tattoos traces the evolution of Nordic crime fiction, from its humble beginnings with Sjöwall-Wahlöö's Martin Beck novels of the 1960s straight through to the worldwide phenomenon of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, featuring interviews with some of the genre's brightest stars — authors Henning Mankell (Wallander), Gunnar Staalesen (Varg Veum) and Håkan Nesser (Van Veeteren) — as well as the actors and producers who bring these mysteries to life on-screen.

Produced by MHz Networks and Nordic Blast Entertainment. In English, Swedish and Norwegian with English subtitles.

Run Time: 02:00:00

Rating: TVPG Format: SD Source: MHZ

Why do crime writers set stories overseas?

My recent immersion in Dashiell Hammett implies no abandonment of international crime fiction. Hammett set "Ber-Belu" in the Philippines and "The Road Home" in Burma, and his friend Raoul Whitfield spent part of his life in the Philippines and set an entire series of stories there.

Henning Mankell took Kurt Wallander to Latvia in The Dogs of Riga, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö sent Martin Beck to Budapest in The Man Who Went up in Smoke, and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole does some far-flung travelling in a pair of books not yet available in English.

***

What other crime writers send their protagonists overseas? Why do they do this, and what does it add to a story? Have crime writers' reasons for setting stories overseas changed over time? (Keywords: Wanderlust, exotica, curiosity, exploration, Edgar Allan Poe.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Were Sjöwall and Wahlöö the last romantics?

Why not? Their observations about urban decay wrought by technology are less polemical than wistful (or, at most, gloomy), whether about factory-produced bread putting an end to local bakeries or, as in The Fire Engine That Disappeared, about cars and highways:

"It was not exactly a scintillating panorama that lay spread out before his eyes. A dismal industrial area and a motorway, of which all lanes leading into the city centre were crammed with vehicles jerking along at a snail's pace. Martin Beck loathed cars."

How could such a pair of Marxists be so philosophically Romantic? (That unimpeachable source, Wikipedia, quotes a definition of Romanticism as "In part ... a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.")

And then it hit me that Marx flourished smack in the heyday of High Romanticism in music. His most productive period coincided almost perfectly with Wagner's, for example, and they died the same year. (That year, 1883, was a watershed for artists and thinkers who made our view of modern life. Édouard Manet died then, too.)

So now I can relate Marx to Romanticism in one direction and to Sjöwall and Wahlöö in another. Who says crime writing is not educational?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The hero in the bathtub

A few months ago, I wrote about a charming tribute Andrea Camilleri paid Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in his novel The Track of Sand. Sjöwall and Wahlöö accord similar tribute to another crime writer in The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969), fifth in the Martin Beck series:

"He also drank some coffee and cognac and watched an old American gangster film on television. Then he got his bed ready and lay in the bathtub reading Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake, every now and then taking a sip of cognac which he had placed within reach on the toilet seat."

Who said Swedes don't know how to live? A recent Detectives Beyond Borders post asked "Who is the hero in a Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel?" There's your answer: If you know what a character likes to read, he's your protagonist.

***

On the other side of the Atlantic, I wonder if Every Bitter Thing, Leighton Gage's fourth novel featuring Inspector Mario Silva of Brazil's Federal Police, has been translated into Spanish and, if so, how well the book sells in Venezuela. Not that the novel names Hugo Chávez, at least not early on, but Chavistas might frown at several references to "the Clown."

How do you feel about such topical references in crime fiction? What are some of your favorites?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Colin Dexter on Sjöwall, Wahlöö, and Swedish sex

I've just has a couple of beers and a plate of fish and chips at my local, and I'm ready for a snooze, so I'll let Colin Dexter do the honors for today.

Dexter is yet another of the current crime authors who wrote introductions to the (relatively) recent editions of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck mysteries (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard in the U.S., Harper Perennial in the U.K., at least in paperback).

The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969) came fifth in the series and, writes Dexter, "My first preconception was that this husband-and-wife team, with a political stance well to the left, had become rather too bitterly cynical in the sixties and seventies of what they saw as the betrayal of many of their Socialist ideas and ideals."

We took care of that here two weeks ago; Detectives Beyond Borders readers know that strong political sensibilities do not preclude acute observation and sensitive, entertaining storytelling.

We also know about Sjöwall and Wahlöö's wit, though I am pleased to add such a distinguished witness for the defense as Dexter against the canard that Scandinavians aren't funny. "What struck me" about The Fire Engine That Disappeared, writes Inspector Morse's creator, "was the gently underplayed humour of the writing."

One of Dexter's preconceptions involved Ed McBain's influence on Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and I'll save that matter for another post. Another was his belief that anything coming out of Sweden in the 1960s must be saturated with explicit sex.

Instead, he writes, "Sex plays only a very small part in the novel; and what sex we do find is handled with an almost serene simplicity." And if that isn't a beautifully sane (and accurate) assessment, I don't know what is.

Thanks, Colin; and goodnight, readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Adverbs of gloom, or Humor in Nordic crime writing

Discussion here has turned once again to Nordic crime writers and their reputed lack of humor — on a post called What do your favorite writers do less well?, no less.

On the one hand, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö elevated the adverb to heights unseen in crime fiction since the Black Mask days, and those adverbs are generally gloomy. Characters are forever gesturing helplessly and slumping dejectedly. On the other hand are Kvant and Kristiansson:

"Outside police headquarters on Kungsholmsgatan stood two persons who definitely wished they had been somewhere else. They were dressed in police caps and leather jackets with gilded buttons, they had shoulder belts diagonally across their chests and carried pistols and batons at their waists. Their names were Kristiansson and Kvant.

"A well-dressed, elderly woman came up to them and asked, `Excuse me, but how do I get to Hjärnesgatan?'

"`I don't know, madam,' Kvant said. `Ask a policeman. There's one standing over there.'

"The woman gaped at him.

"`We're strangers here ourselves,' Kristiansson put in quickly, by way of explanation."

(Kristiansson and Kvant are officers in Solna whose eagerness to avoid work takes them over the municipal border into neighboring Stockholm and smack into the scene of the novel's central crime. Their ignorance of the lay of the land is thus plausible.)

Read more about humor in Nordic crime fiction in Mystery Readers Journal.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What do your favorite writers do less well?

I've finally found something Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did not do well: routine description.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966), second of the ten Martin Beck novels, takes Beck to Budapest to look for a missing Swedish journalist. His reflections on arrival are potted history and travel-guide boilerplate, the only time I have been tempted to skim rather than read Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Apologists might call the flat prose a comment on Beck's alienation or on the economics of tourism, but that would be out of character for Beck, who we are told enjoys travelling. Besides, alienation ought not to alienate the reader.

In any case, the bad bits were brief distractions, paling next to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's compelling portrayal of Beck's feeling at a loss in a country about which he knows little, whose language he cannot speak, investigating a case as baffling as the novel's title.

But that's a distraction from the day's question: What have your favorite writers tried that did not work?

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The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is broadly similar to Henning Mankell's The Dogs of Riga, which takes Kurt Wallander to Latvia. Each novel is the second in its series in order of original Swedish publication.

Mankell has acknowledged Sjöwall and Wahlöö's formative influence on Swedish crime writing. Could The Dogs of Riga be in part a tribute to his great predecessors?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bread, butter and crime

Or margarine rather than butter, to be frank. My recent post about Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Man on the Balcony singled out a meditation on the disappearance of small bakeries as a symptom of social decay.

That was the third novel in the ten-book Martin Beck series. Here's how the second novel, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, opens:

"The room was small and shabby. There were no curtains and the view outside consisted of a gray fire wall, a few rusty armatures and faded advertisement for margarine."

A grim slice of urban color? Yes, but perhaps more, as well. Back when the novel first appeared, in 1966, margarine was — at least where I came from — a weirdly artificial creation, a chemical intrusion of a ghastly white color that came in small tubs with an orange pill one could dissolve in the margarine to impart what the makers hoped was something closer to butter's natural color. So margarine could function easily as a sign of social decay, of the industrial and the chemical replacing the natural.

One need not read the passage that way, of course. (To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a greasy tub of bread lubricant is nothing more than that.) That the passage could function equally well as description and as social criticism, though, is one more sign of how good Sjöwall and Wahlöö were.

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My copy is part of the excellent reissue of the entire series by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, each volume of which includes an appreciation by a noted current crime writer.

I was chuffed to find in Val McDermid's discussion of The Man Who Went Up in Smoke some of the same points raised here apropos The Man on the Balcony: that Beck was no maverick, rules-defying hero; that he functioned as part of a team; that he was no genius and possessed no extraordinary powers. McDermid also praises Sjöwall and Wahlöö's skill as plotters, a quality especially apparent to me in the first Beck novel, Roseanna.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Who is the hero in a Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel?

Sure, Alan Blair's translation of The Man on the Balcony (1968), third of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck mysteries, includes several instances of the word society and one of the welfare state, but much of its social observation is homelier than that:

"Kvist ... inhaled the smell of fresh-baked bread, thinking that these small bakeries were getting rare.

"Soon they'll vanish altogether and you'll be able to buy nothing but mass-produced bread in plastic wrapping and the entire Swedish nation will eat exactly the same loaves and buns and cakes."

These days Kvist might have added "... and drink the same coffee, talk on the same phone, and read the same book on the same e-reader from the same company," but the sentiment remains pertinent today.

***

The novel gives the thought not to Martin Beck or even to his close colleague Lennart Kollberg, but rather to Kvist, a low-ranking officer who makes an important discovery in the scene and plays no role otherwise. Later in the book, two similarly low-ranking officers make an even more important discovery purely by accident.

What is a reader to make of the juxtaposition of serendipitous breaks by underlings and the lengthy, draining, sometimes heart-rending work put in by their superiors? Is this merely a more realistic account of how investigations work? A polemical attack on the convention that a novel must have a central figure? A raspberry aimed at authority by a pair of mischievous leftists?

Whatever the reason, other Scandinavian crime writers, Karin Fossum and Håkan Nesser among them, followed Sjöwall and Wahlöö's lead, dispersing the focus away from a central figure and distributing it among a larger cast.

Why do they do this? What other authors focus more on a cast of characters than on one central figure? What effect does this have? (Please remember to write your name on your blue books before you hand in your test papers.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Something new ...

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö blazed a number of crime fiction trails, among them those of social criticism, a multiplayer cast of detectives, and elevation of the investigator's personal life to importance comparable with that of the mysteries he or she investigates.

(Whether, in fact, they blazed the trails or were early followers is immaterial here. At any rate, they were among the first to tread the paths in question.)

Here is some of what I've noticed in Roseanna:

1) The team approach to the police procedural.

2) The occasional jab at military regimes, though these have been far less frequent that I'd expected.

3) Great stress on the protagonist's everyday problems.

4) And, what I consider the book's most impressive innovation, one cited by Henning Mankell in his introduction and handled beautifully by Sjöwall and Wahlöö: its portrayal of an investigation that moves in fits and starts, with long stretches when nothing happens.

If you've read Sjöwall and Wahlöö, which of their innovations most impressed you? Which have held up best? Which seem less exciting now that they might have in the 1960s? If you haven't read them, what crime-fiction innovations have impressed you most? Who introduced those innovations? Who perfected them? And what crime fiction innovations are less exciting now than they must have seemed when new?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sjöwall and Wahlöö: My late start on an early source

This post is by way of atonement. If Henning Mankell is a father to the current boom in international crime fiction, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are grandparents. Their ten Martin Beck novels, from 1965's Roseanna to The Terrorists in 1975, were among the first to examine a society critically as well as tell a crime story, and authors to this day cite them as influences.

Despite this, I had not read Sjöwall and Wahlöö until now. Mankell's introduction/appreciation to the 2008 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprint of Roseanna is a brisk review of its highlights, its influence, and its remarkable freshness despite the apparent distance of its world from Mankell's and ours. I am especially impressed that the first adjectives Mankell applies to the book are "straightforward" and "clear," and that he says "Even the language seems energetic and alive."

So far he's right. The first two chapters are like an operatic overture or prelude, sounding, one by one, miniature versions of the themes that will follow until, in Chapter 3, we meet Beck — the same Beck whose ordinariness as a human being, along with that of his colleagues, was such a revelation to Henning Mankell forty years ago. I have a heady feeling that I am exploring a source of much that has become familiar to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon V: One too many mornings ...

... but too few days and evenings to attend all the panels and soak up all the vitality of the event, much less to write about it all. So, a few notes, and expect more such late bulletins and little essays in the coming days. I'll begin with a pair of accolades for a pair of Swedish crime-fiction characters.

A panel Friday bore the amiable title "Books we love." Panelist Ali Karim predicted that Lisabeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo in Stieg Larsson's novel of that name, would become one of this generation' great crime fiction characters.

Lee Child paid even stronger tribute to Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's great creation: "[Martin Cruz Smith's] Arkady Renko is really Martin Beck. Michael Connelly's Bosch is really Martin Beck."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008