Hooray for Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill's long literary and journalistic career includes at least one crime novel that crosses borders (The Guns of Heaven, Northern Ireland), but that's not what gets him mentioned here.

He makes it because his introduction to the Penguin Classics Damon Runyon collection, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings, contains in the space of two paragraphs three salient attributes of Runyon's work that I noticed in his story "Sense of Humor":

• "Sometimes we can hear Runyon's people talking above their stations, playing social roles that are lies, but we certainly don't mistake them for characters out of Edith Wharton, who do the same thing."


• "This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don't speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours."


• "Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

International noir on a rainy day

Sunday's International Noir panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival was cut short by rain (We had to move indoors at the last minute and trudge over to St. Francis College.)

But participants did have some worthwhile things to say, particularly about their early inspirations. "I was huge fan of Batman," Pete Hamill said. "It has shadows."

And Paco Ignacio Taibo II said he was inspired early by Carl von Clausewitz. "`War is the continuation of politics by other means,'" Taibo said. "The phrase stayed inside me."

Caryl Férey repeated a sentiment I had heard from other crime writers that nonetheless ought to be bracing to all fans of the genre: "You can talk about anything in that kind of novel: politics, ethnic issues."

For Férey, the sentiment went hand in hand with a lively interest in the wider world and what one can say about that world in a crime novel. "I don't care about me," he said. "I care about others."

Taibo said the crime novel had usurped a place once occupied by another medium as a source of truth: "Journalism is becoming noise, noise, noise." And it did my heart good to hear him say what he thinks drives a story:

"Everyone says the plot is the instrument. No. The language is the instrument." Now, there's a crime writer worth investigating.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

International noir in Brooklyn

This weekend's Brooklyn Book Festival includes a session on international noir, if you should happen to be around Brooklyn Borough Hall Sunday afternoon.

Guests include Caryl Férey, whose novel Zulu is a recent topic of discussion here; Mexico's Paco Ignacio Taibo II; Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Delhi Noir and my fellow radio guest on Wisconsin Public Radio last year; and Pete Hamill. They'll talk about noir and its enduring appeal starting at 3 p.m. on the International Stage at Borough Hall.

That's just one of the weekend's events, all available for the attractive price of FREE. Here's the complete schedule. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010