Frederick Forsyth at Crimefest: Thirty-five Days of the Jackal

Crimefest 2013 in Bristol, England, is coming up next month, and I plan to make my fourth appearance in the festival's six years. So this is a good time to start reading a classic thriller that I first got excited about at Crimefest 2012.

The opening hundred or so pages of The Day of the Jackal offer measured, chilling background to fanaticism from two French sides in the Franco-Algerian War. (The Jackal is an assassin hired  by right-wing military figures to kill French President Charles de Gaulle, incensed by De Gaulle's grant of Algerian independence after having declared "Vive l'Algerie Francaise!" De Gaulle proclaimed "Long live French Algeria!" then granted the country its independence, and "Vive le Quebec libre!" or "Long live free Quebec!" without, however, wrenching my native province out of Canada--at least not yet. He had a bit of a problem with this liberation thing.)

Now, why not listen to some Franco-Algerian music, read about the real aborted Algerian military coup against De Gaulle, and join me in The Day of the Jackal?

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 Thirty-five days. That's how long Crimefest 2012 honoree Frederick Forsyth said it took him to write his classic 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal. And he said the novel was published as he had written it, without changes.

This and the rapidity of the book's composition earned him the good-natured jealousy of Peter Guttridge, who quizzed Forsyth in the first of the festival's six guest-of-honor interviews.

I had seen and liked the 1973 film version of The Day of the Jackal, but I had not read a word of Forsyth's work before today. His interview turned me into a fan, though, and I bought the book. My favorite bit of the interview was probably Forsyth's response to Guttridge's question about whether the world had grown more complicated since the Jackal's Cold War days.

"Very much so," Forsyth replied. "Al-Qaeda is here, there, everywhere. ... It's a weird world. It's a dangerous world. It's a bewildering." (And yes, Forsyth's tendency to speak in threes lends his speech a pleasantly rhythmic effect.) He also, by his own account, has led a fortunate and engaging life, so yes, I'm a Forsyth fan starting today.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012. 2013

Crimefest 2012 highlights

A gentle spring wind dissipates the gin fumes over College Green, and Bristol is an eerily quiet place now that Ali Karim has left town.

With Crimefest 2012's remaining stragglers marshaling their strength before the Sunday dinner, here are some highlights of my third Crimefest, one of the most enjoyable crime festivals I've been part of:

1) Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool wins the Last Laugh award, for best comic crime fiction published in the U.K., besting a field that included hacks and pikers like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.

2) Your humble blogkeeper loses the Criminal Mastermind quiz to Peter Guttridge on the crime-fiction equivalent of penalty kicks. Guttridge and I each answered fifteen questions correctly in general crime-fiction knowledge and our specialty categories. (His was Richard Stark's Parker novels; mine was Dashiell Hammett.) Guttridge won the prize of Bristol blue glass and a free pass to next year's festival because he had passed on only five questions whose answers he did not know while I passed on seven. I think, however, that my showing may be the best ever by a North American, and proof to the Brits that there's more to America than bluff good humor, rustic colonial manners, and a flair for tall stories.

3) A post-dinner discussion with Gunnar Staalesen, who agreed with a Detectives Beyond Borders commenter's suggestion that the Anders Breivik case will halt fruitful, honest discussion of immigration and integration in Norway for a generation.

4) Finding a crime writer (William Ryan) for whom Isaac Babel (Odessa Tales, Red Cavalry) is both an inspiration and a character.

5) Reunions with the delightful floating cast of authors, organizers, critics and fans who spend their vacations criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean to attend every crime festival they can in England and America, and the addition of Alison Bruce, Laura Wilson and Stav Sherez to the cast. See you in Cleveland or Harrogate or Bristol or Albany or Long Beach or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

CrimeFest, Day III, Part I: Interviews

Håkan Nesser, interviewed by Ann Cleeves, shed light on that recurrent question of Scandinavian gloom and Scandinavian authors. Scandinavians, he said, are dour; their authors are not: "I wanted [my protagonist] to be, at least to start with, depressed. ... Happy people don't need their humor."

Dour Swedes may be, Nesser said, but not cripplingly so: "We're not that depressed, but we don't talk a lot. That's good for a crime story. You keep things inside for thirty years," and then they just come out.

Ten of Nesser's twenty-two novels have featured Inspector Van Veeteren; four of these have been translated into English. The remaining six would likely change Nesser's image in the English-speaking world. The books translated thus far have featured villains with whom the reader may sympathize deeply. But that changed: "There are two really bad guys in numbers nine and ten." After the fifth in the series, Nesser said, Van Veeteren retires from the police and opens a bookstore instead.

Nesser also discussed his series about a character with the whimsical name of Gunnar Barbarotti, a series as yet untranslated into English, a series whose premise seems an odd mix of whimsy and Ingemar Bergman: "It's a thing between [Barbarotti] and God, and God has to prove he exists. ... If the prayer is fulfilled, God will get one point, or, in more important cases, one or two points."

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Two interviews with authors I have not yet read offered insights I found especially pleasing. Andrew Taylor told Peter Guttridge that he loved Jane Austen, and Simon Brett told Gyles Brandreth that Austen was the one person he'd like to meet in Heaven, Taylor also cited P.G. Wodehouse as an early love.

So I'll take a tentative stab at charting some tendencies of British crime writers: They love Austen, they love Wodehouse, and they have a decided position, yes or no, on whether their novels have fundamentally moral concerns. At least this was true of some writers here, and the penchant for Austen and Wodehouse is by no means restricted to writers of what Americans call cozies or to any other type of mystery. Not should it be. Austen and Wodehouse are towering giants, a Hammett and a Chandler of English writing.

One remark was sufficient to get me interested in reading Taylor, who is English and this year's recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement: "Until ... 1934, it would have been utterly possible for us to slip gradually into being a Fascist state."

Oh, and he offered a valuable tip for beginning crime writers: "With the first novel, I had a corpse, and I went on from there. Corpses are good."

Click here for the full CrimeFest schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009