Shot at the Edgars

Peter Lovesey, named an MWA Grand Master at the 2018 Edgar Awards. Photo by
Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

News flash: Peter Lovesey is an MWA Grand Master

Peter Lovesey (Photograph for Detectives
Beyond Borders by Peter Rozovsky)

Mystery Writers of America have announced that Peter Lovesey has been named an MWA Grand Master. The Last Detective, first of Lovesey's novels about Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, is one of the best alienated-cop novels. I got to meet and chat with Lovesey at Crimefest 2017 in Bristol, and I am pleased to report that he is one of the most pleasant fellows one could want to meet, entertaining as a panelist and informative as an interview subject. And here's an old post about that most virtuosic of crime-fiction feats, Lovesey's Bertie and the Seven Bodies.

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I like authors who solve narrative problems, and that superb craftsman and fine storyteller Peter Lovesey solved a whopper in his 1990 mystery Bertie and the Seven Bodies (Felony and Mayhem Press), the second of his three novels about Bertie, Prince of Wales.

I picked up this affectionate tribute to Golden Age mysteries, Agatha Christie's in particular, as a change of pace, and I noticed early on how skillfully Lovesey captures the flavor and tone of an English country-house mystery while at the same time remaining thoroughly up to date.

How does he do this? First by making the jovial prince and the pretty hostess more explicitly randy than his predecessors in the Golden Age probably would have; second, by describing the pheasant hunt that is the occasion for the story's house party far more thoroughly than I expect a Golden Age author would have done:

"The planning for this week of sport had begun more than a year ago, and the arrangements couldn't be altered at the drop of a hat. What with loaders, beaters, stops, pickers-up, drivers and catering staff, we could be using more than two hundred personnel."

"The dead birds were tidily lined up for counting, almost two hundred pheasants, one of the gamekeepers said, bringing our day's bag past seven hundred."

"I waited, flanked by my loaders, picturing the activity in the coverts as the fugitive birds scampered ahead of the beaters. A pheasant has a natural reluctance to take to its wings, and it requires a well-managed beat to put it up precisely over the guns without flushing too many other at once."

"This battue was faultless. They presented the birds in a long, soaring sequence almost vertically above us. I worked with three guns, receiving from the loader on my right, firing and passing it empty to the other man, never shifting my eyes from the sky."

The accumulated weight of these vignettes adds up to a startling picture of sybaritism, a portrait of long, hard work by many devoted to the idle and momentary enjoyment of a few. And yet they work as action and description without ever coming off as shrill, polemical, condescending or anachronistically knowing.

Why? Because Bertie describes the scene with an innocent eye. He does not know that what he sees might be appalling to the democratic and ecological sensibilities of today's readers. That distance safely allows us both to enjoy the scene and to be surprised, even shocked, by its waste and luxury. To put it another way, Lovesey has written the most socially authentic-seeming hunt scene I can remember in any crime story.

Lovesey appeals beautifully to current readers' sensibilities. At the same time, he maintains the atmosphere of a story composed in the past (that he does this all against yet a third layer of time, the story's 19th-century setting, is a matter for discussion elsewhere). What other authors do this?
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(Read another Detectives Beyond Borders post about Bertie and the Seven Bodies.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2017

Crimefest 2017, Part I

Another edition of this fine Bristol crime fiction convention has wrapped up, the most enjoyable of the seven Crimefests I've attended even though a seagull shit on my head the convention's first day. Details of the convention will follow over the next few days, minus the bird shit.

Martin Edwards

In the meantime, a few words about Martin Edwards and Peter Lovesey, as entertaining and informative a combination of interviewer/moderator and subject//panelist as has ever graced a crime festival stage. I've read just a few novels from Lovesey's extensive output, but they include one of the best of all angry-cop novels (The Last Detective) and the most virtuosic performance by a crime writer that I have ever been privileged to read (Bertie and the Seven Bodies). Lovesey was a guest of honor at this year's Crimefest, and it was a pleasure to see him interviewed on stage by Edwards, to hear him hold forth during a panel on short stories, and to offer my compliments on his work, to which he reacted with humility and good humo(u)r.

Peter Lovesey

Edwards has changed my ideas about traditional mysteries, served as a model of how to moderate a panel, and won a number of crime fiction quizzes in which I finished second several times and fifth once. He was also a member of a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, where we enjoyed a convivial pre-convention dinner discussing his subject for the panel (Michael Gilbert), the legal profession (Edwards is a lawyer), and the differences between the profession as practiced in the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Edwards and Lovesey obviously love the work they do, are good at it, and are engaging and entertaining when talking about their own writing and the history of crime fiction. Edwards often attends Bouchercons and Lovesey will be a guest of honor at Bouchercon 2019 in Dallas. You should see these guys on this side of the ocean or that.

Kati Hiekkapelto

Janet Laurence, Peter Lovesey

And now, some more photos of Crimefest by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Beyond Borders.

Parker Bilal, Steve Cavanagh

Paul Hardisty

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Before the gala dinner

Ali Karim in the gutter, Mike
Stotter's eyes on the stars

At the convention hotel

Crime on stage

Peter Lovesey's next Peter Diamond novel, Stagestruck, is set in and around Bath's Theater Royal.

The stage seems a natural setting for a crime story, doesn't it, thriving as it does on disguise and deception. Lovesey, that most ingenious of crime writers, does something else as well. He has a supporting player on the police force whose only dialogue is clownishly baroque wordplay.

The verbal games remind the reader that the simplest statement can be twisted into any number of meanings — surely appropriate for a mystery story. And they drive Peter Diamond entertainingly batty.

Such over-the-top verbal business might be a distraction in an otherwise realistic police novel. Here, the character is like a commedia dell'arte clown, thrown into the mix to stir things up.

Now, here's a question you'll likely be able to answer more readily that I could: What other crime writers have set stories in the world of the theater? Why did they choose those settings? What do such settings add to the story?

I'll start you off: Dame Ngaio Marsh.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Get smart, but not too smart

Apropos of my recent reading of Bertie and the Seven Bodies by Peter Lovesey, Lee Goldberg posts a relevant criticism of the new Get Smart movie. The problem with that movie and with Steve Martin's Pink Panther remake, Goldberg writes, is that "someone made the inept decision to make the bumbling heroes smart and capable ... and very good at what they do." This, he says, robbed the two protagonists of that which made them so funny: the gap between their inflated estimates of their own capabilities and what they were actually capable of.

Lovesey's Bertie, Prince of Wales, is similarly good-hearted and similarly deluded about the extent of his own capabilities as a sleuth. Lovesey has fun with this delusion literally from the novel's opening page: "Damnit, one small oversight and I'm branded as a failure. If I'd looked in the wretched wastepaper basket my chain of reasoning would have been different, altogether different."

And now, readers, what are your thoughts on crime-fiction bumblers? Who are your favorite such characters? Why do you like them? How would your feeling about them change if they were more capable and less prone to bumbling?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008
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More Bertie and the Seven Bodies

The third body has just been set off to one side in Peter Lovesey's Bertie and the Seven Bodies, which means I have about half the book to go. But I can't resist passing on a delicious passage.

The book's narrator and protagonist is Edward, Prince of Wales during the reign of his mother, Queen Victoria, which ended in 1901. The book's conceit is that Edward is narrating the story after he has become King Edward VII. Here is Edward, known to all as Bertie, relating his shock when he realizes the three deaths must be connected:

"Well, you'll have gathered the direction my thoughts were taking. It seemed to me that the victims had been picked off like prey, impersonally, for no other reason than that they happened to be guests at Desborough Hall at this time. Such callous slaughter is not unknown. I can't expect my twentieth-century reader to have heard of the East End murders committed in 1888 by a seeker of publicity known to the press as Jack the Ripper. At the time they made a considerable sensation. He wrote letters challenging the police to catch him, but up to now he is still at liberty. I tell you candidly, sitting in that darkened room, I could foresee a campaign just as brutal and alarming as the Ripper's – in fact more alarming, because it was aimed not at streetwalkers, but people of refinement."

This passage contains much to enjoy, laugh at and think about.

Discuss.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008
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Peter Lovesey

Language schools and other shady settings

I don't know why I think of this now, other than the shark-like principle that governs blogging (For sharks, the credo is keep swimming, or die. For bloggers, it's keep posting, or die), but I realized that Peter Lovesey's The Summons was not the first crime novel I had read in which a language school is a focus of shady dealings. In that book, a character's desire to cover up dodgy matters at such a school is presented as credible motive for murder. Some time earlier, I had read Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, whose protagonist gets himself in a whole lot of trouble, starting with his job at a sleazy language school.

In neither novel do the principal crimes take place at language school, but both books present such schools the way earlier writers presented saloons or used-car dealerships. They are places where bad, dishonest things are just waiting to happen.

So, dear readers, name some other prototypically disreputable locations from your crime reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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When authors spring a surprise in mid-series

A discussion at the Oz Mystery Readers group sparked thoughts of the ways crime writers shake things up mid-series. Peter Lovesey, whose novel The House Sitter is the Oz group's current subject, has brought Peter Diamond back into the Bath police force and killed off his wife. In He Who Fears the Wolf, Karin Fossum pulls her protagonist into the background and makes him part of an ensemble cast in which suspects and victims are far more prominent.

The late Michael Dibdin livened things up in the fifth of his Aurelio Zen books by basing the story on a Mozart opera. And then there's that gushing fountain of ideas, Donald Westlake, who has shared chapters with other authors, who has had the characters in his comic Dortmunder series plan a heist based on an imaginary novel in his decidedly un-comic Parker series, and who has used the same opening chapter in novels in two different series, with the action in each book then following a different character.

How have your favorite writers changed things up in mid-series? Did the changes work? And tell me about some of the stranger changes. Can you think of anything wilder than Dibdin's wonderful opera plot in Cosi Fan Tutti?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007