Back from a land where people read books

A small slice of the history section at Waterstones
Piccadilly bookshop in London. The section extends
to the left beyond the frame of this photo and into
and beyond the range of the next picture. (Photo by
Peter Rozovsky)

I trekked to Waterstones Piccadilly in London Tuesday evening to see Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Ragnar Jonasson interviewed by Andy Lawrence about their work and about Icelandic crime writing in general, but I was sidetracked by the breadth and height of the store's history section.

Ragnar Jonasson and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir amid more
evidence that  England more literate than the United
States. Note the small sign immediately to Yrsa's
right. She and Ragnar spoke in a part of the store
one over from that in the photo at upper left but
still in the history section.

What you see above/left is larger than the history section of my city's big bookshop, and that's just a part of the section on British history. Other countries, regions, periods, and subjects in history occupy even more space. And Waterstones is not some egghead independent or academic bookstore, it's part of a chain.

It was a pleasure to visit a city that buys books. As a commenter who was visiting the UK at the same time wrote on Facebook:

"B&N whines about Amazon, but I can see that in the UK, they treasure printed books and brick and mortar more because the experience is so very different from the U.S."

The store also has a bar and restaurant on its fifth floor. London is not just more literate than Philadelphia, it also knows better how to show a reader a good time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Crimefest and tonic

I can't quite remember the sequence of events, and I'm not sure I have all the names straight, but suffice it to say that the first day of Crimefest Bristol has restored my faith in the rationality of the human species. And that's pretty good for a crime convention's first day.

Kati Hiekkapelto, Ragnar Jonasson 

at Friday's debut authors panel.

More to follow after the pitifully meager amount of sleep that remains to me before tomorrow's panels.

Among the day's discoveries--possibly foremost among them--is that 160 ml. of tonic mixed with the gin is the perfect amount for an exquisite Hendrick's and tonic, a conclusion verified repeatedly beyond all possibility of statistical error.

Ali Karim

I have enjoyed being carried along in Ali Karim's wake, and have also had the pleasure of meeting Craig Sisterson in person, years after serving as a judge for him in New Zealand's Ngaio Marsh crime fiction awards.

I also met up with Western Australia's Alan Carter, and thanks to David Whish-Wilson for letting me know about him. Alan: I missed your panel this morning, but I bought Getting Warmer. Stop me if you see me, and I'll ask you to sign it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bouchercon 2014: I never knew there was a police code for "dinner"

Relaxing in my local coffeehouse (my L.A. local, not my Philadelphia local), regaining my power of coherent thought after six days of hard drivin', low-sleepin' fun at Bouchercon 2014.  Here are some things that stuck with me from the convention's panels.

Lots of these in Long Beach. All photos by
Peter Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper

1) Connie Dial, a Los Angeles cop turned crime novelist, said during Thursday's panel on crime in Hollywood  when she worked patrol in South Central L.A., "You'd ask for a Code 7, which was dinner, and they'd say, "Take twenty more calls."

2) Someone recalled the lavish spread provided for the crew during filming at a police precinct house, a spread whose appeal extended well beyond the police station in question? "Cops came from everywhere to eat." Walpow also recounted the snacking habits of the movie's star, Paul Newman: "Newman wandered around the station ... He ate them out of jelly beans."

Kwei Quartey

3) Kwei Quartey's suggestion that writing crime fiction set in his native Ghana poses challenges that fiction set in large American cities does not. Why? Because Ghana is changing so rapidly, over the course of months rather than years.

John McFetridge

4) John McFetridge recalling a rewriting of the history behind his novel Black Rock, whose principal crime is a series of killings of young women based on real-life killing in Montreal in 1970. His research turned up suggestions that authorities had issued warning for young women to be wary, but McFetridge's sister, about the same age as the victims, said she recalled no such warnings. "I thought that was a bit of revisionist history," McFetridge said, "`We should have warned them, but we didn't. Now we're claiming we did.'"

Ragnar Jonasson

5) Ragnar Jonasson's debunking of the popular belief that weapons are scarce in his native Iceland. Guns are plentiful there, he said, and so, in a nation of hunters, are guns.

Chris Ewan

6) Chris Ewan, crime novelist and resident of the Isle of Man, on a difference between Manx Halloween customs and those in American and England: "It's not easy to carve a turnip."

7) I wish I could remember which author described the process of research and writing this: "You get out in the world. Then you go hermit. You don't wear pants for nine months."

8) DBB favorite Adrian McKinty won the Barry Award in the best paperback original category for I Hear the Sirens in the Street.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crimefest Day 2: Fire and Iceland

"You never hear anyone telling Norwegian jokes anymore, and I think it's because of the money," Swedish crime writer Åsa Larsson said during today's Crimefest 2012 panel on Scandinavian crime fiction.

"Now it's the other away round," Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger replied. Norway's oil wealth has apparently muted at least one outward expression of Sweden's superiority to its neighbors.

But the panel was not all doleful observations and good-natured gloating. Gunnar Staalesen gave a plausible answer to a question I'd long had about Scandinavian crime writers: Why did Satanism and the fear thereof figure in a number of their crime novels in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (a.k.a. The Savage Altar) among them? Tursten appeared to take umbrage when I put the question to her a few years ago, apparently thinking I implied she had copied Nesbø. I implied no such thing, and I'll chalk Tursten's impatience up to fatigue from a gruelling tour schedule.

Larsson said a church figured in her book simply because, while secular now, she had had a religious upbringing; churches were simply a part of her background. But Staalesen suggested that a real-life wave of church burnings in the 1990s by a black-metal musician who wrote about Germanic neo-Paganism might have brought Satanism to the fore as an issue of public concern.

The intriguing thing about the resulting novels, at least the three I named, is that Satanism and satanists tend to be suspects and sources of fear rather than the actual villains of the piece. The books do not decry or praise Satanism, they merely take it up as one aspect of Swedish and Norwegian social and spiritual life.

I asked Staalesen after the panel whether an amusing, geographically specific metaphor for oral sex in the English translation of his 1995 novel The Writing on the Wall was an accurate rendering of the Norwegian original. He did not remember the line, which he'd have written seventeen years ago. But he did say the metaphor would work just as well in Norwegian as in English.

Finally, Ragnar Jonasson paid tribute to the trail blazed by his fellow Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. That Arnaldur did not publish his first novel until 1997 indicates how new Icelandic crime writing is. "Prior to that," Ragnar said, echoing a battle that crime writing has had to wage in a number of countries, "crime fiction was looked down upon by the public."

*

 The panel's moderator was Barry Forshaw, who really has written the book on Scandinavian crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012