Crime writers and reviewers, as they looked at Crimefest 2015

Martin Edwards

Kati Hiekkapelto

Ali Karim

Jake Kerridge

Anthony Quinn

Gunnar Staalesen

Steve Cavanagh

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Hans Olav Lahlum

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Crimefest: History, wisdom, and the reek of fermented shark

 

Because it's almost time for Crimefest 2015, and because history is what I read most when I'm not reading crime, I thought I'd bring back a post about history from Crimefest 2010.   

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Andrew Taylor made trenchant observations during Crimefest 2010's historical-fiction panel, just as he had at last year's Crimefest.

"The 1950s," he said, "are a fascinating time because, I think, it was the end of history for most of us, an eternal present." But, he said, "It became clear to me it was a completely alien time," a world that would have been recognizable to someone who had been around in the 1930s.

Edward Marston, the panel's moderator, spoke of his childhood during the Second World War: "I saw no one between the ages of 18 and 40 because they had all been conscripted. I didn't see my father until I was 6. ... My grandfather lived with us. He'd fought in the First World War," and, Marston said, those who remained at home heard much about how "His war was better than our war."

Marston also made a remark that ought to make all crime readers and authors reflect on the world in which fictional detectives live and work: "Your sleuth must have social mobility."

Ruth Dudley Edwards spiced up the sex, violence and bad language panel with the observation that her Baroness 'Jack' Troutbeck, while willing to avail herself of a carnal romp with whatever sex is available, "would be just as motivated, really, by a good dinner." (My question about sex as a motivating factor in crime fiction, as a means rather than an end, won me a book bag for the session's best question. I won another later the same day, and no one was around to take it away from me.)

Elsewhere, Michael Ridpath, an author new to me who sets his recent novels in Iceland, said that country's financial crisis had forced some rewriting. "I had to change `In Iceland everything is expensive' to `In Iceland, everything is cheap,'" he said. Asked at a different session what she thought of Ridpath's choice of settings, Iceland's own Yrsa Sigurðardóttir said: "That's great. That's just excellent."

Yrsa also brought hákarl, or highly pungent fermented shark, an Icelandic specialty she was eager to share with fellow attendees, along with bracing Icelandic schnapps to wash it down. I enjoyed watching the faces of everyone who tried hákarl. You'll enjoy doing so, too. Says Wikipedia: Hákarl "is an acquired taste and many Icelanders never eat it."

I suspect that after Crimefest 2010, some Canadians, Americans, Englishmen and South Africans may join them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Saint, P.G. Wodehouse, and copy editing

The introduction to the new edition of The Saint and Mr Teal invokes the name of P.G. Wodehouse, and aptly so; the writing is that good.

The introducer, one John Goldsmith, claims a place for author Leslie Charteris alongside (or above) the stars of British adventure writing of the early and middle twentieth century. The Saint was a rule breaker, Goldsmith writes, free of the anti-Semitism and racism of his upper-class British fictional counterparts. Goldsmith also offers an astute discussion of Charteris' literary style.

The introduction's one conspicuous weakness is Goldsmith's account of his trip to "a remote fishing village on the coast of Brazil," where "when I mentioned the Saint faces lit up, recognition was instant. It was smiles and ecstatic cries of ‘El Santo! El Santo!’ all round."  Why the Brazilian villagers spoke Spanish rather than Portuguese is a mystery to be solved by Goldsmith, his copy editor, or, just maybe, a linguist. (Read Goldsmith's introduction at the Hodder & Stoughton website.)

Wodehouse lovers will also note the name of the Scotland Yard detective Claud Eustace Teal, whom Charteris introduced in 1929 — six years after Wodehouse had created Bertie Wooster's unforgettable scapegrace cousins Claude and Eustace Wooster in The Inimitable Jeeves. That makes Charteris the earliest crime writer known to your humble blogkeeper to have paid apparent tribute to Wodehouse. He joins such later authors as John Lawton and Ruth Dudley Edwards.

And finally, a tip of the Yorkshire wool cap to Zoë Sharp, who talked up Charteris and The Saint at Crimefest this year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crimefest 2: Drop your pants, this is a fire drill

Thank heavens a fire drill emptied my hotel Friday afternoon just as I'd removed my pants preparatory to a refreshing nap. For a moment there  I was afraid I was going to get some rest and recover from my jet lag ...

... and, in retrospect, that turned out to be a relatively enjoyable parts of my day. I shall expose the institutions on both sides of the Atlantic that tried so hard to make my life a misery, but I'll wait until I'm safely home and out of their clutches.

Meanwhile, the Crimefest part of Crimefest makes me feel like Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former head of the International Olympic Committee who would inevitably declare each recently concluded Olympics "the best Games ever." This six-year-old festival keeps getting better and better. More snapshots from its first two days:

Ali Karim said: "America is mental."

William McIlvanney said: "Glasgow has an opinion about everything."  A hard city of hard men? said the father of tartan noir. "I don't think it's hard so much as confrontational."

Michael Sears, half of the writing team of Michael Stanley, suggested a reason police in southern Africa may be less than eager to investigate cases of humans killed and dismembered for use of their body parts in religious rituals:  "Partly because they're scared of the witch doctors, partly because they're scared of who might be paying the witch doctors."

McIlvanney again, on the impetus for his Laidlaw novels: "I wanted to acquaint straight society with its darker side, to introduce Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll."

Ruth Dudley Edwards, speaking during a panel on crime and humor, of herself and her Irish countryman Declan Burke: "We were both brought up in a society of performers."

Aly Monroe, an author new to me, on why she made the protagonist of her espionage series an economist: "Because the Cold War was all about money."

John Lawton, a fellow member of Monroe's panel on Cold War espionage fiction: "The thing about spies is that they can't wait to tell you things."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Swedish crime novel wins the International Dagger

Johan Theorin and translator Marlaine Delargy have won the 2010 Crime Writers' Association International Dagger for The Darkest Room. The prize follows the pair's 2009 John Creasey New Blood Dagger (best first novel) for Echoes From the Dead.

Thorin and Delargy beat out competition that included:

Badfellas by Tonino Benacquista, translated from the French by Emily Read.

August Heat by Andrea Camilleri, translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.

Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indriðason, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer, translated from the Afrikaans by K.L. Seegers.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, whose correct placement of the apostrophe, in contradistinction to the novel's American edition, was not enough to secure a triumph over Larsson's fellow Swede. Reg Keeland was the translator.

Ruth Dudley Edwards won the Non-Fiction Dagger for Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing And the Families' Pursuit of Justice.

Visit the CWA Web site for other awards and shortlists announced today and links to more information about each.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon I

Arrived in Indianapolis a full day ahead of the formal start of Bouchercon, which meant a few hours for socializing and for taking midnight pictures of the city's imposing Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

Ran into old friends from previous conventions -- Anita Thompson, Dennis Tafoya, Toby and Bill Gottfried, Janet Rudolph, Jon Jordan (who is already hard at work on Bouchercon 2011) and so on. Ran into Ali Karim as well, but then, one is always running into Ali Karim at these affairs.

Dinner turned into a Pied Piper parade that dwarfed what I'd experienced at previous cons. About thirty of us all told wolfed down pasta, and each of us was asked to stand, introduce him or herself, and name the best book he or she had read this year. A few votes came in for Louise Penny (Canadians were well represented at the dinner), and one each for Timothy Hallinan's Breathing Water and Megan Abbott's Queenpin, both of which I endorsed.

Donna Moore stood and thrust her head straight into the low-hanging lampshade at left. It set off her hair nicely.

Tomorrow, my translation panel, plus an Irish crime fact and fiction discussion that includes Ruth Dudley Edwards and Stuart Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Tradition, tradition!

Does something in the zeitgeist — the disastrous recession, maybe, the swift and terrifying collapse of vital, once-trusted industries, the newly precarious state of so many lives and livelihoods — turn readers' and publishers' thoughts to the comforts of tradition? A week and a half ago I posted some thoughts by and about those unrelated novel-writing Edwardses — Ruth Dudley and Martin — on traditional mysteries: what the term means, and how an author goes about writing traditional mysteries in these untraditional times.

This week, Sarah Weinman weighs in on "New Traditionalist" mysteries and cites some thoughts on the subject from Jordan Foster at Publishers Weekly.

Click on all those links — Sarah's, PW's, the Edwardes' and mine — and open your mind to mysteries that can be traditional and with it at the same time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest II: What's traditional about a traditional mystery?

(Here's my second in a series of posts about authors who plan to attend CrimeFest 2009 in Bristol, England, next month. I'll be there, too, working when I should be having fun and having fun when I should be working.)

What's traditional about a traditional mystery? If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, I might have said traditional = cozy = prominent role for old dear = village or country-house setting = knitting = cute animals.

Then I read what Ruth Dudley Edwards had to say on the subject. In the United States, she writes on her Web site, "the distinction is made between cosies and hard-boiled, terms which are unknown here except to the cognoscenti. I am definitely in the cosy league – what Reg Hill, who is there too, calls ‘the Jane Austen end of the crime writing spectrum’."

One always knew that Britain had Christie and the U.S. had Chandler and that the dichotomy might have echoes to this day. Still, having just read Edwards' The English School of Murder, I was surprised to see the author place herself in the cozy league. The novel, after all, is set almost entirely in London, and it includes passing and not-so-passing references to drug use, homosexuality, menages-a-trois and any number of up-to-date political and cultural jabs and other references, not to mention the occasional four-letter word.

I've just opened Martin Edwards' Waterloo Sunset, and I've noticed reflections on urban growth and boosterism, not to mention a character who just might be disturbingly demented. I hadn't expected this from an author who has proclaimed his allegiance to traditional mysteries. Heck, the man even named his novel for a song by the Kinks.

I know something about what a traditional mystery isn't: full of explicit sex and wrenching violence. But sharpen my thinking, and tell me what a contemporary traditional mystery is.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Detectives Beyond Borders' CrimeFest blogfest: Ruth Dudley Edwards

I'm off to Bristol for CrimeFest 2009 next month. Between now and then, I'll devote some posts to authors and others who'll join me there.

First up is Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose novel Murdering Americans won CrimeFest's Last Laugh Award 2008. That was the eleventh novel in her series about the splendidly named Robert Amiss; The English School of Murder is the third.

I may devote a post to Edwards' satire, but here it's humor's turn, specifically Edwards' talent for maintaining a tone through incidental action and description. This line, in the fourth chapter, without having any immediate bearing on the plot or anything to do with Edwards' targets, gives a fair idea:

"`Suspicious,' observed Amiss, who was losing interest rapidly."

The novel is set in an English-language school, and Dudley is not the only crime writer to find such a school fertile ground for a story of crime and corruption. The other half of the title's wordplay applies, too. Amiss' friend Ellis Pooley is a genial and wide-ranging connoisseur of crime novels.

A special treat for P.G. Wodehouse fans: Amiss' improvised effort to trap a recalcitrant cat in an early chapter is a tribute to "Jeeves and the Impending Doom," my favorite Wodehouse story and one of his best.

More to come, maybe.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Political incorrectness

There's a fair bit of it on display in Ruth Dudley Edwards's Matricide at St. Martha's, one of the books I've harvested on this book-heavy vacation.

A rich patroness has died and left a sizable bequest to the struggling St. Martha's College at Cambridge, and factional battles have broken out about how to use the gift. "The decision has to be taken by the end of the term," writes protagonist Martin Amiss, "and the Fellows are at war over what it should be. With her customary delicacy, Jack describes the two main tribes as the Virgins and the Dykes, with a minority party called the Old Women."

The first group, Amiss explains, "are devising the Alice Toon Postgraduate Scholarships in Theology, Paleography, Medieval Law and so on. Dame Maud Theodosia is compiling a definitive list at present of the most unpopular subjects anyone can think of.

"The second lot, the Dykes, are fewer in number but they're better street-fighters ... Her lot want to spend the money on a centre for Gender and Ethnic Studies." And the "Old Women are in fact men." I'm not far into the book, then, but I am prepared to have my sensibilities joyously offended.

Edwards said more than once during her appearances at the Books 2008 Crime Writing Series that she writes about institutions, so what she's up to is not sexism or cheap shots. Rather, it's a little thing called satire, and so far it's been nice to read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008