A school of crime?

Several crime novels I've read recently share certain features: yearning emotion, stories  at least as wistful as they are tragic, and empathy with characters whatever their orientation on the legal or even moral compass. Some of the books enhance the effect by alternating point of view among several characters.

Most notable to me has been that the emotion suffuses not just the characters but the social and physical landscapes as well. The books are The Wolves of Fairmount Park, by Dennis Tafoya (Philadelphia); Done for a Dime by David Corbett (San Francisco Bay Area); and Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby, whose heister heroine ranges fairly widely.

Domenic Stansberry's The Big Booom (San Francisco) may belong on the list as well. Same with John McFetridge's novels (Toronto, Montreal, and those American cities just over the border from them).

Several of these books have publishers, editors, or both in common. So, how many crime writers does it take to make a school, anyhow?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Booms, busts, and how crime writers portray them

More than most crime novels, Domenic Stansberry's The Big Boom (2006) caters to my tendency to devote posts to a book's parts rather than the whole.

Chapter One is a fine atmospheric beginning that opens the way to questions about historical fiction. Chapter Three has the protagonist imagining a corpse talking to him. Chapter Five is narrated from a cat's point of view — and it also contains a regrettable editing lapse. Thirty short pages could keep me posting for a week.

First the opening. I've long wanted to ask authors of historical crime fiction about an inevitability of writing stories set during a real war: The reader knows how part of the story will end.  Stansberry sets his book not during wartime, but during the dot-com bubble (Remember when the term dot-com made people giddy with excitement, the way social media or apps or 4G smartphone do now?)  The reader knows how the boom will end, and Stansberry does not pretend otherwise. The result is one of the more evocative and ominous openings in all of crime fiction:

"It was the time of the big boom and everyone figured the prosperity would last forever."

(Here's another favorite bit from the opening paragraph: "The old-timers found the new enthusiasm insufferable, but the old-timers found everything insufferable. The truth was, you could see a certain gleam in their eyes, too ... ")

Here's your question: Stansberry's opening will inevitably put crime readers, perhaps Irish ones especially, in mind of economic booms, economic busts, their consequences, and the people left behind. Who has written the great post-Celtic Tiger crime novel? The great American recession crime book? 

***

And here's the lapse. The cat chapter begins thus:

"Eccentric the Cat lay in an unhappy somnolence on his mistress's rayon bathrobe, in the dark corner of the armoire. It was a place that was redolent of Angie's smell ... "

Redolent means exuding fragrance; smells like, in other words. Redolent of Angie's smell is redundant. I also would have cut "a place that was." But I'm a copy editor; what do I know?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"Do you get much—"

(Two scenes on Bush Street, Nob Hill, San Francisco. Photos, as always, by your humble blogkeeper)

Your kind comments on my previous post got me reflecting fondly on San Francisco's Bouchercon 2010 and my other recent crime-fiction convention, and I realized I had more to show and tell. (So does Ali Karim, though he exaggerates about me and the waitress.)

Back in Philadelphia, a pair of profane utterances ran through Noircon 2010 like leitmotifs through a Wagner opera. Here, then, are some of that conference's best-loved lines:

"Do you get much pussy?"

— inmate to George Pelecanos after Pelecanos had talked to a prison audience about being a writer


"Do you get much pussy?"

— shouted response to "Any questions?" following every subsequent panel session. Much laughter ensued.


"Fuck you!" (and variants including "Fuck you, Cullen!", "Fuck you, Peter!" and "Fuck you, Megan!")

— panelists' response to the equally ubiquitous (and equally jocose) post-discussion question "How do you define noir?" Much laughter ensued.

Want more? See you at Noircon 2012, Nov. 8-11.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

OK, one last San Francisco picture

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon 2010: The last Hammett post

You know what the first picture is. It's on Burritt Street, a half-block from my post- #Bcon2010 hotel.

Scene Two is 580 McAllister Street, a key location in "The Whosis Kid," a fine tale in its own right and a prototype for The Maltese Falcon:

"My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness*. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street. ...

"The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.

"A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall** when I took my plant there.

"It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness into the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.

"A curtain whipped loose in the rain. ..."

* — Van Ness Avenue is just out of the picture to the right. Redwood runs parallel to McAllister behind number 580, home of jewel thief Inés Almad, the mastermind of the heist that triggers the action in "The Whosis Kid." The view here shows the approximate location of the shootout to which Hammett is building up in the passage quoted above.

** — San Francisco City Hall was behind me and off to the right as I took this picture, and I presume it's still there. Much of Hammett is an accurate topographical guide to the city.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

After Bouchercon, or San Francisco, crime city

Bouchercon 2010 ( #Bcon2010 ) lasted four days for most but eight for me, and the bulk of my sightseeing came after my fellow attendees had gone home, exhausted by four nights of carousing at a hotel bar that stayed open as late as midnight.

San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood reminded me of Vertigo, the Embarcadero put me in mind of The Lineup, and Nob Hill was saturated with Hammett.

And then there was Inner Richmond (left/above), home of the excellent Green Apple Books. The neighborhood reminded me of no particular book or movie. But, like other areas of the city, it had the general feeling of an older time. If Nob Hill looks like the 1920s, Richmond looks like a small city in the 1940s or '50s. In both cases, the noir and hard-boiled ambience is rich.

Paradoxically, the city's modernity is partly responsible. The streets are honeycombed with overhead cables that power San Francisco's environmentally friendly electric buses. This evokes the days before power and other cables went underground.

The palm-lined block at left is somewhere on the way from Noe Valley to the Mission District, and if you saw a street that pretty in a movie or read about it in a crime novel, you'd know something dreadful was about to be revealed.

Finally, a mural from the Mission District (above right), just because it's cool, and a political candidate whose name is bound to keep the voters mellow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010