Weighty expectations

I've recently started one book and borrowed another, both of which raise great expectations in the fiction-to-be-taken seriously department.

Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Final Bet is the first Arabic-language detective novel to be translated into English, according to the jacket copy, and its author one of the first to write detective fiction in Arabic.

Chingiz Aitmatov's The Place of the Skull not only bears a jacket blurb from Arthur Miller, but the Times Literary Supplement called it "arguably the most representative text of the Gorbachev thaw." Not novel or book, but most representative text, mind you.

Now, while I see if these novels live up to their weighty promise, I'll ask you to ponder this difficult question of weightiness.

Leonardo Sciascia comes to mind for his acceptance and impeccable credentials both as an important crime author and as an important author, period, no qualification.

What crime writers enjoy similar acceptance both as masters of their genre and as important writers even to those who may not read crime fiction? How do you feel about claims for importance on behalf of crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The man who came in from reading Fred Vargas

The Oz Mystery Readers group is discussing John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a classic espionage novel and an occasion for some lessons in history.

You know the history I mean, don't you? The history of the fictional spy, which meant, at that time, James Bond. Le Carré's protagonist, Alec Leamas, is an anti-Bond. His life, according to the article to which I link above, "is far from the glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely, unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model."

Then there's that other history, that of the Cold War, of us vs. them, with its harsh symbol of division, the Berlin Wall. And us vs. them, Le Carré tells us, is decidedly not good vs. evil. It was probably easy to call the book a classic back in 1963, and the dust jacket of my handsome old hardback edition trots out a lineup of superstar blurbsters: Daphne du Maurier, Alec Waugh, J.B. Priestley and Graham Greene, the last of whom called the book "the best spy story I have ever read."

But that was then; this is now. How does the book's laying bare of the amorality of espionage hold up today? Pretty well, even when the prose seems tendentious by current standards:

"Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression on quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the ends and the means were identical."

I'll report back later on a bit of plot manipulation that just might be shocking or even offensive, depending on the next thirty or so pages. In the meantime, sit back and reflect on the vanished days of the rivalry between Russia and the West, that golden era of international spying.

Say, who was that Alexander Litvinenko guy, anyway?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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