That didn't last long, did it?

A reader in Florida knew that Tana French credits her training in theater with helping her create her characters. His knowledge wins him a copy of French's novel In the Woods, newly released in paperback in the U.S. by Viking Penguin.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Tana French

Win a copy of "In the Woods" by Tana French

Talk about making a splash! Tana French's debut novel, In the Woods, has been garnering praise and honors in numbers known in the publishing trade as "out the wazoo," an Edgar Award for best first novel among them. Now you can find out what the fuss is about without having to spend one thin dime.

To celebrate the novel's U.S. paperback release from Viking Penguin, Detectives Beyond Borders has a copy of In the Woods for the first person who can answer the following question correctly:

Tana French has credited her training and experience in a previous profession with helping her writing. What is that profession?

Send your answer along with your postal address to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Tana French

The fleeting vogue of crime-fiction themes

I’ve read enough of Tana French’s In the Woods to notice its dreamlike prologue and its initial narrative hook: A detective will wind up investigating something horrible that happened to him and two friends when they were children.

The superficial similarity with Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River got me thinking about other such similarities, and it happens that I’m not the only one doing so. Here's a recent comment from the Oz Mystery Readers site: “Serial killers went through a phase of being genre du jour. Seems to have died down a bit now. And for some reason nearly every second book I read at the moment has the protagonist recovering from injury or illness or a traumatic experience.”

That’s two recurring themes right there: Serial killers, and protagonists looking into their own traumas. What others can you think of? Why do certain themes capture the attention of writers? Why do such themes come into and go out of fashion?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Tana French
Dennis Lehane

Tana French's sex-based humor

I hate the word gender because it’s so often used incorrectly, at least in America, as a puritanical or social-science-jargon substitute for sex. I can’t help thinking about the word, though, in connection with a very funny bit in Chapter One of Tana French’s first novel, In the Woods.

French’s protagonist, Rob Ryan, muses on his position as an investigator:

“I sometimes thought the brass assumed I was a good detective in the mindless pre-programmed way that some men will assume that a tall, slim, blonde woman is beautiful even if she has a face like a hyperthyroid turkey: because I have all the accessories. I have a perfect BBC accent ... they still assume that anyone with a stiff upper lip is more intelligent, better educated and generally more likely to be right. On top of that, I am tall, with a bony, rangy build that can look lean and elegant if my suit is cut just right …”

Ryan has been set to musing by the presence of a young female officer on the murder squad, and he discloses that he “disliked the Neanderthal locker-room overtones, competing cars and competing aftershaves and subtly bigoted jokes justified as `ironic’, which always made me want to go into a pedantic lecture on the subject of irony. On the whole, I preferred women to men.”

A male character created by a female author uses the presence of a woman as an occasion to shake his head at male behavior and the dopiness – and usefulness – of stereotypes male and female. I don’t know what French will do with all this over the course of this long novel, but she sure has fun with it in the opening chapter.

Can you think of any other crime writers who have similar fun with sex (or, OK, gender) roles?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Tana French
Irish crime fiction