Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A few more Houston pictures and your chance to win a book

Here's something Houston has lots of.

Here's a celestial body with which Houston will forever be linked.




The third scene, slightly expanded, reveals a clue at lower right. The clue suggests, correctly, that the pattern is in a roadway. The colorfully painted crosswalk is one of several such in Houston's Museum District. Two readers guessed accurately enough to win book prizes. Congratulations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

I found my kicks on Route 59

For me, Houston will always mean the sweetish scent of fried food and auto exhaust.

Saturday night flat on my back in a pickup truck by the Gulf of Mexico. More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Old and new

(Right: Female figure, attributed to the Ashmolean Master, Greece, Cycladic Islands, Naxos Early Cycladic II, Dokathismata variety, 2400–2300 B.C. The Menil Collection, Houston. Below: A building considerably newer in another part of town.)

You know what Houston is, don't you? It's an intoxicating mix of old and new.

The new I knew about (Houston has no zoning to speak of, and residents say it eats its old buildings for breakfast); the not-so-new I didn't know until now.

The not so new came in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum and the Menil Collection (neither of which is depicted at left). The latter is home to the Cycladic woman pictured above and to collections from the Byzantine and Medieval worlds, Africa, the Pacific Islands (notably a giant anthropomorphic slit drum from Vanuatu and a war and hunting god from Papua New Guinea), the Pacific Northwest, and, from closer to our own time and place, rooms devoted to Cy Twombly and surrealism.

The Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum offers an evocative setting for some thirteenth-century church paintings that have an interesting history.

The two museums are recent foundations, both having opened since 1987. The founders came from oil-drilling money. It's always good to reflect on the wealth and power that brought great art collections together, whether in the museums and the National Gallery founded by the railroad and steel barons from Boston to Washington, or in the Vatican museums. It's one more layer of pulsating life behind all that art, and it's nice to know that rich people can find good things to do with their money.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A rage in Houston

One thing I love about crime bookstores like Houston's Murder by the Book and Belfast's No Alibis or Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street is the sense of community among workers and readers. Here in Houston, it's de rigeur to belong to at least two crime-fiction book groups, and some people are in more.

Tonight it was the noir group's turn, and they discussed Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and The Jook by Gary Phillips, led by the capable Anita Thompson.

Before and after, I bought books by Bill James, Peter Corris, Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen, and Colin Cotterill. David Thompson is no relation to Anita, but he does help manage Murder by the Book, and he founded Busted Flush Press, and he'll recommend mysteries if you tease it out of him. He suggested The Wooden Overcoat by Pamela Branch, and I bought it.

Oh, and Houston also has good Mexican food.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009