Discussion by Kalteis and Frankson, photo by Detectives Beyond Borders

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper, Porto, Portugal, 2011)

Dietrich Kalteis, a novelist whose debut I reviewed earlier this year, also has a penchant for verbal mano-a-mano and an eye for atmospheric scenes, and he has chosen to illustrate some of the former with some of the latter. His newish Off the Cuff site pits Kalteis and fellow author Martin J. Frankson in a series of discussions that include the kinds of questions I like to ask and, in its current edition, some thoughts on crime-novel titles that I suspect you will enjoy reading. And now Kalteis, whose Facebook feed regularly includes stunning photography, plans to illustrate his posts with my noirish photos. The current Off the Cuff discussion unfolds under a photo I shot in Porto in 2011 (above/right). So feast your eyes and feed your head.

And read what I had to say about Kalteis' Ride the Lightning: 

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I read Dietrich Kalteis' debut novel, Ride The Lightning, as an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed. But trust me: The book is pretty good.

What I like best is that it sustains a breakneck pace without sacrificing character to action, or action to character. Kalteis made me care about his cast of lowlifes, screw-ups, and marginals without stopping the action too often for endearing moments of humanity or self-conscious wit. What these characters show of themselves, they show in the act of doing what they do. 

What they do is grow, develop, and sell drugs; rip each other off; try to stop each other from growing, developing, and selling drugs; and seek revenge. Even the worst of the main characters is good enough at what he does that he earns a reader's respect. He gets kicked around and beaten up and gets his leg caught in an animal trap, all of which he deserves, and his very resilience is admirable. I also like Kalteis' understated nude-beach scenes.

This novel, appropriately for a book under consideration at Detectives Beyond Borders, crosses the U.S.-Canada border, from Seattle to Vancouver, where most of the action happens. So Karl, the bounty hunter who loses his job and has to shift from the U.S. to Canada, muses that he expects less violence as compensation for his reduced income. (Karl states this in a more entertaining fashion, but this was an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed.)

I also like characters' references to Medicine Hat, Alberta, as "the Hat," as well as the mostly downmarket setting, not so much because I got to go slumming, but as a reminder that peaceful, low-key Canada has its lowlifes, too. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Tumblin' Dice rocks, rolls, and rules

A blurb for John McFetridge's new novel, Tumblin' Dice, invokes This is Spinal Tap and Elmore Leonard, but I'd add Return of the Secaucus 7 to the list of cultural referents.  Tumblin' Dice is even more about growing into middle age and facing change than it is about fast talking, violence, and life on the road, though it's about all those things, too.

And the change is nuanced;  there's no clear line between characters who accept and characters who reject it. Even the most decisive is plagued by occasional introspection, doubt, and reminiscence. Others act decisively (for good or ill) just when a reader is likely to write them off as hopelessly nostalgic or irredeemably stupid. That nuance makes this an unexpectedly moving book, as close a simulation of what I imagine real life is as I can remember in a crime novel.

Let's meet some of the characters:

• There are The High, a 1980s rock band that reunites and hits the oldies-and-casino circuit, with larceny on its mind.
• There are the Philadelphia mobsters.
• There are the Saints of Hell, familiar to readers of McFetridge's previous books, bikers gone upscale and professionally stratified. The Saints challenge the Philadelphia mobsters for control of an Ontario casino, where The High are booked for a show (opening for Cheap Trick).
• There are the cops from Toronto and elsewhere who try to contain the violence and who cope with a blood-chilling and culturally timely case of their own.

Each of those groups has its own drama and subplots, in addition to its role in the climax at the casino. That's a lot of characters and action for a medium-size crime novel, a lot of story lines interacting in any number of ways, expected and unexpected, kind of like life. But it's funny, it's moving, it works, and the worst thing I can say about McFetridge is that he appears to like Rush.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dashiell Hammett, existentialist

I've just found this capsule description of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938):

"The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea."

Why Nausea? Why here? Because of this, from The Maltese Falcon, as published originally in Black Mask:

"The tappity-tap-tap and the thin bell and muffled whir of Effie Perine's typewriting came through the office door. Somewhere in a neighboring office a power-driven machine vibrated dully. On Spade's desk a limp cigarette smoldered in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged gray flakes of cigarette ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current."

And this, from Frederick Nebel's story "Doors in the Dark":

"He saw Halo Rand standing at the far side of the room. The room was dimly, discreetly lighted. A parchment shaded floor lamp stood back of the woman and built an amber glow about her amber hair."

I'd bet my beret and pipe that Sartre knew his Hammett, if not his Nebel. What else has French culture borrowed from American?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Westlake the wonderful

I've just taken a busman's holiday with two classics of American crime writing. One has some tantalizing parallels with a politically edged European author I've discussed here, and I may expound further in a future post. The other offers no such connection, but it's so good that I have to share its opening:

"I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn’t so eloquent. That’s always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again. But life’s a gamble, is what I say, and not all the eloquent people in this world are in Congress."

The narrator is a New York cabbie and man, can't you just hear him talking?

That's the beginning of Donald Westlake's Somebody Owes Me Money, and you can read the rest of its first chapter on Hard Case Crime's Web site.

The passage exemplifies a definition I once read of the difference between a comic and a comedian. A comic, a schlepper who stands up and mugs for laughs, says funny things, but a comedian, that acute observer of humanity, says things funny. Westlake was a comedian.

What other crime wrters say things funny rather than just saying funny things?

(Here are some of my posts upon Westlake's death in 2008.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

An enemy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle?

Well, not an enemy, really, but George V. Higgins' novel is such a foundational text for hard-boiled crime writers everywhere that any criticism smacks of heresy, and I have at least one to offer.

First, though, it's easy to imagine what a bracing effect the novel's style, almost all dialogue, with bits of elliptical description, must have had when the book appeared the early 1970s. That part still works fine, and it would be interesting to look back at what Elmore Leonard was doing at the time. This was just before he moved over from Westerns to crime novels. Did Higgins influence Leonard?

Second, that dialogue contains some funny lines. My favorite so far:

"`I never been able to understand a man that wanted to use a machinegun,' the stocky man said. `It's life if you get hooked with it and you can't really do much of anything with it except fight a war, maybe.'"

The substance of the dialogue is surprisingly fresh considering that the book was written amid the hangover from the 1960s, and Higgins couldn't help that he was writing during what may have been the most embarrassing fashion era in Western history. He had to describe all those god-awful fringes and suede jackets.

But the book's bad-guys-are-people-too message has dated badly, or rather, so many writers have delivered it so much better since that Higgins' version reads today as plodding, rudimentary and ponderous. Dillon's long virtual monologue in Chapter Six is so patently tendentious (It's one of the only parts of the book so far that has no funny lines; that's how we know Higgins is being serious), and it's so damned long that I was tempted to flip ahead – not a good thing in a book of just 150 pages.

Chapter Six certainly slows the story down. I don't know enough about crime writing of the early 1970s to call it a bad piece of writing. Maybe it has just dated badly. I invite friends of The Friends of Eddie Coyle to weigh in, particularly on the chapter in question and on Higgins's role as a pioneer in the bad-guys-are-just-working-stiffs school.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

McKinty reads

In one more piece of evidence that Belfast is the center of the universe,

No Alibis invites you to an evening with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite

Adrian McKinty

to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, Fifty Grand,
on Wednesday, July 8, at 6 p.m.

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a ‘traitor’ who skipped free from Castro’s control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood Scientology set, where a façade of legality is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and laborers working for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Mercado Sr.’s dreams of fortune and freedom are shattered when he is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome, not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics at Oxford University, and after a failed legal career he moved to the US in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a school teacher. He now resides in Melbourne, Australia.

NO ALIBIS BOOKSTORE
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Here's part of what I had to say about Fifty Grand:

"The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

"It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

"In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments."

McKinty flew all the way from Australia for this reading. Go hear him, buy a book, and stake him to a pint of correctly poured Guinness. It's the least you can do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A Fifty Grand day

Today is release day for Fifty Grand by Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty. The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments:

`Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddamnit! Why don't you understand, what's the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?'

I do. It was my major.

When you're done reading the book and touting it on Amazon.com and elsewhere, try McKinty's splendid Michael Forsythe trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Max

Here's one of those fun posts where I get to highlight a book's exuberantly funny lines. Along the way, I may discuss what makes some of them funny. The book is The Max, third of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's collaborations for Hard Case Crime, and here are some of those lines:

"The coke kicking in, she took a sip of her stone-cold vanilla latte. (Decaf. She wasn't reckless. That caffeine was, like, addictive.)"

"`I might have to make it into a trilogy,' she said, and Max suddenly had a vision of the great Hollywood trilogies. Star Wars. The Godfather. Shrek. Revenge of the Nerds."

And, among many others, this, from the novel's title character, which pushes the book into Detectives Beyond Borders territory:

"Yeah, okay, there was a downside, he had to be fucking Irish, maybe for the rest of his life, but hey, he could pull it off. After all, how hard could it be to be Irish? He already liked to drink and kill people, he'd be a goddamn natural."

The series has an Irish author and an American author, just as it has a protagonist from each country. Bruen has always looked to American crime writing for inspiration, and that passage, whether it comes from Bruen's pen or Starr's, is a wonderfully blunt statement of some American stereotypes about the Irish. Max Fisher, that utterly amoral, irrepressibly optimistic and impossibly lucky businessman turned drug dealer turned prison lord who embraces the stereotype, is a great American comic character.

Someone asked me if Bruen and Starr planned a fourth book in the series, to follow Bust, Slide and The Max. I didn't and don't know, but The Max leaves possibility open, albeit with a twist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Beyond pundits and onto politcs

I so enjoyed the jabs at the Boston Red Sox and conservative media blowhards in Adrian McKinty's The Dead Yard that I devoted all of yesterday's comment to them. (Since I wasn't writing for the Media Formerly Known as Mainstream, I'm allowed that sort of thing.)

Now I'd like to say a few words about politics and history, since Northern Ireland's Troubles may well haunt the imaginations of Irish writers for quite some time. That prime minister of Northern Irish crime fiction blogging, Gerard Brennan, wondered recently why The Dead Yard was the least popular of McKinty's Michael Forsythe novels in the U.K. Here's part of what he wrote:

"Maybe it’s because this is McKinty’s ‘Troubles’ book. ... We have seen a hell of a lot of work based on the ‘Troubles’. Ireland and the UK are coming down with IRA stories. Some are better than others, and in this case, much better, but at the end of the day, people are looking for new settings and themes. America, however, still has quite an interest in this kind of thing, especially among the Irish-American communities. With the luxury of distance, they maybe have a romantic idea of the struggle and are open to more from this sub-genre. And McKinty has given it to them in spades."

The Dead Yard sees Forsythe infiltrating a breakaway IRA cell in the United States on the verge of the Good Friday Agreement in 1997. At this stage, everyone wants to silence these guys (and women), not least the main IRA, and McKinty manages the not easy feat of making them pathetic and terrifying at the same time.

I suggested to Gerard that if we in America still have an interest in stories about the Troubles, it might be because we're ready for McKinty's deromanticizing of them. Of course, though my name is Peter O'Zovsky, I'm not Irish. I don't know how crime fiction about the Troubles resonates in the numerous large Irish communities in America.

(For another view of the Troubles and their afterlife in Northern Irish crime fiction, see Brian McGilloway's comments to this blog about his novel Borderlands. McGilloway wrote, in part, that

"I wanted to write a non-Troubles book but, around the Border, it would be unrealistic to assume that they're not there somewhere — thus the only representation of the Troubles in Borderlands is the disembodied voice, talking about the past. It's there, but increasingly insubstantial. Or that was my intention, at least.")

I don't know what if any relevance this has, but I think McGilloway is about ten years younger than McKinty.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Dead Yard

The Dead Yard, second in Adrian McKinty's three-book series about Michael Forsythe, moves in harsher, more serious territory than its predecessor, Dead I Well May Be.

For one thing, the first book's third act, a long section in which Forsythe recovers from an ordeal, regains his place in the world, and gathers the physical and emotional resources he needs to resume his adventure, is here compressed to 2 1/2 pages — or, more strictly speaking, to a single brutal and vital sentence. That leaves more room for the central narrative, and a violent narrative it is.

For another, the betrayals are more numerous, and they hit harder. This book's violence is more graphic as well. But the main difference is that The Dead Yard is more direct in its harsh judgment of a nation battered for ages by a foe of overwhelming power, sentimental about its failures, overweening in the pride at its meager successes:

"`Sorry, I don't know much about baseball, nothing actually. We don't play it in Ireland. I've only heard of Babe Ruth, oh, and Joe DiMaggio of course, because of Simon and Garfunkel, and yeah, Lou Gehrig because of the disease. Oh aye, and Yogi Berra, you know because of the cartoon.'

"`What did I tell you about Yankees players?' Kit snapped, her face turning bright red ... '

"They were all Yankees? Jesus. Sorry. Who are the famous Red Sox?' I asked.

"`I don't want to talk about it now,' Kit said, still a little ticked off. Petulant and furious, she looked even more fetching.'"

Oh, yeah: In a moment of extreme stress, Forsythe also thinks harsh thoughts about Ireland and some of those who presume to fight for Ulster against the British.

Yankee fan McKinty's dig at the Boston Red Sox and their hysterical fans is the book's second-cleverest (and just maybe a metaphor). The cleverest concerns a trio of American conservative media pundits.

Highly recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Dark, epic zest from Adrian McKinty

What do we learn from Dead I Well May Be, Adrian McKinty's first novel about a Northern Irish crook/killer/thinker/survivor named Michael Forsythe let loose in America?

We learn that whoever said revenge is a dish best served cold did not work from Michael Forsythe's recipe book.

We learn that an author can get readers feeling they are inside a first-person narrator's head simply by omitting quotation marks. This heightens the illusion that everything we read is filtered through the narrator rather than quoted by the author.

We learn the virtue of patience and the simple heartbreak of death.

We learn that humor can work even in grim situations, and McKinty's humor is among the grimmer ones in crime fiction. This is one of the lighter examples, but you'll get it anyway because it's also one of the funniest: "Carolyn's her real name, but she wants everyone to call her Linnie. That should have been a clue right there. She's no Bridget, though she is pretty. Pale, thin, blond. fragile. She's from Athens, Georgia, but likes the B-52's rather than R.E.M. Another clue."

Forsythe is under siege from quite a number of hired killers at the time, but he still offers a rock and roll reference that's right up there with Jo Nesbø's all-timer about the Rolling Stones in The Devil's Star.

Michael's grim, sometimes hellish journey through the last two thirds of the book may evoke for the literary-minded any number of the world's great epics. Think of the book as Dirty Harry meets Dante if you must.

That last two thirds also wiped away the one quibble I had with the book's zesty opening chapters: McKinty's use of retrospective foreshadowing, of the "I missed the chance that night, the last chance I would get because the world caved in the next morning" type. I almost always find the device obtrusive and unnecessary. I suspect McKinty used it as a reminder that Forsythe is narrating events that had happened to him before the time in which he is narrating them.

I could have done without such reminders, but I forgot my objections rather quickly once the book moved into the harrowing middle section. Among other things, the events of this section are nightmarish enough that a narrator looking back on them would understandably use them as a point of reference for everything that went before and that followed. So disregard my quibble and read the novel. It's a hell, or an inferno, of a tale.

(Dead I Well May Be is the first of a series that continues with The Dead Yard and ends with The Bloomsday Dead. Based on the first book's conclusion, I would suggest reading the novels in order if possible.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Zest

Zest has always been one of my favorite words, long before I knew it also meant the peel, esp. the thin outer peel, of a citrus fruit used for flavoring. I love the word because it sounds like the qualities it embodies: Gusto. Flavor. Hearty enjoyment. And that's the opening chapter of Adrian McKinty's Dead I Well May Be, as life-embracing a piece of literary zest as I can remember since I started reading about murder, cheating, robbery, squalor, despair and violent death in my spare time.

Here's the start of Chapter One. Pay special attention to the first four words:

"I open my eyes. The train tracks. The river. A wall of heat. Unbearable white sunlight smacking off the railings, the street and the godawfulness of the buildings. Steam from the permanent Con Ed hole at the corner. Gum and graffiti tags on the sidewalk. People on the platform – Jesus Christ, are they really in sweaters and wool hats? ... I'm smoking. I'm standing here on the elevated subway platform looking down at all this enormous nightmare and I'm smoking. My skin can barely breathe. I'm panting. The back of my T-shirt is thick with sweat, 100 degrees, 90 percent relative humidity. I'm complaining about the pollution you can see in the sky above New Jersey, and I'm smoking Camels. What an idiot."

Just one bit more, because I want to keep the post shorter than the chapter:

"Here I should point out that every time you hear Scotchy speak you must remember that each time I put in the word fuck there are at least three or four that I've left out."

Is that great, or what?

A short prologue, more effective than most examples of its kind, begins "No one was dead." How's that for a grabber?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Britons are from Christie, Americans are from Chandler?

In my opening post, I praised Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops novels while acknowledging that they may be stronger on character than on plot. A British reader responded that she was no big fan of the one book in the series she had read, and she said she valued good plots over good characters and was a big fan of puzzle mysteries. That plays into the old commonplace of British readers preferring the classic, elaborately plotted whodunnit, (North) Americans the atmospheric urban P.I. story. So, here's my question for the day: Does that distinction retain any validity in these violent and hilarious days of Bill James, Ian Rankin and Charlie Williams? Do British readers and writers tend to value a well-plotted fair-play story more than their American counterparts?

Here's another question of the day: Who are the European (or Asian, African, South American or Australian) counterparts of the American "regular guy" (or regular girl) detectives? I mean American series characters such as Les Roberts' Milan Jacovich, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, and Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter. The first is a divorced father, the second a zany single woman, the third a gay man, but they share a number of characteristics: They have quirks, but not pathologies. They worry, but they don't brood. There's not an alcoholic or a psychological cripple in the bunch. And add Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman to the list. He has family problems, but the man is happily married.

The only comparable European character I can think of -- a character whose personal life is an important part of the story and who is still sane and balanced -- is Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Can you think of any others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2006