Welcome to Wales, or Malcolm Pryce's alternate crime universe

The 2016 European soccer championships have been a boon for small, unheralded soccer nations. Northern Ireland, Hungary, and Iceland (and now the Republic of Ireland!) have all made it to the tournament's knockout stage, but no team has been a greater surprise than Wales, which, playing in its first major tournament since 1958, won its group. In honor of this small nation's sporting achievement, here's a repeat of one of this blog's small number of posts about Welsh crime writing.

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I've discussed fantasy novels from time to time, notably Jasper Fforde's, as well as a science fiction story or two, and I've discovered that I may just have finished one without knowing it, at least if alternate-universe books fall under the rubric of fantasy.

A Wikipedia article describes Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth novels as "set in an alternative universe," a description I found helped my thinking about these odd, comic, sometimes poignant books.

I've just finished the second in the series of five, and its title gives a fair sense of the books' tone: Last Tango in Aberystwth. (The rest are Aberystwyth Mon Amour, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth, and From Aberystwyth With Love. The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still is due out this summer.)

The real Aberystwyth is a Welsh university and holiday town whose recorded history dates to 1109. In Pryce's world, it's a summer resort where it's always the off-season, the fashions are never the latest, and a whimsical melancholy pervades everything. ("I walked up Great Darkgate Street and through the castle grounds towards the bed-and-breakfast ghetto down by the harbour. This was where the ventriloquists tended to stay, along with the out-of-work clowns, the washed-up impresarios and the men who ran away from the bank to join the circus. ... Down below I could see Sospan's new kiosk — repositioned and re-established after the short-lived fool's errand of selling designer coffee to a town that hungered only for vanilla.")

Like many hard-boiled worlds, it has its disappointed young women who flock to the big city hoping for stardom but wind up doomed to grimmer fates. Only here, the girls hope to model for the fudge boxes sold to tourists but wind up in "What the Butler Saw" movies. And the diversions available to the residents of this world as they spiral downward manage the difficult double of seeming ridiculous to us (but never to the residents themselves) and affecting at the same time.:

"`Where does someone go in this town when they've reached the bottom and and have nowhere left to go?'

"There are lots of places.'

"`For you, yes! For you there are the bars and the girls and the toffee and the bingo and the whelks. For you there is a great choice. But for her. Ah! but for her? You cannot imagine what this girl was like.'"

If you're a fan of the genre, what are the ingredients of a successful alternative universe?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Rev. Derek Coates does not believe in transubstantiation! or, what's your favorite graffiti?

Two good bits from books I've started this week:

"In the bed-and-breakfast ghetto the shutters squeaked and banged and a chill low-season wind blew old newspapers down the road."

— Malcolm Pryce, Last Tango in Aberystwyth

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And here's Colin Bateman's Mystery Man on a graffiti vandal's trail in Mystery Man:

"A footpath on the Malone Road bore the legend Alan McEvoy beats dogs; a gable wall on the Andersontown Road had Seamus O'Hare plays away from home; on Palestine Street the front door of a student flat had been daubed with the words Coke dealers live here and a parish house in Sydenham decorated with Rev. Derek Coates does not believe in transubstantiation."

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What's your favorite graffito ever? I saw my two in neat, bold, large letters in Boston's Charlestown section more than twenty years ago:

Eat shrimp for better function!

and

Kevin has his priorities

I wonder to this day if demolition of an adjacent building robbed the second of a punch line we shall sadly never know.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Senses and sensibility: Aberystwyth Mon Amour

I'm glad I have a blog to discuss Aberystwyth Mon Amour because I could never talk about the book in person or on the phone. I'm unsure how to pronounce the name of the Welsh resort town that gives the novel its title. Nor am I much more confident with Myfanwy, Cantref-y-Gwaelod, Llanfihangel-y-Creuddyn or Siani-i-Blojob and other names of people and places in the book, though I suspect the last is not pure Welsh.

Author Malcolm Pryce sets the story in Aberystwyth, a town on Wales' west coast for whose past glories he apparently has much affection. Yet the book also acknowledges, sadly perhaps, the need for Aberystwyth to update itself. In fact, it's possible, at least for a reader like me who knows nothing of Wales and its coast, to read the novel as an elegy to an old Aberystwyth of ice cream stands and whelk stalls and a final acceptance of a new one of cappuccino and biscotti.

But the book is a murder mystery and a thriller, and Pryce delights in deadpan humor and in words amusing for their own sake. He also excels, particularly in the novel's opening chapters, at creating a sense of place by appealing to the senses.

The mystery is the disappearance of a string of schoolboys and then of a dancer at Aberystwyth's notorious nightclub, the Moulin. Louie Knight, the private investigator whose office is furnished with old library furniture, takes the case and is soon immersed in a shady half-world of gangsters, secret societies, Welsh mythology and a plot that could destroy the town.

I suspect that reaching the book's final destination was more than half the fun for Pryce. Who would think otherwise with bits like:

"The grandeur was now sadly defaced by charmless municipal sign boards: Combinations and Corsetry; Two-Headed Calves and other Curios; Coelcanths."

and

"I rolled a six and a one, and set off on my journey around the board. How many other people, honeymooners and young families, had made the same journey as the rain swept in from the sea and pounded on the plywood roof of their shoebox on wheels? Families who had driven for two or three hours, stopping occasionally for puking children, to the world of gorse and marram grass, dunes and bingo and fish and chips."

and possibly my favorite:

"A gleam of comprehension appeared in the waters of her eyes and the mauve iris of her mouth opened like a sea anemone's vagina."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

Ryanair had no flights available from Derry to Glasgow, so I took the Belfast-Stranraer ferry instead. Just as well; I'm reading Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth Mon Amour, and this way I was safe in case Ryanair decided to charge passengers extra for carrying books with long Welsh names in the title.

I regard with affection any novel that begins: "The thing I remember most about it was walking the entire length of the Prom that morning and not seeing a Druid" and includes exchanges such as:

"`Is that Caldy Island?' she asked pointing at the map of Borneo.

"`No, it's Borneo.'"

Had dinner in Glasgow with Donna Moore, a wonderful hostess who regretted that there was no dead body on the premises as there had been the day before; Allan Guthrie; and Ewan McGhee. Made plans to visit Edinburgh today, to which one Glaswegian replied: "You should have a lovely day as long as you don't have to mingle with the people."

Cheers,

Peter

© Peter Rozovsky 2009