Curzio Malaparte and James Ellroy: History, truth, and everything

A comment on Sunday's post about James Ellroy's "Underworld U.S.A." novels is pertinent to both the novels your humble blogkeeper is reading.

Dana King, that fine author, nice guy, and skilled horn blower, said Ellroy has:

"a keener understanding of American history, and of the true ethos that has driven American society and history, than do many others."

Not "grasp of the facts," but "keener understanding" of American history and the ethos behind it.  Were Ellroy's tycoons, FBI chiefs, and gangsters as deranged in real life as they are in his books? Do his killer protagonists have real-counterparts? Does this matter, as long as the fiction makes sense, or feels right? What truth must a historian serve? A writer of fiction? Is historical fiction the same as fiction that takes history as its theme?  Or is Ellroy just doing what all fiction arguably should do but so little does: portray real life, comment on real life, and entertain readers all at the same time?

Besides Ellroy's American Tabloid, the other novel that sparked these questions is Curzio Malaparte's The Skin. That shocking, dark, graphic, and very blackly funny 1949 novel, banned by the church, banned by the Neapolitans, tells the story of the American military and the misery of Naples toward the end of World War II. "The book caused a scandal," one commentator said, "because it was mistaken for a realistic work."

Here's a bit of The Skin:

"`We are the volunteers of Freedom, the soldiers of a new Italy, It is our duty to fight the Germans, to drive them out of our homeland ... It is our duty once more to hoist the flag that has fallen in the mire, to set an example to all in the midst of so much shame, to show ourselves worthy of the task that our country entrusts to us.' ... When I had finished speaking Colonel Palese said to the soldiers: `Now one of you will repeat what your commanding officer has said. I want to be sure you understand. You!' he said, pointing to a soldier. `Repeat what your commanding officer said.'

"The soldier looked at me; he was pale, he had the thin, bloodless lips of a dead man. Slowly, in a dreadful gurgling voice, he said: `It is our duty to show ourselves worthy of the shame of Italy."

"Colonel Palese came up close to me. `They understand,' he said in a low voice, and moved silently away."

I might not make American Tabloid the textbook for a course on twentieth-century American history or The Skin for a course on Italy during and after World War II. But both would make fine collateral reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: J. Robert Janes' murky world

J. Robert Janes' fourteen Kohler and St. Cyr mysteries pair a Gestapo officer and a French Sûreté inspector solving "everyday" crimes in German-occupied France during World War II, and if that description gives you pause (as it gave me for years), Janes recognizes that such a reaction is likely.

Each book in the series, from Mayhem (1992) to the new Tapestry, bears an exculpatory note from the author explaining that he abhors "what happened during these times" and that "during the Occupation of France everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?"

An introduction to the series on Janes' Web site suggests (accurately, at least for Tapestry) that no one in the books comes off as especially pure, ethical, admirable, or even clean:

"It's German-occupied France during the Second World War. Two honest detectives, one from each side of that war, fight common crime in an age of officially sanctioned crime on a horrendous scale. Gangsters have been let out of jail and put to work by the Gestapo and SS; collaborators welcome the Occupier and line their pockets; ordinary citizens struggle to survive; inflation hits 165% while wages are frozen at 1939 levels; but most of all, German servicemen come on leave to Paris, ‘our friends' to some, ‘the Green Beans' to others, the ‘Schlocks, the Boche'.

"Paris, unlike all other cities and towns in war-torn Europe, is an open city, a showcase Hitler uses to let his boys know how good things can be under Nazi rule. French Gestapo are everywhere and definitely don't like these two detectives since St-Cyr put many of them away before the war, but Kohler is all too ready to tell them this and is fast becoming a citizen of the world under Louis' influence and also has no use for the Occupier, even to ridiculing Nazi invincibility. Hated and reviled by the Occupier and often by the Occupied, the two constantly tread a minefield."

I'm not up on my administrative history of the German occupation of France, so I don't know how much attention the various organs of the occupation and of the French civil authority and population paid to ordinary crimes. But a relatively recent history of the occupation, Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains, suggests a real occupied France similar to Janes' fictional one:

 "The moral universe of occupied France was notoriously murky. What was right and what was wrong, what patriotic and what unpatriotic, may have been clear in 1944, but not before."

Oh, yes. Crime fiction. Tapestry's moral, ethical, and physical environments are the darkest I have ever read in crime fiction. Kohler and St. Cyr are called on to work in a city so darkened by blackouts that characters must feel their way through the streets at night. Plunder, greed, puritanism, lust, patriotism, violence, and luxury in the face of deprivation slip in and out of focus, the reader never sure if any one is staged to cover for another. I'm not yet sure if Tapestry is good history, but it sure is good noir.

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 J. Robert Janes will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Americans go to war, Part II (Bouchercon 2013 panels)

Last month I noted a motif common to John Lawton's Bluffing Mr. Churchill (also published as Riptide) and James R. Benn's Billy Boyle: Each features a young American bewildered by wartime London.

Three weeks later I learned I'd be moderating a panel at Bouchercon 2013 of which Lawton and Benn will be members, along with Susan Elia MacNeal, whose Mr. Churchill's Secretary features a young American woman who winds up working for Churchill in 1940.

I'll ask all three authors why they chose to thrust three Americans, all young, into wartime London. In the meantime, I'll ask you: Why do you think Lawton, Benn, and MacNeal made the choice they did? What are the attractions of the innocents abroad theme? What are your favorite stories, crime or otherwise, of Americans abroad in wartime? Why do you like those stories?

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James R. Benn, John Lawton, and Susan Elia MacNeal will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Martin Limón on life after wartime

I chose the name "World War II and Sons" for one of my panels at next month's Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., with Martin Limón in mind. His novels and stories chronicle the adventures of two criminal investigators in the U.S Army in 1970s South Korea. They thus have much to say about a war's strange and lingering aftereffects (made even stranger because the Korean War still awaits a final peace agreement).

===============

Sure, Martin Limón's novels are rollicking tales of two loose-cannon military investigators, but they show considerable and illuminating sympathy for a society recovering from war.

Here’s co-protagonist/narrator George Sueño on a British soldier’s Korean manservant from Slicky Boys, second novel in Limón's series:

“His English was well pronounced. Hardly an accent. I knew he’d never gone to high school — probably not even middle school — or he wouldn’t be working here. He’d picked it up from the GI’s over the years. Intelligence radiated from his calm face. When I first arrived in Korea, I wondered why men such as this would settle for low positions. I learned later that after the Korean War, having work of any kind was a great accomplishment. Even cleaning up after rowdy young foreigners. At that time, the rowdy young foreigners were the only people with money. … Yim seemed lucid, calm, smart, sober. An excellent witness, except that I knew from experience that houseboys were so low on the social scale that nobody took their testimony seriously.”

Here he sees a sign of Korea’s recovery in the surprising beauty of a local “business girl”:

“Over the last few months, more girls like Eun-hi had drifted into the GI villages. More girls who’d grown up in the twenty-some years since the end of the Korean War, when there was food to be had and inoculations from childhood diseases and shelter from the howling winter wind. Eun-hi was healthy. Not deformed by bowlegs or a pocked face or the hacking, coughing lungs of poverty.”

And here are Sueño's thoughts on prostrating himself before a powerful gangster:

"So I’d lowered myself to a common thief. A Korean one, at that. ... Such things didn’t bother me. I was from East L.A. I’d been fighting my way up from the bottom all my life. Herbalist So had power. A lot more than I did. In certain areas, more than the Commander of 8th Army. He deserved respect. This little ceremony didn’t bother me any more than standing at attention in a military formation and saluting some potbellied general with stars on his shoulder.”

There's humor amid the sociology, though. Here’s a look at Sueño’s colleague Ernie Bascom:

“The joint was in the brightly lit downtown district of Mukyo-dong. Outside, a hand-carved sign in elegant Chinese script told it all: The House of the Tiger Lady. A kisaeng house. Reserved for the rich. `This place sucks,’ Ernie said.”

What are your favorite crime novels about the social after-effects of war?

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Martin Limón joins fellow authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, and Susan Elia MacNeal on my "World War II and Sons" panel, Thursday Sept. 19, at 4 p.m., at Bouchercon 2013.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: John Lawton on being a "crime" writer

I first heard of John Lawton on crime fiction blogs, and I first heard him read at New York's late Partners & Crime mystery bookshop. His series protagonist, Frederick Troy, is with London's Metropolitan Police, and Lawton attends crime fiction conventions now and then. But when I wrote that Lawton reminded me more of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or even, in spots, P.G. Wodehouse than of crime writers, a reader huzzahed all the way from Canada. He wrote, too, that he was baffled by the occasional descriptions of Lawton's books as spy novels. So, is Lawton a crime writer, or a spy writer, or what? If not, why do some people say he is? And does it matter? I sought answers from the source, and here's what Lawton had to say:

===================

“I can't recall any discussion with my editor at Weidenfeld – Ion Trewin, who edited all my work until the move to Grove – as to genre. Black Out had no tags. Nor did any subsequent novel. I was reviewed as either fiction or crime. It wasn't an issue. `Genre' is a tag neither to be sought nor resisted. Like a book prize – neither sought nor resisted.

“It's flattering to be told `this book transcends genre,' but it's not a phrase that holds up to scrutiny. Five nano-seconds later, you're asking yourself, `What does he/she think is inferior about genre writing?' And when toastmasters at crime gigs harp on about crime being `as good as literature,' you think, `So what?' And when a crime novel is deemed `too literary,' you think, `Ain't no such critter.'

“It's marketing ... whatever gets you on the shelves and then off the shelves and into hands. And marketing is different country to country.

“I first became aware of an `invisible' crime tag only when the CWA called in (so I was told) Riptide for consideration for the Ellis Peters Award. As I said, you don't seek it and you don't resist it. It's only an issue if you win – who in their right mind, after all, would want to sit through an award ceremony they didn't have to?

“Paint and drying come to mind.

“The book after this was Sweet Sunday. Ion and I agreed this wasn't `crime.' Still ... it got reviewed as crime. But a review is a review ... not to be knocked. Better by a yard and a half than being ignored.

“And a few years later I was asked in an interview to categorize myself. I said something like ... `historical, political thrillers with a big splash of romance, wrapped up in a coat of noir.' What they're not is mysteries, and I think there is a tendency to assume that crime and mystery are synonymous. They're not.

“There are crimes in most of my novels. Occasionally unsolved. They aren't there to be `solved;' they're a propellant to drive the book along.

“Pretentious bit coming up ... I don't think I'm doing anything different from my immediate contemporaries. ... McEwan, Faulks, Amis, Hare, Turow (all born within months of me). ... In intent.

“That said, I've never written anything set in the present, and none of them has written a series around a policeman. Scott Turow is regarded as `crime' – he has no problem with this. (I asked him.) And at this point the sensible thing to say is, if Scott has no problem with `crime' neither should I.”

— John Lawton

*

Here's Lawton's Web site with essays and other information about the Troy novels. Here's a New York Times review that asks: "Is there any genre convention John Lawton hasn’t boldly disregarded, often to brilliant effect? "

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John Lawton will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

John Lawton and James R. Benn: When Americans go to war

John Lawton's Bluffing Mr. Churchill has some fun with Cal Cormack, a young American embassy man by way of Berlin plunged into London in 1941, puzzled by Cockney rhyming slang and staggered by the sight of solitary houses left standing after German air raids. Since other responsibilities keep me from my normal blogging today, I'll bring back an old post about another novel that similarly placed an innocent American in war-stricken London, and I'll ask you what other crime novels or stories have exploited the theme of wartime innocents abroad, whether American or otherwise?

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Yesterday I wrote about neat use of period speech in Rag and Bone, James R. Benn's fifth novel about Boston cop-turned-army-investigator Billy Boyle.

Today I reproduce two passages from the first book in the series, Billy Boyle. The selections are a touching portrayal of war's sobering effect on a brash young American when he sees it up close for the first time.

"We had been briefed in OCS on language differences and how to make nice with the Brits. Don't flash your money around, GIs are paid more than British officers, stuff like that. Me, I couldn't have cared less. The English had had their time in the sun when they conquered Ireland and ran it like their private preserve, killing and starving out my ancestors. If I hurt a few feelings waving around a sawbuck or two, big deal."

But then:

"People parted and formed a narrow corridor as three stretchers were carried out of the destroyed building. Two held blanketed, inert forms. The third carried a person covered in soot highlighted by rust-colored dried blood along a leg and a hasty bandage wrapping a head. A thin female arm rose from the stretcher with two fingers raised in the V-for-victory sign as she was gingerly carried into the ambulance. There were murmurs of appreciation from the crowd, and then they drifted back into the morning routine. Another day at the war. The other two stretchers were left on the sidewalk for a journey to a different destination.

"`Welcome to London,' Harding said as the traffic moved forward.

"`Yes, sir.' Maybe I wouldn't wave those sawbucks around for a while."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The English, they are a funny race

I've been reading three Englishmen in recent days, and, without purporting to analyze English character, I will say that each of these examples shows considerable wit, and that the wit cuts deeper than mere jokes.

The first is from a short story by Michael Gilbert:

"Mr. Behrens said, raising his voice a little, `If I were to lift my right hand a very well-trained dog, who has been approaching you quietly from the rear while we were talking, would have jumped for your throat.' 

 "The colonel smiled. `Your imagination does you credit. What happens if you lift your left hand? Does a genie appear from a bottle and carry me off?' 

"`If I raise my left hand,' said Mr. Behrens, `you will be shot dead.'  

 "And so saying, he raised it."

— "The Road to Damascus" 

The second is from a novel by John Lawton:

 "Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago. ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’” 

— Bluffing Mr. Churchill 

The third is from a poem by Philip Larkin:

"Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:"

— "Toads" 

Aren't those fun?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Martin Limón and Raymond Chandler?

I asked a few days ago how crime-fiction series change over time, using the first of Martin Limón's novels about U.S. Army investigators in Korea as a case in point.

I finished the book, Jade Lady Burning, last night, and I think I found one way Limón has changed: He shed some of Raymond Chandler’s influence as he found his own voice. Granted that every hard-boiled writer since Chandler has been compared to him, and that such comparisons can be glib and facile, I'd say they’re valid here.

The ride from Seoul into the countryside in Jade Lady Burning, the scenery changing from urban to thinly settled rural, is pure Chandler. The novel’s wistful ending has a whiff of Chandler about it as well, and co-protagonist/narrator George Sueño is a bit more the lone wolf here than he is in later books, when his colleague Ernie Bascom comes more to the fore.

Maybe Limón never borrowed from Chandler. Maybe he did, but unconsciously. But if he did use Chandler as a model, he did so effectively and well. And a remark that Limón made during our panel at Bouchercon 2011 demonstrated that he is highly conscious of his own efforts to find his voice.

Limón's publication history has closely paralleled American military involvement during the post-Cold War era, with spurts of books following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then the second Iraq war. I suggested that interest in his military mysteries might have waxed and waned along with public interest in military news.

Nope, he said, the occasional gaps in his output (seven books in nineteen years) are due to his efforts over time to figure out how to be a novelist. I say that he’s gone a long way toward figuring out and that Chandler was part of the process.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón, or How do authors' voices change over time?

I read two of Martin Limón's novels for my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon 2011, of which Limón was a member. Now I'm reading his first book, Jade Lady Burning, and I've noticed (or thought that I noticed) some slight shifts in tone between it and the later books.

All the books feature George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, a pair of free-wheeling U.S. Army investigators in Korea in the 1970s. But this book seems a bit more explicit about the two protagonists' sexual adventures with Seoul's "business girls" (though well short of X-rated). Its language is a bit saltier than I remember from the later books, and its attitude toward Korean business practices and the Americans who investigate them a bit more, er, jaded.

I have no idea what significance this has, but it does raise this question: How do crime-fiction series change? I've asked this question before, but this time I don't mean obvious devices, such as aging the protagonist or getting him or her married or divorced. This time I'll focus on authors and narrators rather than on characters, and I'll ask How do crime writers' narrative voices change over time in a long-running series? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón on cleanliness and Korea

Bouchercon starts Wednesday night. While writing a list of questions for my panelists (and checking it a lot more than twice), I found these cultural observations from Martin Limón. The first is from his novel The Wandering Ghost. The second is from Buddha's Money:

"`She's very clean,' the landlady told us, `for an American.'"

and

"If anyone in the West thinks of them at all, it is as rice farmers or merchants or tae kwon do instructors. But Koreans have been sailors and fishermen since before history began."

One does not normally think of Korea as a seafaring nation, so that second passage gets me curious about the country's history. Who says crime fiction can't be a spur to learning?

***

Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón, real war, and fictional crime

Martin Limón's novels have a Cold War setting (Korea in the 1970s), but they began appearing around the time the United States resumed large-scale combat involvement for the first time since the Vietnam War.

Jade Lady Burning, Limón's first novel about U.S. Army investigators George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, appeared in 1992, which means he may have been writing it during the Persian Gulf war of 1990 and 1991. Two more books appeared by 1998, and the series resumed in 2005, by which time the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were underway.

Limón's novels give a rich picture of U.S. troops' daily (and nightly) life. Have American readers grown more interested in such matters since they've been reading and seeing war news every day for almost ten years? If so, was this is a factor in Limón's decision to write his books and his publishers' to issue them? Perhaps I'll find out late next week.

 And now, what are your favorite crime stories with military settings? Why  is the military a good setting for crime writing? (Limón weighed on this subject at Bouchercon 2009). If you don't think war and crime fiction mix, why not?

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Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Canned fruit cocktail: The key to telling detail in crime fiction

At Bouchercon 2009, Martin Limón said the years between the Korean War and South Korea's more recent economic and social success offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime."

I've thought about that remark while reading The Wandering Ghost, fifth of Limón's novels about Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, a pair of U.S. Army investigators in South Korea in the 1960s and '70s, especially when I read these bits:

"Small rooms open, no doors. Jam-packed with black-market merchandise, cardboard cases of canned fruit cocktail imported from Hawaii. In the next room, cases of crystallized orange drink were piled almost to the ceiling. The next held boxes of bottled maraschino cherries and about a jillion packets of nondairy creamer."

and

"The entire facility reeked of damp canvas and decayed mothballs. A cement-floored walkway was lined by square plywood bins, each bin filled to overflowing with steel pots, web gear, helmet liners, wool field trousers, fur-lined parkas, ear-flapped winter headgear, rubber boots, inflatable cold-weather footgear, ammo pouches, and everything the well-dressed combat soldier needs to operate in the country once known as Frozen Chosun."

The sheer profusion gives a convincing idea of the staggering amount of stuff it takes for a wealthy country to provision a modern army, and of the temptation to crime that must come with it. You can keep your submachine guns and briefcase-size nuclear devices for cotton-headed thriller fantasies. If I want a convincing mystery, rich with criminal possibility, I'll take a warehouse full of crystallized orange drink, nondairy creamer, and canned fruit cocktail by any day.

***

A quibble: Sueño refers to the "sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out." The term sexual harassment might not yet have been current enough in the early 1970s for anyone to use it as casually as Sueño does.

***

News flash: The Associated Press reported Tuesday that "As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates."

I suspect Martin Limón would not be surprised.

***

Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón, or crime goes to war

The opening pages of The Wandering Ghost, fifth of Martin Limón's military crime novels set in 1970s South Korea, offers this:

"If the coddled staff at 8th Army headquarters looked down on their snooty noses at the 2nd Infantry Division, the combat soldiers up here at Division returned the animosity tenfold. Anybody stationed in Seoul, they believed, lived in the lap of luxury and would be no more useful in a firefight than a hand grenade with a soldered pin."

That answers one question about what makes the U.S. military a good setting for a crime story: There are opportunities for conflict one could not dream of in civilian life. Limón himself answered another such question on a panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis.

What other unexpected settings are fertile ground for crime novels, and why?

***

Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011

Marty, write to your moderator. He's worried about you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

John Lawton on nationality and civilization

I don't know how John Lawton's books wound up being called crime novels, but if the label lures unwary readers (as it lured me), they'll be the better for it.

A Lily of the Field, seventh and most recent of Lawton's Troy novels is shaping up, like its predecessor Second Violin as, among other things, a touching meditation on the fragility of nationhood as a vehicle of identity:

"Magda was Austrian through and through, Roberto was the son of Italian immigrants, Inge was as Viennese as Magda — but Jewish."

or

"Since 1926, Imre had worked side by side with Phillipe Julius. A man as Viennese as he was himself, but with origins as mixed as his own. The Voyteks had come west a generation ago from Hungary. The Julius family had travelled east from France at about the same time. Central Europe was less a fixed point in geography — more a flying carpet."

(Prepare for A Lily of the Field with Lawton's essay on Second Violin. You'll find a fair sample of his righteous anger, a bit of Wodehousian wit, and a look back at an unedifying episode in England's wartime past.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Billy Boyle, or making sure the words fit the time

How does an author create a sense of place and time?

On Page 91 of Rag and Bone, author James R. Benn has the narrator/protagonist, U.S. Army Lt. Billy Boyle, escorted into the presence of a gangster in wartime London.

"Two other guys, middle-management thugs by the look of them, sat at the table playing cards," Billy tells us.

Seventy-five pages later, Billy's sidekick tells him: "Them two knuckleheads are probably still changing that tire, and no one else followed us."

Middle management? Knuckleheads? Did people talk that way in 1944? Are the terms historically accurate?

Not only are they accurate, but they are accurate with impressive precision. One search traces the first use of knucklehead to 1944, another finds middle management used first sometime between 1945 and 1950. More to the point, they lend Billy and his aide, Big Mike, a distinctive American voice. This is especially important in this tale of a young American abroad.

More on Billy Boyle later. In the meantime, how does dialogue contribute to a sense of place in fiction? Give examples of dialogue and vocabulary well suited to their fictional place and time — or not so well suited.

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(James R. Benn will be a member of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 a.m.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Billy Boyle and Ireland's secret World War II history

I neglected to mention yesterday what sparked my interest in James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels. Here's the beyond-borders connection:

Benn's current and fourth novel in his World War II-based series, Evil for Evil, has Boyle in Northern Ireland investigating theft of arms from a U.S. base for possible use in a Nazi-sponsored IRA uprising. (For some reason, IRA ties to Nazi Germany are not much discussed in the United States.)

The first book, Billy Boyle, which I'm reading now, has explored no such politically dangerous territory yet. But it does lay the groundwork for interesting internal conflict. Boyle, a young Irish American police officer from South Boston, heads to war in London with no particular military ambitions and a family legacy of ill will toward the English.

Young Billy, also the novel's first-person narrator, scorns advice that he be discreet about flaunting his American cash in front of the beleaguered and relatively impoverished English — until, on his way to his new assignment, he sees a wounded woman flashing the V-for-victory sign as she is carried from a pile of rubble on a stretcher:

"`Welcome to London,' Harding said as the traffic moved forward.

"`Yes, sir,' Maybe I wouldn't wave those sawbucks around for a while."

This shapes up as a compelling, politically charged take on the loss-of-innocence-in-war theme. It also makes me wonder how big a readership Benn has in South Boston.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Billy Boyle's life during wartime

Billy Boyle, first of James R. Benn's four mysteries about a young Boston police officer who winds up in World War II England, has a long, leisurely buildup to what I suspect will be its central plot, and that suits the context just fine.

Billy's arrival in London is full of walks about town that take in tourist sights, wry observations, innocent wisecracks, loneliness, and the curiously unreal (to an American, at least) spectacle of a city trying to go about its business in a war zone:

"We turned a corner and had to stop as workers in blue coveralls hauled bricks away from a smoldering pile of debris that had slid out into the street. People going to work walked around the mess, carrying their newspapers, umbrellas, and briefcases as if it were completely normal to walk past bomb-damaged buildings. Shops across the street had OPEN FOR BUSINESS painted on wood plans nailed over shattered windows."

Young Billy, like virtually all Americans, has no experience of war on his own soil, in his cities, on his own streets. Benn's leisurely introductory chapters lay the groundwork for possible conflicts, but mainly they give the innocent protagonist a chance to take in the strangeness of his own situation, and they invite readers to do the same.

(James R. Benn was part of the "War Crimes" panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis. Read more about Benn at his Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Just call me Daddy War Books

Readers responded in good number to Friday's post about wartime crime fiction. One suggested I post a list of the nominated books and authors, and here it is:

— Alan Furst
— John Lawton
— Andrew Taylor's Lydmouth series
— David Downing, Silesian Station and Zoo Station
— Jo Walton: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown
— Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels
— Jacqueline Winspear
— Rebecca Pawel's Carlos Tejeda series (suggested by Rebecca Pool in response to a post about Rebecca Cantrell)
— City of Gold by Len Deighton
— Marshall Browne, The Eye of the Abyss and The Iron Heart
— Charles McCarry

Some readers noted that their suggestions would usually be considered espionage novels or thrillers, but they offered good arguments for including them on a crime reader's list. I made the post to increase my own TBR list and to give a shout-out to good books I might (might!) not get around to reading right away. You helped me do both. Thanks, gentle readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Read On ... Rebecca Cantrell and wartime crime novels

Three years ago I wrote about an efficient little reference book called The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction. That book expanded its range through such clever devices as entries on themes and a handy "Read On ... " addendum to many author entries that referred readers to similar books and writers. This made the book a guide to many more authors than the 220 who received entries of their own.

I thought of the book today when I received Rebecca Cantrell's A Trace of Smoke in the mail. I heard Cantrell on the War Crimes panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, and I liked what she had to say about her book, a tale of death, intrigue and secrets in interwar Berlin. Among her fellow panelists, James R. Benn and Charles Todd also set novels in that jolly time between the start of World War I and the end of World War II.

I'll read A Trace of Smoke when I get some deadlines out of the way, and Benn is also in my TBR pile, along with Olen Steinhauer, whose novels are set amid the Cold War. I'll want to read more John Lawton, whose Second Violin chronicles inglorious episodes in English history before Word War II, as well as Charles Todd.

And then there's ... Well, here is where you come in. Help me build a "Read On ... " list of current crime novels set in Europe between 1914 and the early 1960s, Europe in World Wars and Cold Wars. What are your favorite crime stories set in these times and places? Why do you like them? What is the appeal of such books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon IX: Death during wartime

The funniest moments of my Bouchercon came during Reed Farrel Coleman's Saturday panel on "Dark Books for Dark Times." Coleman's swift dispatch of long-winded audience members helped, as did Duane Swierczynski's laugh lines and the fortuitous tension between Larry Beinhart (an atheist) and Michael Lister (a prison chaplain).

I was having too much fun to take thorough notes, but I did note a consensus among the panelists, who also included J.T. Ellison, that the putative restoration of order at the end of a crime story is illusory (Coleman) or, at best, temporary (Ellison).

Nothing impresses me as much as intelligent people who think deeply and seriously about what they do, so this panel was one of the conference's highlights. "I find nothing funny about murder," Coleman said, and he quoted with approval the pronouncement that "A cozy is a book in which someone gets murdered, but no one gets hurt."

***

I found a similar seriousness earlier Saturday at "War Crimes: How war shapes characters and crime novels." The four panelists set their novels during or between wars.

"War creates opportunity," said moderator Suzanne Arruda, a suggestion immediately endorsed by the panelists. James R. Benn, author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries, noted the immense attraction of military supplies for black marketeers, but also a loosening of social structures and inhibitions that allowed black marketeers and others to act in ways they never would during peacetime.

Martin Limón noted the dreadful toll of the Korean War and the country's current success as a robust, if sometimes spectacularly fractious, democracy. The intervening years, he said, offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime." Limón, who served twenty years in the U.S. army, said there was much to admire about that institution. Nonetheless, he said, "the military does not talk about crime unless it has to." And that sounds like a superb source of tension for a crime novel.

The seven deadly sins are with us at all times, said Charles Todd, "but war magnifies it. ... War is a tremendous opportunity to make money."

And what about the odd, poignant task of a wartime crime novel: to single out one death as pivotal amid the deaths of hundreds and thousands? Perhaps the surrounding carnage makes a murder victim's killing all the more tragic. "I do think that once you've waded through death, said Rebecca Cantrell, "you don't want to see any more of it."

Said Benn: "It is a grave offense for someone to be murdered when they could have survived the carnage of war."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009