“Algérie montait à la tête”

Charles de Gaulle in Aïn Témouchent,
Algeria, December 1960

  Sorry, folks, but, as Alistair Horne remarks several times in A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, “Algérie montait à la tête” — Algeria went to one's head (or, one might say, got under one's skin), and it's gone to mine. I'm not sure I'll visit any time soon (though Morocco or a return trip to Tunisia are not out of the question), but I bought a biography of Charles de Gaulle today and also Algerian White, by Assia Djebar.

Here are some of the small and large delights and surprises of Horne's book for me, who had known little about Algeria, particularly about that savage period in its history:

• Almost seven years into the bloody Algerian war, crowds of Muslims shouting: “Algérie algérienne… Vive de Gaulle!” in Aïn Témouchent — and the event that precipitated the deminstration: de Gaulle's astonishing reference in a 1960 speech to “an Algerian Republic, which will one day exist."
• That same year, as plots against de Gaulle's life by disaffected members of the military and pieds noirs mount by the minute, “A handsome young pied noir playboy, tired of life, decided to ram de Gaulle’s helicopter with his private plane.” He didn't do it because he couldn't figure out which helicopter was de Gaulle's.
• Horne's quotations from Frantz Fanon, known previously to me only as the apologist for revolutionary violence, the author of The Wretched of the Earth, and the revolutionary whose éclat was second only to Che Guevara's, on women's roles the Algerian uprisings.The mentions are brief, but the effects of women taking active roles where they had never done before must have been even more cataclysmic in Algeria's traditional Arab and Kabyle cultures than was the influx of women into the workforce in America during World War II.

I should note, too, that Assia Djebar, mentioned above, who is still around today, writes both in French and under an alias (she took the nom de plume because she feared her father's disapproval, her Wikipedia biography says.) Algerian White, according to a blurb, "weaves a tapestry of the epic and bloody ongoing struggle in her country between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society," which makes her seem like a woman worth reading.

It also sounds a bit like Yasmina Khadra, who writes in French under an assumed name and who criticizes both the state of Algeria and what he sees as Western misunderstanding of the Islamic world. Sounds to me like Algeria is one pretty interesting country, though I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting these days.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria in the '50 and the '90s: Yasmina Khadra and Alistair Horne

I'm still burrowing into the complicated history of France and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century via Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace,  In the meantime, here's an old post about an Algerian crime novel that paints a grim picture of the country a few decades after the events Horne recounts.

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Yasmina Khadra's novels about an Algiers police inspector named Brahim Llob owe much to the tradition of the alienated detective, but Khadra's wit is more bitter than is usual for that wisecracking tradition, and his target is his own country. Thus the opening pages of Dead Man's Share offer this:

"I try to catch the wall doing something wrong so I can investigate it."

but also

"We Algerians react only to what happens to us, never to forestall something that might happen to us.

"While waiting for the storm, we carry on with our rituals. Our patron saints take good care of us, our garbage cans are overflowing with food, and the planet's impending economic crisis is as distant as a comet—to us."

The novel's opening pages are full of bitter reflections on what Algeria does to its thinkers, how it consumes people of talent, how its leaders want to keep the people dumb. There may be a touch of autobiography to such passages; "Yasmina Khadra" is a pen name that the author, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, adopted to avoid censorship when serving as an Algerian army officer. He now lives and writes in France.

***

Dead Man's Share, published in French in 2004 as La part du mort and translated in 2009, is the fourth Brahim Llob novel. Khadra's comprehensive Web site (in French) includes excerpts, summaries, news, interviews, and the author's explanation of why he writes in French rather than Arabic.

A 2007 article surveys Khadra's work, including the Llob novels and non-series books that constitute a travelogue the Muslim world's miseries and agonies (The Attack, The Swallows of Kabul, The Sirens of Baghdad). And here are previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts about Khadra (click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012, 2013

Amara Lakhous on conflict Islamic style

Thursday's "Wide world of hate" post took up the diversity of ethnic resentment, conflict, and suspicion as revealed in crime fiction.

Amara Lakhous' Divorce Islamic Style, a social comedy in the guise of a spy story, offers this:

"I have to constantly remind myself that I’m Tunisian, and this neighborhood is full of Egyptians. Many people don’t know that there are rivalries among the Arabs. For example, it’s not smooth sailing between Syrians and Lebanese, between Iraqis and Kuwaitis, between Saudis and Yemenis, and so on and so on. It’s why they can’t seem to come up with a plan for unity, in spite of a common history, geography, Arabic, Islam, and oil. The model of the European Union will have to wait!"

That the Tunisian is really an Italian impersonating a Tunisian – albeit an Italian whose grandfather had been born in Tunisia of Italian parents before returning to Italy, where he longed to return to the land of his birth – suggests the fun Lakhous gets up to.

Here's what happens in the dormitory where the undercover Tunisian finds a place to stay:

“The non-Egyptian tenants are divided into two categories. Mohammed, the Moroccan, and I are in second place; we’re Arabs and we can communicate linguistically with the majority, limiting insult and injury where possible. But for the Senegalese and the Bangladeshi there’s no escape: they’re at the bottom. They have to submit or leave. To be Muslim isn’t enough. It’s better to be an Arab Muslim, but it would be fantastic to be an Egyptian Arab Muslim!”

Lakhous, Italian and born in Algiers, is only my latest reading encounter with Algeria. Didier Daeninckx built his novel Murder in Memoriam around the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters. Yasmina Khadra challenges easy notions that the Islamic world is either fundamentalist suicide bombers or Western sellouts.

Coincidence, or did the bloody end of Algeria's colonial ties to France make the country a moral crucible for relations between the West and the Islamic world?

While you ponder the question, here's a song by the Algerian-based-in-France singer Rachid Taha that you've likely heard before, though perhaps not in this version.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler turns 124 127 years old today, so I thought I'd bring back some old posts about his influence on crime writers beyond his own American (and English) borders.

==========

Four years ago the Los Angeles Times asked writers what they would give Chandler as a birthday gift, but I'd like to discuss taking rather than giving, namely what other writers have taken from Philip Marlowe's great creator.
Two years ago, in a post called "Chandler in South Africa," I noted Roger Smith's graceful extended tribute to Chandler in his novel Mixed Blood.

Last year I discovered Claudio Nizzi, Massimo Bonfatti, and their loving, amused, and amusing tribute to Chandler (and just about every other crime, movie, and pop-culture trend) in their Leo Pulp comics.

Matt Rees, Welsh-born and Jerusalem-based author of mysteries set in the Palestinian territories, told Detectives Beyond Borders that: "My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett." Moreover, he said the social chaos of the territories reminded him of the worlds those two authors portrayed so well: "In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler."

In Ireland, Declan Hughes invoked Chandler in discussing his own country's Celtic Tiger economic explosion and concurrent boom in crime and crime fiction: "The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.”

Also in Ireland, your humble blogkeeper noted the debt to Chandleresque plotting and wisecracking in Declan Burke's first novel, Eightball Boogie. Colin Watson's delightfully opinionated social history of English crime writing, Snobbery With Violence, cites Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," for his observations about crime writing and English writers.

An afterword to Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian crime novel American Visa noted the author's references to Chandler, Hammett, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. I've also detected more than superficial signs of Chandler's influence in novels by Australia's Peter Corris and noted the traces of Chandler some have found in the work of Algeria's Yasmina Khadra. Finally, Chandler is one of many crime writers upon whom Australia's Garry Disher muses in his wildly self-referential and wildly funny story "My Brother Jack."

***

And now it's your turn. What other crime writers from outside the United States have felt Chandler's influence? How has the influence shown itself?

***

Late-breaking Chandler tribute: I've just read the following in William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around Rosa):

"Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

What I've bought on my sort-of vacation

1) White dress shirts and black dress socks. I'll bridge the considerable fleshy lacuna between them with charcoal-gray suit pants, as the social functions for which I purchased the shirts and socks call for business attire.

2) A book of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, random browsing through which suggests that Swedes, contrary to their reputation, suffer just as passionately as your garden-variety Greek, Italian, Irishman, or biblical prophet, though they may do so more quietly. Here's one stanza (translated by Joanna Bankier) that hit home, and not just because of my recent clothes shopping:

"In the middle of life it happens that death comes
 and takes your measurements. This visit
 is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
 sewn in the silence."

3) Yasmina Khadra's memoir L'écrivain. I've wanted to read this since I read an excerpt in which this Algerian author resident in France (he writes the Brahim Llob crime novels, among other books) explains why he writes in French rather than his native language:

"I wanted to write. In Russian, Chinese, Arabic. But to write! At the beginning, I wrote in Arabic. My Arabic teacher ridiculed me, whereas my French teacher encouraged me."

4) A book of maxims and reflections by La Rochefoucauld. Expect this blog to become more pithy, witty, and jaded under its influence. And expect me to try to sneak one of the maxims into the blog, uncredited, in the next year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A Hitch in crime (or why you should read crime fiction and not the news)

I inadvertently left at home the crime novel I'd intended to read on my dinner break yesterday, but the substitute was more than acceptable, and it dovetailed neatly with some recent Detectives Beyond Borders posts.

The author is Christopher Hitchens, the book is his essay collection Arguably, and the passage I have in mind is from the book's introduction, in which Hitchens recounts his support and admiration for real revolutionaries in the Middle East and contrasts these with, among others, "the baroque corruption of the `Palestinian Authority.'”

 "It was clear," Hitchens writes, "that a good number of the audience (including, I regret to say, most of the Americans) regarded me as some kind of stooge. For them, revolutionary authenticity belonged to groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, resolute opponents of the global colossus and tireless fighters against Zionism."

Last week I wrote about my eye-opening chat in Tel Aviv about crime fiction in Israel. My informant was decidedly a man of the left, forthright and rueful about, among other things, the Israeli army's bulldozing of houses in Hebron. Yet he was equally forthright about calling Hamas terrorists. And he recounted a naval patrol from his own military service, when he marveled at the white sand beaches of Gaza and at the equally white luxury villas belonging to the Palestinian Authority elite that loomed above, built, presumably, with PA money that did not find its way into Swiss bank accounts.

Like the Israeli Arab driver who shuttled me to Hebron and Bethlehem on the same trip, that informant offered a more nuanced view of Israeli and Palestinian affairs than one is likely to get in America, where Palestinians are good and Israelis bad, or vice versa. And this, in turn, reminded me of Matt Rees' decision to turn to crime writing when he found a story "too good for Time magazine," and of the corruption of Palestinian officialdom that forms an important subtext in his novels but not of media and popular discussion of the Middle East, at least not in the United States.

And what about the Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra, who once told an interviewer

"Algerian readers like me a lot. They read me in French because I am not translated into Arabic. I am translated into Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, in the majority of the languages, except in Arabic. But that has nothing to do with the Arab peoples. It is the leaders who seek, as always, to dissociate the people from the elites so they can continue to reign and cultivate clanism and mediocrity."

There's another sentiment you'll likely not read in the American media, unless the reporters make themselves hip by affixing to it a fatuous social-media-related tag.

And now, readers, a question: "Crime stories reflect reality better than do the media." Do you agree? Disagree? Discuss.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

A quibble about The Golden Scales

I'd guessed that The Golden Scales, by Parker Bilal (nom de plume of Jamal Mahjoub), had been translated from Arabic and that tin-eared rendering was responsible for some of the clunky prose in the book's prologue. But I can find no translator's credits, and online biographies say Mahjoub was born in London, brought up in Khartoum, educated in Wales and Sheffield, and lives in Barcelona. Given that background, I now assume that he writes in English.

Whatever the original language, sentences like the following do nothing but get in the way:

“Liz Markham reared back, completely stalled by the human mass that confronted her.”

What's the difference between stalled and completely stalled? What does completely add? What does it do except slow down what the author clearly intends as a heart-pounding opening?

“Behind her she heard someone make a remark that she couldn’t understand.”

Why the extra words? Why not “she heard a remark” or “someone made a remark”?

“Glancing back, certain that someone was behind her, she moved away from the hotel, pushing impatiently through the crowd of tourists and tea boys...”

Pushing impatiently? How else would one push through a crowd? Yet again Bilal tells rather than shows and uses too many boring words doing it. That's apt to try a reader's patience, especially in an action scene.

My first guess was apparently wrong, but I'll try another: Mahjoub, described by some sources as an acclaimed author of “literary” novels, can't write action. I hope either that I'm wrong or that he chooses methods other than action scenes to tell his story, because I'm curious about what this writer of Arabic and African background can do with the Western crime-fiction tradition, a la Yasmina Khadra or Naguib Mahfouz.

Here's part of a blurb for the novel:

“Makana, a former Sudanese police inspector forced to flee to Cairo, is now struggling to make ends meet as a private detective. In need of money, he takes a case from the notoriously corrupt mogul Saad Hanafi, owner of a Cairo soccer team, whose star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing ..."

P.S. An author chooses Parker Bilal as a pseudonym for his first venture into crime fiction. What are the odds that he had Richard Stark or Robert B. Parker in mind?

P.P.S. Read my 2008 post on “Who will be the next Samir Spade? ... (Crime fiction in the Arab world)”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Detectives Beyond Borders on the radio — again

My 2009 appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth program will be rebroadcast today at 4 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Dig that nifty opening theme, and find out what kind of voices the show's host, Jean Feraca, likes! In honor of WPR's rebroadcast, I'm bringing back a blog post I made after the show first aired.

Here's a summary of  what we talked about and what I would have liked to talk about had we had more time. (If you're just tuning in now, the Here on Earth link should still allow you listen to the archived program.)

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

I'm back from talking international crime fiction on the Here on Earth radio program, and how about a huzzah for Wisconsin Public Radio for hosting a show on that entertaining, enlightening topic? The broadcast is available for listening or downloading here or here.

I learned that radio is an astonishingly compressed medium. I was worried we'd run out of things to discuss, but we got to barely a tenth of the authors and subjects I'd prepared. So in the coming days, I'll post a series of outtakes, things I'd have discussed had there been time.

I did get to tout Ireland as a hotbed of crime fiction, to offer my definition of noir and to talk about Yasmina Khadra, Seicho Matsumoto, Henning Mankell, Patricia Highsmith, David Goodis, Ian Rankin, Matt Rees, Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole. My fellow guest and I both like Jean-Claude Izzo, so we talked about him awhile. (That fellow guest was Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Akashic Books' Delhi Noir, about which he made some interesting remarks.)

But, oh, the things I didn't get to: Corporate villains. Humorous Swedes. Canadian borders. Northern Ireland. Irish odysseys. Hard-boiled crime as America's gift to the world. Translation. Miscellaneous exotica. The world of publishing.

More to come. Oh, and the show's host, Jean Feraca, with whom I had never spoken before, said on air that I had a "nice voice." Bless you, Ms. Feraca.

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

P.S.: Feraca gave me credit for a statement that I was only quoting. It was the Edgar Allan Poe scholar Shelley Costa Bloomfield who suggested that the French were ready and waiting for what Poe had to offer before Americans were: "Maybe it takes an older civilization to feel comfortable with the dark side and be able to enjoy it." I wish I'd said that, but Costa Bloomfield said it first.

P.P.S: Before anyone can point this out to me, I realize that I said, "If you will" once on the air. I shall suffer the consequences in the next life.

P.P.P.S. Finally, I think I got Seicho Matsumoto's death date wrong. That fine Japanese crime writer died in 1992. I think I killed him off twelve years prematurely.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009, 2011

The Group of Death

Jeff VanderMeer has organized a World Cup of Fiction, which groups the thirty-two nations of this year's soccer World Cup and asks readers to handicap the field in fiction instead of football. I'm refining his terms and restricting myself to crime writing.

Group A is the tournament’s Group of Death (and where is that term more meaningful than in a crime-fiction competition?)

For South Africa, Roger Smith, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Richard Kunzmann, James McClure (no one said the players had to be alive), Michael Stanley and Jassy Mackenzie head a lethal group of strikers that could be deep for years.

The French have Dominique Manotti, Fred Vargas and Tonino Benacquista in a midfield that plays a less attacking style than the vuvuzela-tooters but is capable of deadly surgical strikes.

France could wangle for Yasmina Khadra on its side, too, though he could make a dangerous striker for Algeria in Group C.

In Group D, Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Leigh Redhead, David Owen, Chris Nyst, and Adrian Hyland are just a few of the names on an Australian side that is a strong dark-horse contender, just as the Socceroos were in the real World Cup – at least until the competition started. (Temple, by the way, was born in – you guessed it – South Africa.)

Italy has Group F wrapped up, and I'll tab New Zealand to sneak into the knockout stage.

The Netherlands and Japan should fight it out in Group E of the Crime Fiction World Cup, hampered only by the fact that their stars, Janwillem van de Wetering and Seicho Matsumoto, are both dead.

England and the United States could make some noise in Group C.

Who do you think wins the 2010 World Cup of Crime Fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Who will be the next Samir Spade? Or the first one? (Crime fiction in the Arab world)

An article earlier this month from the London Book Fair (hat tip to Sarah Weinman) touched on issues that crop up from time to time at Detectives Beyond Borders. The subject was a speech by Amr Moussa, secretary general of the League of Arab States, on the "immense challenges" facing the Arab books world.

"The Arab League recognizes the shortcomings of education in the Arab world," he said, highlighting issues that included the inability of many would-be readers to afford books. But all was not negative. Moussa cited positive signs, including what he said was a decline in censorship, and more translation abroad.

Both the positive and the negative judgments dovetail with matters that have arisen on this blog. One of my early posts concerned a trip to Tunisia, where I found no crime fiction. Our local guide suggested an explanation that tallies with one of Mussa’s: that many Tunisians simply earned too little money to afford books.

Some time later, the questions of poverty and censorship arose in an exchange of e-mails with Matt Rees, who sets his novels in the Palestinian territories. Though the subject was crime fiction, the discussion touched on subjects Moussa raised in connection with Arabic literature in general.

“There are two separate issues,” Rees wrote. “One is that the book market is very small … My theory is that the Arab world is very prone to conspiracy theories, but the uncovering of the truth is generally not encouraged by governments or religious establishments – in political terms. Though the detective novel grows out of situations of corruption (Hammett's San Francisco or Chandler's Santa Monica), it also depends on a conception that when right is uncovered, it can also be carried through. Unfortunately the Arab world suffers from a lack of that freedom."

Rees also said crime fiction was virtually unknown in the Arab world, in part for reasons outlined above. What does this all mean? Perhaps that if Amr Moussa is right, and if a measure of liberalization does come to Arabic culture in general and publishing in particular, a new Arabic crime fiction might result.

There might be a way to go, though, at least in some Arab lands. The Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra, author of the searing Brahim Llob crime novels, writes in French because "I wanted to write. In Russian, Chinese, Arabic. But to write! At the beginning, I wrote in Arabic. My Arabic teacher ridiculed me, whereas my French teacher encouragd me." And Khadra, who lives in voluntary exile in France, once told an interviewer that:

"Algerian readers like me a lot. They read me in French because I am not translated into Arabic. I am translated into Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, in the majority of the languages, except in Arabic. But that has nothing to do with the Arab peoples. It is the leaders who seek, as always, to dissociate the people from the elites so they can continue to reign and cultivate clanism and mediocrity."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Love, war, crime fiction, and a question for readers

I posted more than a year ago about the chilling opening chapter of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri, in which the ravages of fighting in Algeria have sapped the protagonist even of the consolation of sexual desire:

"Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed – she holds no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she's there when I am afraid of the dark."

The next day, I found a discussion of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida that said: "Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

In A Grave in Gaza, Matt Rees' protagonist is haunted by deaths he has witnessed:

"Omar Yussef dreamed of death ... Death wasn't following him anymore. It was sharing his bed, not like a wife, but like an illicit lover, jealous and angry, giving him no sleep."

Once again, war is a destroyer of love (though only in his dreams for the eminently well-adjusted, decidely non-screwed-up, warped, embittered, cowed or otherwise damaged Omar Yussef). What other modern crime stories use this ancient theme?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Ethics and crime stories?

Clea Simon posed some questions on this subject last month on her blog. Her queries included:

Do you think mysteries have or promote ethical systems?
Do you care if justice is served?
and, perhaps most provocative,
can a book be moral or immoral?

I'll pass those questions on to you, but I won't let you off with any yes/no answers. Instead, I'll ask how a crime novel or story can express its ethics in ways other than simply the good guy winning in the end. Is ethics the same as justice? What about stories in which a villain wins or no one wins? What can one say about the ethics systems of such stories? Be sure to give examples!

Such writers as Yasmina Khadra, Jean-Claude Izzo, Jean-Patrick Manchette and perhaps Matt Rees upend or put novel spins on the good-guy-wins-in-the-end ending. One variant is the good-guy-left-standing-alone ending. What others can you think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Happy birthday to this blog, plus a note on Tokyo Year Zero

Today is the first anniversary of the first Detectives Beyond Borders post, which I mention because I have read that few blogs last this long. Mine, I think, is beyond the teething stage by now and is even walking on its own. So, thanks to all of you who have read and commented over the past twelve months. Keep on doing it, and tell your friends, colleagues and loved ones to join you.

I begin the new blog year with another post about Tokyo Year Zero, this time about its technique. Author David Peace has interpolated memories, presumably the narrator's, and sound effects of the decaying and rebuilding Tokyo into the novel's text. The interpolations are set in italic type, which fairly screams Technique! The same is the case with the frequent repetition of sentences, sometimes with minor variants in word order.

But Peace has put the technique to exceedingly good use. The constant ton-ton-ton-ton of hammers and the repetition are highly effective ways of translating the noise, squalor and monotony of a war-ravaged city into terms a reader can understand and feel. The devices are far more effective than exclusively descriptive passages would be, though Peace offers plenty of those, too, and does it well. Peace makes the squalor a part of the very texture of the narrative. He does as good a job of describing war's effects on people's minds and daily lives as does Yasmina Khadra in Morituri.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack" is up for a Dagger

I'd always considered Yasmina Khadra's crime novels about Inspector Brahim Llob of the Algiers police as something apart from his other novels — The Sirens of Baghdad, The Swallows of Kabul, Wolf Dreams, The Attack — which constitute a voyage through the Islamic world examining the corrosive effects of fear and extremism on everyday life.

Khadra apparently felt the same way, once telling an interviewer that in the Llob novels, “I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. … I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” If his crime books were not quite the same as his other books, I reasoned, then his other books must not be crime books.

Perhaps, then, Khadra shared my pleasant surprise when the Crime Writers Association in the United Kingdom short-listed The Attack for this year's Duncan Lawrie International Dagger award, alongside novels by Karin Alvtegen, Christian Jungersen, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Fred Vargas.

The Attack is a curious kind of crime story. Its protagonist and first-person narrator, Amin Jaafari, is an Arab surgeon living comfortably and successfully in Tel Aviv who is shocked when a suicide bomb rips through a crowded restaurant, and his wife disappears at the same time. Though the novel has police as characters, the investigator is Jaafari himself, driven to find out what compelled his wife into an association with terrorists. Perhaps this is why the CWA judges called The Attack "A harrowing psychological novel which explores the motivations of a suicide bomber, and lifts the conventions of the whydunnit."

And Jaafari is a curious protagonist. The novel's first eighty or so pages contain numerous references to the effects of his wife's disappearance: "The tornado that knocked down all my supports" or "when I resolve to guard against losing control." At least in the novel's first half, though, Jaafari never seems in danger of losing his moorings. He's too vital an observer, too interested in reporting on the seething world around him to be convincing as a man in danger of falling part. And that makes him a lively investigator.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Commentary on Khadra

An article in CrimeSpree Magazine's online version shares thoughts about Yasmina Khadra, whose many novels include four about the Algiers police inspector Brahim Llob. The article discusses some of the controversies surrounding the complex figure of Khadra, among them his service in Algeria's army.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra goes to the movies

A new post brings the exciting news that the movie version of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri is to be released in France April 25. The site offers clips, stills, reviews, production notes, and interviews with Khadra and director Okacha Touita. The clips make the movie look like an urban war film, and Khadra's comments lead me to expect a film noir. Both are entirely appropriate, given the bleak and draining atmosphere of 1990s Algiers, as pictured in Khadra's novels about police Inspector Brahim Llob.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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... and I'm working that week

Black & Blue: Mediterranean Noir Comes to New York, April 25-28, is dedicated to the memory of Jean-Claude Izzo. Its programs of readings and discussions includes appearances by Yasmina Khadra, Carlo Lucarelli, Massimo Carlotto and Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett and a documentary film featuring Lucarelli and Andrea Camilleri.

Yasmina Khadra and Bill James interviewed

This evening's Web surfing turned up recently published interviews with two of my favorite crime writers. The interviews are more interesting than most and should make good reading even if you don't know Bill James and Yasmina Khadra (and I think you should know both).

Epic India carries this discussion with Khadra, whose work includes crime novels featuring Algiers Police Inspector Brahim Llob. Khadra speaks bluntly about terrorism, Western media, and Arab leaders as well as with passion about his own background and his love for certain Arab writers who may be unknown in the West.

Here's what he says about the Llob novels, which are funny but also chilling in their evocation of violence and corruption:

“I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. I dreamed to reconcile the Algerian reader with his literature. I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” (The interviewer speaks English, and Khadra speaks Arabic and French, which may account for the very occasional odd-looking word. But trust me: Khadra always makes himself clear. )

Could this sensitive and talented author be guilty of underestimating his own work or perhaps even of condescension toward crime fiction, to which he has made memorable contributions?

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Crimespree has just republished this 2oo4 interview with Bill James, author of the Harpur and Iles series. James' topics include his manic co-protagonist Desmond Iles ("He's basically a good cop. But very basically."), the laughable pretensions of his drug dealers, and some interesting thoughts on female characters I have not discussed here.

He also talks about the music he likes (Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, among other musicians), and his non-crime writing (He's written and published a study of Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Harpur and Iles
Bill James
Yasmina Khadra
Brahim Llob

A Temple-Khadra connection

I've just come across a December article from the Australian called What the writers read, in which authors as well as critics are asked to choose the best books they read in 2006. Peter Temple chose Kel Robertson's Dead Set, for example, and he also had this to say about Mike Davis's Planet of Slums: Davis' "brilliant synthesis of the works of dozens of scholars leads to a frightening prediction: a world of `feral, failed cities' in which the well-off live in fortified sanctuaries while helicopter gunships patrol the slums and extremist religions of all kinds are among the opiates of the wretched masses."

Recent headlines from Rio de Janeiro lend credence to that vision. But so does the work of a writer I've discussed here several times: Yasmina Khadra. Here's Algiers police Inspector Brahim Llob in Khadra's novel Morituri: "Once past a police barrier we cross a downtown neighborhood with the air of an Indian cemetery, bypass a part of Bab el Oued where the simple folk fornicate ardently to keep themselves warm, and climb the sinuous road which leads to the city heights. Without warning the hovels vanish and we burst upon a little Eden bedecked with opulent villas, Swiss chalets and hanging gardens ... `Hell! Just take a peek at those fortresses, Super.'"

Earlier in the novel, Llob "gaze(s) at the guru in the photo: twenty-eight years old. Never went to school. Never had work. Messianic peregrinations across Africa, preaching absolute virulence and an implacable hatred toward the entire world. And now here he was setting himself up as a righter of wrongs: thirty-four murders, two volumes of fatwa, a harem in every bush and a scepter in every finger."

One generally associates wretchedness of the kind Davis discusses with teeming Asian or sub-Saharan African cities, but it sounds as if Brahim Llob's Algiers is right up there. Or down there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Australian crime fiction
Peter Temple
Yasmina Khadra

Love and war

Yesterday (or, strictly speaking, early this morning), I wrote about the corruption of Yasmina Khadra's Algiers in his novel Morituri. So pervasive and all-penetrating is the rot that it poisons and saps the protagonist's desire for his wife.

Today, in Philadelphia's excellent Big Jar Books, I chanced upon the following on the back cover of a Vintage paperback edition of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida:

"In medieval literature, Troy represents the perfection of normal human life on the brink of its destruction by a more corrupted force. By writing about this norm, Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

As in fourteenth-century England, so in 1990s Algeria. Khadra knew what he was doing when he opened Morituri with a scene of poisoned love.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Technorati tags:
Yasmina Khadra
Brahim Llob
Geoffrey Chaucer