An interview with Timothy Hallinan, Part II

In part two of his interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, author Timothy Hallinan talks about the persistence of the Khmer Rouge, Western crime writers in Southeast Asia, and his protagonist's interesting career.

(Read part one of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)
==========================

The afterlife of the Khmer Rouge figures in A Nail Through the Heart. Have Khmer Rouge figures in fact slipped into civilian lives in Southeast Asia outside Cambodia?

Absolutely. Madame Wing actually lives in Bangkok, under a different name, of course. The Khmer Rouge stole hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the murderers simply stayed in Cambodia. Some of them are high up in the Cambodian government, which is the main reason it's taken so long to bring anyone to trial. But some of them slipped away, and she's one of them.

Poke Rafferty is settling down from a life of writing the kinds of travel guides I'd have liked to read. Why did you choose this as a former career for your protagonist? And do such travel guides exist?

You know, at the time I started to write the series, I was sure they did, but now I don't think so. Lonely Planet kind of started out as alternative guides, but now, as we all know, they're publishing guide books by people who have never visited the countries they're writing about. I've thought several times of writing them myself, under Poke's name, just to get people confused. But it would require too much energy. The great thing about fiction is that you can just make it up.

Poke came to me on New Year's 1998, when I walked Bangkok from about 10 P.M. to 9 A.M. I went everywhere, but mostly off the main drags. And Poke came into my mind: a travel writer who writes about the places that are beyond the margins of the well-worn tourist paths. And I immediately realized that this character had already written a couple of books, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines and Looking for Trouble in Indonesia, and that he'd written them from an external, fairly superficial perspective. But when he got to Thailand, the place blindsided him, as it did me, and he suddenly found himself in a culture to which he actually wanted to belong.

But the important thing, from a writing standpoint, was that he didn't belong, and because he didn't belong, he didn't have to understand everything; he could make mistakes about the people and the lives they live. And he spoke only elementary Thai. Those things were very liberating for me. I'd been nervous about writing about Thailand because I knew there was so much I didn't understand. Suddenly, I didn't have to be the guy who could write the Wikipedia entry on Thailand. My character was just another clown trying to find his way in. He was going to get things wrong from time to time.

And I figured writing these guides would give him an interesting skill set, street smarts that would come in handy.

What kind of a community, if any, is there among Western crime writers who live at least part time in Southeast Asia and set their work there, people like you, Colin Cotterill and Christopher G. Moore?

I know Chris Moore and like him very much. I've never met Colin, although I want to because I love his books. Writers tend to be sort of solitary, but Chris and I grin at each other and have lunch from time to time, when we pry our fingers from the keyboards and emerge into the sunlight.

What are the crime-fiction-reading habits of Thai readers? Does Thailand have a native crime-fiction tradition? How much translated crime fiction is available there?

Not much tradition that I know of, although there are lots of thriller films set in Bangkok. Danny and Oxide Pang (are those great names, or what?) have directed a couple.

Poke is of mixed Asian and European descent. Why did you choose to give him this ethnic background? What does this bring to his character?

I always wanted to be part Asian, or even all-Asian. I think Asian people, when they look cool, look cooler than anybody. If I could start over, I'd like to be Korean or Thai, and really killer-looking, as well as somewhat taller than the norm.

I also thought it might be handy if Poke could, on occasion, blend in with the local population, or at least not stand out to the extent he would if he were, say, Norwegian. I used that in the first book I wrote about him, which I never showed to my agent (I wrote it just to get my feet wet in Poke's world) and it came in very handy in that story because he had to disappear. And here I am writing the third, and guess what? He has to disappear. So those Asian genes are going to be very helpful.

(Read part one of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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An interview with Timothy Hallinan, Part I

Readers of book-jacket biographies know that crime writers tend to have (or to be given) colorful job histories. Often these include bartender, bouncer, teacher, sailor, deck hand, skip tracer or private investigator. Timothy Hallinan's résumé includes none of these, but his background does include a career in television and an embryonic association with one of the most successful pop bands of the 1970s. He also lives part time in Thailand and sets his novels there, as good a credential for adventure as a crime writer can have.

Hallinan has published two books about Poke Rafferty. This protagonist is the author of travel guides called Looking for Trouble in ... but is himself trying to stay out of trouble by settling down in Bangkok with his bar-girl-turned-businesswoman lover. His tenuous success with this remarkable woman is a running motif and a delight of the novels. When it comes to staying out of trouble, however, he fails dismally.

Hallinan's Poke Rafferty books are A Nail Through the Heart and the new Fourth Watcher. He also wrote six novels about Los Angeles P.I. Simeon Grist. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Timothy Hallinan discusses the delights and terrors of Thailand as well as the road that led him there. He also delivers a good, solid kick in the pants to a supposedly respectable and authoritative American television network.

(Read part two of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)
================================

Forgive this question because I am just old enough to remember when Bread was a pervasive AM radio presence, but what was your association with the group, and how did you get from that to writing crime fiction?

I was in a band called The Pleasure Fair with Robb Royer, who went on to found Bread with David Gates and Jimmy Griffin. We made an album on Uni records, which at the time was Universal Studios' music arm. The LP went nowhere, but it was produced by David Gates, and he and Robb and Jimmy later got together, and the rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately, I'm not on those chapters of the history book, or I'd be a lot richer.

So I took a day job which evolved into a very nice career in television, but was always writing in my spare time. I had about three partial novels (I was at that stage where you're “writing at” novels rather than writing novels), and my house in the Hollywood Hills burned down. I had backups of everything, but they were all in the house. I underwent one of those realizations: If I'd finished any of those books, it would have been somewhere else – in print, on some agent's desk, somewhere. So I went to Thailand and started to rewrite the book I remembered best. I finished it in eight weeks, and it sold immediately, and suddenly there I was with a three-book contract. The key was finishing. That's why in the Writer's Resources of my Web site, http://www.timothyhallinan.com/, the keynote quotation is Thomas Farber's line, “A writer is someone who finishes.”

How did you wind up in Thailand?

Totally by accident. I was in Japan with the first Western symphony orchestra ever to tour there (I was working on a PBS series about the tour), and I had decided to go to some hot springs when the job was over and sit up to my nose in hot water, reading The Tale of Genji. A bunch of the guys in the string section thought that sounded great and decided to go along. I'd been sitting next to them for weeks and was less than enthusiastic about continuing to sit next to them while on vacation, so I called my travel agent and asked her to book me on a flight to anywhere in Asia where I didn't need a visa. Forty-eight hours later, I got off the plane in Bangkok wearing a down jacket and a scarf (it was February, and cold as hell in Japan), and it was 97 degrees. The immigration guys were falling off their chairs laughing at me. And I fell in love with the place – the contrasts, the energy, the smiles of the people. I took an apartment within a week.

The Poke Rafferty books are not your only novels. Could you talk a bit about your other crime writing?

I wrote six novels set in the other town I know best, which is Los Angeles, featuring an overeducated private eye called Simeon Grist – four graduate degrees and no actual idea about how to make a living. A lot like me. Anyway, the Simeon books got the reviews writers dream of and the sales they have nightmares about. Every book was hailed as my breakthrough by somebody important (this was when newspapers still thought people wanted to read about books). But lightning never struck. So after we put Simeon out to graze, I took a few years off and just concentrated on making money so I could write full-time. And now I can.

What attracted you to Bangkok, Thailand and Southeast Asia in general as settings for crime stories?

Well, I love the whole Southeast Asian thing: everything from the terrible traffic to the temple in the jungle by the sea. Any place that's had continuous and somewhat isolated civilization for, say, 1,200 years, that suddenly collides with the overwhelmingly Western influences of the 21st century is going to be interesting. This is nowhere truer than it is in Thailand and Cambodia, both of which have gone through tremendous societal changes in the past 30 years or so – although there's nothing in recent Thai history to compare with the Cambodian tragedy of the Khmer Rouge.

What I like best is the fact that Westerners, including my protagonist, Poke Rafferty, never really get inside. They're made to feel special and welcome, and after a while they think of themselves as being part of everything, but they're not, and they never will be – the society might as well be a department-store window display with the foreigners on the other side of the glass. They will never get through that pane of glass. And that's the situation Poke's in – he's in love with the culture, he's in love with two Thai females, his wife, Rose, and his adopted daughter, Miaow, and those relationships aren't going to work out in the long run unless he becomes more Thai. The same is true of the scrapes he gets into. Unless he understands the society better, he could wind up dead. It's kind of an interesting situation.

And then, I also get to deduct all my expenses there from my tax return if I write books that are set there.

Child prostitution figures in the Rafferty novels. How widespread is the phenomenon in Thailand, and is it more widespread there than elsewhere in Southeast Asia? If so, why? Is undue suspicion ever cast on Westerners living in Thailand because of it?

The dreadful child abuse – more pornography than prostitution – in A Nail Through the Heart was based on a real guy, a German monster who actually lived in Bangkok and shot there the pictures described in the book. I don't know whether he's dead (although I fervently hope he is), but the pictures seem to have stopped coming.

I think child prostitution exists anywhere you have a very large, very poor lower class. In Thailand and Cambodia, where it used to be quite prevalent, it's either pretty much disappeared now, or it's moved way, way underground. I live in both countries, and there are still lots of street kids, so my guess would be that there's still some child prostitution, but not with pimps and child brothels and all the rest of the institutionalization of the trade that used to exist. And yes, I think Western men who live there are regarded with a certain amount of unfriendly speculation.

Part of the problem is that American television news is so unprincipled. Every year they run the same terrible footage of child prostitutes, taken in Phnom Penh in 2002, as the center of a piece on CNN or MSNBC with a title like House of Shame or something equally maudlin. The fact is, they haven't spotted anything new since 2002, but why let that get in the way of a sure-fire teaser line like "Child Sex at Eleven"?

I was in Phnom Penh the last time Anderson Cooper was there, and he shot his set-up in front of the brothels of Tuol Kork, where most of the women could be charitably described as motherly. All the lighted doors were out of focus behind him. The shadows moving around could have been adults, or children, or Komodo dragons for all anyone could tell. Several bars where freelancers go to meet tourists refused to allow any woman under 5 feet, 4 inches into the bar while CNN was in town because they were terrified of some shot taken from behind of a big guy and a small woman. The most disgusting thing of all was that the whole time CNN was in Phnom Penh, the tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge leaders – who killed two million people – was finally about to get underway, the first time any of these bloodsuckers had ever been brought to account. And CNN never reported a single word about it. Not sexy enough; "Murderers of Millions Brought to Justice" is nowhere near as good as "Child Sex at Eleven."

(Read part two of the interview with Timothy Hallinan here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Prophet Murders — Community news

A recent commenter on this blog wrote favorably of the tendency in English village mysteries for characters to gather in the local pub and talk things out. Mehmet Murat Somer's The Prophet Murders manages a similar feeling of intimacy, though the center of its universe is a transvestite nightclub in a city of 10 million people.

Somer articulates the feeling of community from the novel's first page, where the protagonist, who manages the club, has just read of a transvestite's death in a fire. "Bad news about our girls always gets me down," he reflects (italics mine).

The protagonist, never named in the book, is not just the manager of the club, he also dresses the part. He is gay and, as narrator and character, he is forthright about his sexual pleasures and practices. By day, he dresses in men's clothing and is an expert in computer security. Nothing like this is likely to turn up in an Agatha Christie novel. Still, the comparison is valid, emphasized by the protagonist's chatty observations about music, television, diets and food and the amusingly chilling gimmickry of the plot (a series of transvestites, each with the given name of a prophet in Islam, turn up dead), and made explicit by references to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Somer makes intelligent, amusing and creative use of at least one additional amateur-sleuth convention: that of the expert who provides skills that the amateur hero lacks. This protagonist has several such helpers, the most intriguing of whom we meet first in a chat room, where he posts inflammatory messages using the handle jihad2000. The name expresses one facet of the character. The other facets may be far more surprising.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Case of the Missing Books, a different sort of mystery by Ian Sansom

I don't know what sorts of movies Ian Sansom watched in the early 1980s, but I'd bet Local Hero was one of them.

In that 1983 Bill Forsyth film, an oil billionaire sends a hotshot young executive to buy up a Scottish village where the oil company wants to build a refinery. Young hotshot is smitten with the village, billionaire with the sky above it, and all ends happily except, perhaps, for the young hotshot, who returns to America and longingly recalls his time in the village as a highlight of his life.

The Case of the Missing Books follows a similar course, except its version of the hotshot — a bedraggled young librarian named Israel Armstrong — stays on, and he and the village grow to embrace one another, if somewhat awkwardly. Armstrong has arrived in Tumdrum, County Antrim, Northern Ireland to take over as librarian for Tumdrum and District. Only the person who is supposed to meet Armstrong fails to show up, the library has closed, and his new job is to staff a mobile library van. Oh yes, and all the books have disappeared.

In short order, Israel loses his clothes, his money and his credit cards. A vegetarian, he struggles to find nourishing food he can eat, not to mention a good cup of coffee. He has trouble understanding the villagers' thick accents and odd expressions, and he gets punched in the eye when he inadvertently spies on a pair of lovers. Beset on all sides, he agrees to stay just long enough to flesh out his résumé and earn enough money to return to London.

His supervisor, as shameless a liar and as fatuous a sugar-coater as my — that is, as any corporate shill, assures Israel that "it is important for the borough to continue to provide information resources with a high service proposition combined with increased competitive flexibility." She also assigns him the unwanted job of finding the missing books and, oddly enough, Israel finds he enjoys the role of sleuth. Only most of his guesses are wrong, and just a few of the 15,000 missing books turn up.

The books do materialize eventually and, like any good mystery, this one has its villain. But the solution comes about not through any discoveries on Israel's part, but only once the villagers have come to trust him. I'll reveal no more except that not only does Israel eventually agree to stay on, he even gets a vegetarian feast. In short, this is less a mystery than an engaging fish-out-of-water story. Lurking within is a ruefully humorous and compassionate message:

"Stripped of his money, his clothes, his dignity, unable to understand what people were talking about half the time, unwilling to eat the food, forced to be doing a job he didn't want to do, and threatened, beaten, and in a state of some uncertainty, confusion and tension, he was now really enjoying the full immigrant experience: this was what it must have been like for his ancestors and relatives who'd made it to Bethnal Green and to America. No wonder they all looked so bloody miserable in the photographs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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What your favorite glamorously dressed detective is wearing

I've written from time to time about amateur detectives, so I took notice when Euro Crime published an interview with the creator of an especially exotic example: a glamorous transvestite/corporate consultant/computer whizz/underground-club owner, and in Istanbul, no less.

Author Mehmet Murat Somer tells Euro Crime about his unusual protagonist and, as a bonus, offers a brief guide to crime fiction by Turkish writers and by foreign writers who set their books in Turkey.

And, in another hat tip to Euro Crime, here's something that sounds like fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Two professions, one of them odd, for fictional amateur sleuths

I've discussed amateur sleuths from time to time in this space, usually with emphasis on their professions, from high school history teacher to shady antiques dealer and beyond.

Implicit in any such discussion is the question of believability. How plausible is it that a stripper or real estate agent or nice old lady would get involved in solving a crime, usually a murder?

Robert Bloch's Mark Clayburn in Shooting Star is one of the odder combinations. He's a one-eyed private investigator who is also a literary agent. Further, he has entered the former profession after his flourishing business in the latter fell apart as a result of the same set of events that cost him one eye. How likely the combination is, I don't know, but it does make for some atmospheric touches — the weary P.I. musing about sending out manuscripts rather than about pounding pavement.

Elsewhere on the amateur-sleuth front, Bill Ott begins a review of Anna Blundy's The Bad News Bible with the declaration that "It’s odd that there aren’t more foreign-correspondent series leads in crime fiction. The job requires a classic hard-boiled hero—tough talking, cynical to the bone, and capable of ingesting prodigious amounts of booze and cigarettes—and the work entails jumping from one dangerous venue to another ... "

What ever could he mean? There are tons of foreign-correspondent sleuths in crime fiction. There's Dan Fesperman's, and um —

Maybe Ott is right. What other foreign-correspondent sleuths can you think of? Do such characters make good crime-fiction protagonists? And why are there so few of them, other than that American newspaper are closing down their foreign bureaus because news is too expensive?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Timely travel tales and a question about amateur sleuths

Hot on the heels on the Lonely Planet/Thomas Kohnstamm travel-guide scandal, and through the good offices of William Morrow, come Timothy Hallinan's first two novels about Poke Rafferty, a rough-travel writer forced by circumstances to turn investigator.

Jacket copy on the first book, A Nail Through the Heart, says Rafferty's "Looking for Trouble series is for travelers obsessed with the unusual: how to beat official foreign-exchange rates; how to spot fake amber or counterfeit money; how much to bribe a cop; how to identify a transvestite before it's too late."

I don't know if this novel or its follow-up, The Fourth Watcher, deal with issues raised in the Kohnstamm dust-up — comps, freebies, accounts based on visits that never happened — but that lighthearted blurb leads me to believe in the possibility. And the protagonist's situation — he's not just Bangkok-based, but he writes for foreigners seeking thrills — leaves ample room for satire, not to mention intrigue and thrills. The novel's short prologue, though, is a somber invocation of a tsunami as seen through a jerky TV camera.

Rafferty's job expands my list of interesting amateur-sleuth professions, a subject about which I've posted here and here. And so, readers, two questions: Have you met any other travel-writer sleuths in your reading? How about other odd and interesting occupations for your favorite amateur detectives?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Adrian Hyland in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Adrian Hyland's novel Moonlight Downs (a.k.a. Diamond Dove) appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Click here to read the online version.

A heads-up: I liked the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Australian crime fiction

The Collaborator of Bethlehem, Part II

Yes, he does make mistakes and unwarranted assumptions born of overconfidence, as a good amateur detective should.

He is Omar Yussef, the schoolteacher protagonist of The Collaborator of Bethlehem (a.k.a. The Bethlehem Murders) by Matt Beynon Rees (a.k.a. Matt Rees). Or perhaps the line between amateur and professional is meaningless in an infernal world such as Yussef's, where the distinctions between law, terror, honor, corruption and revenge have just about evaporated. To avoid plot spoilers, I won't discuss his mistakes – or his right guesses, for that matter – except to say that even the wildest among them is, sadly, plausible.

Yussef is a Muslim; the friend and former pupil whose life he fights to save is a Christian. Hamas and Fatah are both mentioned, but clan alliances and rivalries and good, old-fashioned greed figure far more prominently. Israeli tanks make one fearsome appearance, but the Palestinians of this Bethlehem do too good a job destroying themselves to need much help from anyone else.

Yussef, the good guy, wins in a sense – Soho Press is about to publish the second novel in the series, so I'm giving away nothing if I say that Yussef does not die. But his triumph is partial. Still, its particular nature (again, I'll give no spoilers) adds to the attraction of this good, flawed, dogged and enormously appealing protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Matt Beynon Rees chose wisely when he made the protagonist of The Collaborator of Bethlehem a teacher; Palestinians are said to revere education. Furthermore, Rees’ Omar Yussef teaches history, which makes him a plausible mouthpiece for harsh judgments on modern Arab and Palestinian history and current events, judgments that make him an object of suspicion in the West Bank.

His skepticism naturally makes him a good detective, an avocation he exercises when a friend and former pupil is charged with collaborating with Israel in a killing.

As one might expect, the novel asks probing questions about Palestinians, about their horrible and self-destructive internecine fighting, and about their daily lives. I suspect that partisans of Hamas or Fatah might not like the book, but I also suspect that the rest of us might come away from it with a good deal of sympathy for Palestinians as people rather than as symbols.

Yussef is plagued by doubts from time to time. Having cited the aptness of his profession for an amateur detective, I’ll keep my eyes open to see whether he also commits a sin to which an amateur detective should perhaps be especially prone: overconfidence in his own judgments.

N.B. The Collaborator of Bethlehem is the U.S. title for the novel published in the U.K. under the less resonant name The Bethlehem Murders. The U.K. edition also drops the Beynon from Rees’ name.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Does this protagonist get a clothing allowance?

I’ve posted here, here and here about amateur crime-fiction sleuths with interesting professions, but Sarah Weinman recently offered an example that beats the pants off any of mine. I don’t want to give away too much, but key words in her announcement of Mehmet Murat Somer's The Kiss Murder and The Prophet Murders include “Istanbul,” “transvestite nightclub owner” and “Thai kickboxing expert.”

Elsewhere, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse holds forth on that car accident heard around the world, the death of Princess Diana. Warehouse shares pungent and entertaining thoughts on the subject and offers a surprising suspect. A comment on his post offers the lowdown on Mohammad El Fayed’s eating habits when he visits America. (An unrelated comment from Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays offers eloquent answers to anyone shocked, shocked! that we cannot leave the poor woman alone: “One, it was okay for the Princess of Wails to spin the entire world a fiction while she was alive, but no one is allowed write about her now she’s dead, or at least not for 25 years after the event – is that correct? Two, how come Elton John didn’t get this kind of grief?”)

While Diana’s story involves no crime but lots of fiction, today’s final topic involves no fiction, and its only crime is against good English usage. This evening’s dinner special in the cafeteria at the media outlet that pays my salary was a turkey burger “bundled with” a drink. What consultant decided that “bundled with” was better than “and”? Perhaps the same one who decided, for the same cafeteria, that “accompaniment” sounds more impressive than “side dish.”

Back at my desk, I read a statement from the manager of the Baltimore Orioles on his dismissal of the team’s pitching coach: “Moving forward, I felt that we would be better served with someone else working with our young staff … " I was ready to fulminate against that odious piece of blame-shifting politico-business jargon when I found that someone had done so already.

And now, a non-crime-fiction question for readers: What vogue expressions set your teeth on edge?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Diamond Dove

I read so few mysteries that I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find myself in the middle of a good one. Oh, I read plenty of crime novels, all right, but most could be called mysteries only by force of musty Golden Age tradition. My favorite crime novels and stories may be urban portraits, morality plays, slices of life, colorful foreign tableaux, character studies, stories of divorced, self-pitying middle-aged men who drink too much, violent and funny romps. But mysteries? The very word has a quaint sound, like vicarage or locked room or village green.

With some novels, I nod indulgently at the mystery parts: the clues, the detective’s self-doubt, the obvious misdirection, and I marvel at the superstructure the author erects just so he or she can throw in a bit of mystery. Or at the handy availability of mystery as a plot engine, a framework on which to hang the author’s view of some exciting locale or pressing social or psychological problem.

And then there is something wonderful like Adrian Hyland’s Diamond Dove, an unabashed amateur-sleuth whodunit that works seamlessly as character study and as portrait of a setting that is probably unfamiliar to many Australians, much less to readers like me on the other side of the world.

The protagonist is Emily Tempest, a restless young woman of Aboriginal and white parentage who has come back to live among her “mob,” the shifting clan of Aborigines among whom she spent her youth in Australia’s Northern Territory. The group’s wise and revered leader is killed soon after Emily arrives, and circumstances force her from the group’s camp into the neighboring town of Bluebush, which Emily refers to, if I recall correctly, as a “shithole.”

Along the way, we and Emily meet miners, cattlemen, police, pub owners, aid workers and all manner of inhabitants that one might expect in a town near nowhere and a settlement outside the town. The characters are variously dirty, violent, kind, hilarious, empty-headed and of unexpected strength and talent. This applies equally to the novel’s white characters and its Aborigines, and a comment by Hyland in The Age newspaper seems pertinent here. Diamond Dove, he says,

“is based on people I know and love. Anyone who reads it will see that I hang shit on everyone – the miners, the meatworkers, the station owners and even the Lands Council types who are my friends. It's a comedy satire. I was joking about everybody I knew, and it was written in the spirit of affection about a dying world, a world no one's really written about. … A precious world that's fading. … I suspect one could do more for Aboriginal people by portraying them as a living, loveable people, rather than as a broken museum display which is going to have us all running for the confessional."

But Diamond Dove is also a mystery. At least four credible suspects present themselves, and Emily is a perfect vehicle for Hyland’s artful misdirection. As smart and as determined as she is, she’s a neophyte. Her doubts and misdirected certainties work because in her place, we might react the same way. She is a perfect amateur sleuth. Diamond Dove is Hyland’s first novel so, if we’re lucky, we’ll see more of his precious world.

==================================
Diamond Dove is published in Australia by Text Publishing of Melbourne, and I have read that Hyland has signed a two-book deal with Soho Press that includes Diamond Dove. This could mean more convenient availability for readers outside Australia. My advice, though, is not to wait. Order the book now, enjoy it, then lord it over your friends when the book hits the shops in your country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Amateurs' professions

Three months ago, I posted a comment about amateur sleuths. "What professions are naturals for future crime novels?" I asked. "What sorts of workers who have not yet been protagonists of crime stories would make good fictional sleuths?"

Since then, the roster of suggested or realized fictional sleuths I have come across includes dentists, political minders, real estate agents and strippers. I leave it to your imagination to figure out what, if anything, these professions have in common.

In the meantime, I'll expand on my earlier questions. What professions are natural for future crime-fiction protagonists -- and what weird or unexpected sleuth professions can you think of? Interpret profession as loosely as you'd like to. In fact, I'll start you off: Samuel L. Jackson's schizophrenic street person/concert-caliber pianist in The Caveman's Valentine. OK, the movie was pretty bad, but its protagonist had an unusual line of work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A new kind of protagonist and a familiar kind of blurb

I posted a while back about amateur sleuths in unusual professions. I have just started Shane Maloney's The Big Ask; Maloney's Murray Whelan is the first political-operative crime-fiction protagonist I know of -- and he has a sense of humor.

Here's a detail I forgot to mention earlier. Stop me if you've heard this before, but a cover blurb compares Maloney's protagonist to Ian Rankin's:

"Whelan is like an Aussie Rebus."
Sunday Herald

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

A superb history of fictional detectives

T.J. Binyon's Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction , published in 1989, is an invaluable guide to the history of fictional detectives and just old enough to be an interesting historical document itself.

Binyon breaks down fictional detectives by type: the professional amateur (Sherlock Holmes, for example), the amateur amateur, and the police. Along the way, this short and astoundingly comprehensive book offers nuggets of social history (the remarks about the unease of early British fictional police officers probing crimes among their aristocratic social superiors stand out), and brief assessments of an astonishing number of authors. Binyon is unafraid to boost a lesser-known writer (Georgette Heyer) at the expense of better-known ones (Allingham or Marsh). His suggestions of writers I had not heard of could keep me reading for years.

The book is far stronger on British writers than on Americans. Binyon excludes Norbert Davis and Raoul Whitfield, for example, while including British writers of equal or lesser stature. But really, this is just a quibble. He could not include everyone in a book whose main body is just 134 highly readable pages long.

Binyon's summation is of special interest for visitors to this site. After noting the decline of the man-about-town amateur and accurately predicting the rise of detectives from professions other than law enforcement, he has this to say:

"Police, rather than the gifted amateur or the hired professional, are the natural investigators of crime ... Unlike the other types, too, there seems to be a good deal of scope for development in the police novel; the possibilities offered by, for example, the police forces of other countries, the police procedural, and the historical policeman are far from exhausted."

Binyon published his book relatively early in the careers of such writers as Ruth Rendell, Colin Dexter and Reginald Hill, and before the rise of Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane and any number of writers on my favorites list. All in all, he did as good a job of looking ahead as he did of looking back. Nice work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Eh, what's up, geneticist/bioethicist/computer programmer?

I bought a collection of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories today. Freeman was a physician, like Conan Doyle. This happened a week after I read a theory that connected the rise of the mystery story with the rise of more rational legal systems in Western Europe. (The theory seems to hold true for China, also, where the heroes of the traditional crime stories were judges.)

Later, reporters, lawyers, insurance investigators and forensic pathologists starred in crime novels. It's easy to understand why. All these fields involve asking questions and solving puzzles, just as solving a crime does.

So, here's today's question: What professions are naturals for future crime novels? What sorts of workers who have not yet been protagonists of crime stories would make good fictional sleuths?

© Peter Rozovsky 2006