Self-reference from South Africa

For this post, I revisit my old friend self-reference. My guide is Richard Kunzmann's story "If Nothing Else," from the Bad Company anthology of South African crime stories.

Kunzmann is a youngish author, born in 1976. I don't know how much death and violence he has seen, but his story confronts a difficulty that must plague many serious crime writers: How does one write about death without having seen it up close?

"Rarely are we treated to the spectacle of what is guaranteed to one day happen to all of us," muses the first-person narrator, a crime writer named Sam Engels excited to be joining police at a murder scene. "Modern society robs us of a unique experience on a daily basis, and this is why I wanted to relish the moment."

The story is a bit talkier than I'd have liked, but I like Kunzmann's sly use of the difficulty mentioned above. And I like the rhythm of the story's opening even more: "It was a desperate death to look at."

***

Fiction from Africa is bound to have a bit of the allure of the strange and new for North American readers, and that can be a good thing. One Bad Company story's passing reference to an officer's being the only Xhosa on the force is a reminder that the possibility of ethnic tension need not be limited to black vs. white – an especially salutary thought for those of us who live in the United States. (A similar light goes on above my head when Helene Tursten writes about tension between Swedes and ethnic Finns in her Göteborg-based Swedish crime novels.)

Now, let's bring back that other old friend, the question to readers: What kinds of unexpected racial, ethnic or other tensions have you found in crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bad Company: Short fiction from South Africa

The first days after a crime-fiction convention are a strain on the mind; one never knows what to read first. Compounding the Bouchercon plenitude, I've done a bit of secondhand shopping at Philadelphia's Whodunit Books since I got back.

One of my favorite Bouchercon pickups, and one not easily available in the U.S., is Bad Company, a collection of short stories by South African crime writers. I got my copy from Stanley Trollip, one half of the writing team known as Michael Stanley. Trollip was a jovial presence on Bouchercon's "Murder at the Edge of the Map" panel, a fashion hit in his stylized-hippopotamus T-shirt, and an enthusiastic promoter of South African crime writing who had brought ten copies of the collection to sell.

Stanley's own story, "Neighbours," is an intimate tale of death in a village, relations among neighbors, and the strengths and dangers of living in a community where everyone knows everyone else. Among other things, it makes elegant, unobtrusive use of cliffhangers.

Deon Meyer's "The Nostradamus Document" is a police procedural with a real punch, something like Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories, but with greater focus on the dangerously intertwined personal and professional lives of one cop, Detective Sgt. Fransman Dekker. The story contains bursts of hard-hitting, elliptical dialogue, all the more impressive since what we read is a translation; Meyer writes in Afrikaans. A high vyf to his translator, uncredited here, as near as I can tell.

More to come the more I read.

(Read more about Bad Company and about the South African crime-fiction scene at Book Southern Africa's Crime Beat Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The pleasures of anthologies, or What are your favorite crime-fiction collections?

I recently read the following rave about Michael Gilbert:

"A critic once remarked that Maugham's Ashenden is the finest collection of espionage fiction ever written. That critic is wrong. The honor goes to Michael Gilbert's Game Without Rules, and to its twelve-story sequel, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens."

Since the source of that encomium is Joe Gores, author of the estimable D.K.A. Files stories, I said to myself: "Wow! I've got to look for this Gilbert guy."

Imagine my surprise when I found Gilbert in my kitchen two days later, in a 1997 anthology called Detective Duos. I can do no better than to cite a passage that Gores quoted:

"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."

A few weeks earlier, I'd been flipping through Hugh Greene's 1971 collection, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. That volume contains some of the usual suspects among late-19th- and early-20th-century detective writers not named Conan Doyle, notably R. Austin Freeman and Baroness Orczy. It also includes two stories by Arthur Morrison, of whom I'd not heard and of whom Greene justly remarks that the oblivion into which he fell was undeserved.

Morrison, whose two stories in the collection appeared originally in 1895 and 1897, wrote with an understatement uncharacteristic of the period, even when the stories involved such Gothic details as characters locked in basements. The understatement is probably why his writing feels so fresh, particularly in "The Case of Laker, Absconded."

What a pleasure to discover these writers I might not have found if not for anthologies, and anthologies I might not have discovered if I'd not found them in a secondhand bookshop. All praise to used bookstores!

And now, readers, what are your favorite crime-fiction anthologies, no matter where you found them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:

Michael Gilbert
Joe Gores
Arthur Morrison
crime fiction anthologies

A world of noir anthologies

You may have read Dublin Noir or either of two London Noirs. If you missed Brooklyn Noir, perhaps you picked up Brooklyn Noir 2. But how about Miami Noir, Paris Noir, Havana Noir or, from that hotbed of crime, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, Twin Cities Noir? Are all available or soon to be published, many from Akashic Books.

The heads-up on many of these noirs comes from Maxim Jakubowski, that busy writer, anthologist and proprietor of Murder One bookshop. Jakubowki, editor of several volumes of Best British Mysteries, among other collections, reports that his Paris Noir should be out in the fall of 2007, with stories from French, British and other European writers, all of whom live or have lived in Paris. Jakubowski also reports that contracts have been signed for Rome Noir, with publication possible in 2008.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Garry Disher and "Meta"-Mysteries

I recently posted a comment about two mystery stories set in the world of mystery writers. The stories' self-referentiality made me squirm, their weird coziness and confidence that everyone would get the in-jokes. But Garry Disher's "My Brother Jack" in The Oxford Book of Detective Stories has forced me to sharpen my thinking on this vital matter. That story is entirely self-referential, a tale of a crime writer and his character teaming up to catch a villain who harasses them for not getting details right in their stories. The difference is that its self-referentiality is about the process of creating a story -- and it's as funny as all hell. Disher muses on, among other things:

-- Raymond Chandler
-- V.I. Warshawski
-- Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone
-- Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder
-- the difficulties of naming characters
-- His own work
-- Richard Stark's Parker
-- Inspectors Morse and Wexford
-- the art of creating a convincing private eye
-- Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
-- John D. MacDonald
-- Ross MacDonald
-- the flip tone of American crime writing
-- the gorgeous, formulaic language of crime stories

It's clever, it's an academic exercise (no shock from someone who's been a university writer-in-residence), and it's like a Woody Allen spoof except that it works perfectly as full-fledged fiction. A brief sample:

"It was about 10:30 and I was in bed, reading. There was no wind but those chimes rang out with the kind of abrupt discordancy that made me think prowler ... The love/sex interest in this story flung down her Sisters in Crime newsletter, revealing her small but high, low-slung but pointed, melony but round, sloping but curved, tanned but creamy breasts and said, `What the fuck was that?'"

P.S. This collection also has stories by Pentti Kirstila and Ian Rankin that I've praised elsewhere, along with a lot of good stories from the early days of Western crime fiction almost to today. It's worth looking for.

Technorati tags:
Garry Disher
Australian crime fiction
humorous crime fiction


© Peter Rozovsky 2006