Max Allan Collins has fun with history

Max Allan Collins has his usual fun with history in Quarry in the Black, published in 2016 and set in 1972, during the Richard Nixon-George McGovern presidential campaign.

One example is Quarry's dismissive reference to Watergate as a third-burglary — fun because that echoes Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler's dismissal of the scandal that would bring his boss down, and also because Collins is a liberal Democrat.

In a grimmer vein, the novel cites a legacy of anti-black discrimination in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb I suspect many people never heard of before the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, 42 years after the time of the novel's setting.

Max Allan Collins.
Photos by Peter
Rozovsky

Historical novelists, or those who simply set their books in the best without necessarily exploring that past seriously, have the disadvantage of hindsight: They know how the history turned out, and their job then becomes to wield that knowledge lightly, to remember at all times that the characters cannot possibly know what the author does. Collins' Ferguson passages veer close to bookishness, to my mind, but the Watergate references as well as an allusion to Rosa Parks are delightful, a wink from Collins to his readers right over the unsuspecting heads of his characters.

Your question is who else does this well? Who else writes crime fiction set in the past, uses history lightly, and never forgets that the characters do not know how events will shake out? John Lawton provides a beautiful example in A Little White Death. Who else does it as well or almost as well?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The Unfortunate Englishman: Another historical hit from John Lawton

Does John Lawton write spy novels? If so, when did espionage fiction edge over from geopolitical thrills to meditations on identity and personal and national character? Which authors and books are responsible? And does it matter?

John Lawton's Unfortunate Englishman takes thief-turned-spy Joe Wilderness to Berlin at the height of the Cold War, where he is to mediate an exchange of prisoners between Great Britain and the U.S.S.R. The title character is a schlemiel nabbed for his ineptitude as a spy for the British, and the action consists of efforts to swap him for his opposite number and of flashes back and forward between the early and the mid-1960s.

Along the way, we see the Berlin Wall rise before our eyes and Wilderness encounter Nikita Khrushchev on the Soviet leader's (imaginary) solo tour of the city. Two supporting characters in the novel are shot by the Soviets for their activities, but the executions happen off-stage and they make their presence felt through the schlemiel's brief but intense reaction to them. The reticence of the portrayal makes the executions all the more chilling.

This character-based storytelling works in a kind of alchemy with Lawton's closely observed period detail to reinforce the status Lawton built in his Frederick Troy books as quite possibly the best historical novelist we have. Fans of those novels will be happy to know that Troy and his brother Rod make brief appearances in The Unfortunate Englishman.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A Burnable Book gets its time and its crime right

"In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelry
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye ... "
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Bruce Holsinger's crime novel A Burnable Book is full of history. John Gower is its protagonist and narrates parts of it; Chaucer is a central personage; John Hawkwood cuts a figure something like Al Pacino's in the remake of Scarface. Richard II and John of Gaunt figure in the book; the Avignon papacy is invoked. So are Wycliffe, Wat Tyler, Boccaccio, and the Bardi family of Florentine bankers. In short, if you missed the Late Middle Ages, read this book, and you'll catch up.

Holsinger is a scholar. One expects lots of history from him, and the few examples that I fact-checked suggest that he gets his history right. But he gets the atmosphere right, too. Medieval London is a natural setting for hard-boiled crime, with its lawless precincts just outside the city, its cruel masters and mistreated apprentices, its fetid streets, its premature deaths, its maudlyns plying their trade in Gropecunt Lane, and Holsinger describes it vividly and well..

More important for the reader of crime fiction is that he makes of Gower a credible investigator and hard-boiled protagonist without, however, giving him the anachronistic mannerisms of a Philip Marlowe.  (Getting the essence right without slipping into genre cliché has to be one of a historical crime novelist's toughest tasks. The farther back in time the story is set, the greater the pressure on the author to avoid having his or her protagonist do things a modern fictional detective would do. One crime novel with a medieval setting was ruined for me when its otherwise vividly rendered main character turned without warning into Columbo.)

Holsinger gets around this by telling instead of showing. Gower examines in a straightforward manner his role as investigator and in doing so, makes himself both credible in the role and familiar to readers of hard-boiled crime: "If you build your own life around the secret lives of others ... Information becomes your entitlement. You pay handsomely for it; you use it selectively and well."

The book establishes Gower as temperamental kin to every flawed crime fiction protagonist who exists in a morally compromised world, and Chaucer, the liveliest of all great poets, underlines this nicely, challenging Gower not to be such a stuffed shirt in his own writing: "Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible?"

***

The novel's title refers to a manuscript that falls into the wrong hands, a book so subversive that it deserves burning.  Just as The Canterbury Tales begin in Southwark, a district across the Thames and just outside London in the Middle Ages, significant parts of A Burnable Book are set there. By happy coincidence, I bought my copy of The Canterbury Tales in the old Philadelphia district of Southwark which, like its English namesake, lay outside the city centuries ago but has since been absorbed by it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A hazard of historical crime fiction, and a question for readers

I recently started reading but then put down a historical crime novel. The book’s opening was superb, evocative of the story’s premodern setting, but without dopey signposts to history. No Saxons musing about how quiet it is in Hastings on the pleasantly cool afternoon of Oct. 13, 1066 here.

The novel proposes amusing alternative backgrounds for its historical characters, and it sets up tension between the foremost of those figures and the novel’s protagonist. That protagonist is an amateur sleuth (the novel’s setting predates professional investigators, whether public or private), and his summoning to the murder in question is atmospheric, bawdy, and entertaining. The scene where the body lies is suitably eerie and, again, evocative of its time.

And then comes the detection. The sleuth pauses; something bothers him. He looks at the victim’s hands and finds a clue, either gripped tightly between clenched fingers, or caked under fingernails; I forget which. And I stop reading because I have been yanked out of the illusion that the author has maintained until now, not, strictly speaking, by anachronism, but by a convention I'd seen a hundred times before in modern detective stories.

How might this author have written the scene differently to keep me reading? What extra burdens do writers of historical crime fiction face? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

How do authors keep history fresh? How about bloggers and old posts?

Damn me, but has it really been three years since this post first appeared? Must be; Blogger doesn't lie. Anyhow, I've been thinking so much about fiction and history recently that I thought I'd bring back this post on that stimulating subject.

 ====

 Authors of historical fiction have a problem: Readers know how the story ends, at least the historical part, but the writer still has to keep them reading.

How do they do this?

Here's what John Lawton does in A Little White Death, third of his novels about Frederick Troy. A physician has come to the United States to treat John F. Kennedy for Addison's disease and has met up with a fellow Brit just before returning to England. Here's how the doctor who has just treated Kennedy ends the meeting with his friend:

"`Fine. I understand. Now why don't you hop in a cab. We can have one last drinkie before I dash to Idlewild.'"

That's a powerful little chapter-ender. The speaker of that line carries the weight of the history that the reader already knows about. And he does this without ever ruining the illusion that he exists in a world innocent of that history, which had not yet occurred at the time Lawton portrays. At the very least, that's a neat bit of fun on Lawton's part.

He does something similar in Black Out, the first novel in the series. I won't give that example because it's a bit spoilerish, coming as it does near the end of the book. I will reveal, for those who have not read the novel, that it reinforces the series' status as a social history of mid-twentieth-century England, critical, personal and unsparing.

In other words, you should read the book. Until you do, ponder this question: How do historical novelists get around the annoying fact that the reader knows how the history turns out?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Benn's Day: Historical figures in crime novels

Last year I wrote that James R. Benn's novel A Mortal Terror "opens with a giant wink to the reader that promises a fair bit of fun along with the human drama and military history: `Kim Philby owed me one.'"

Death's Door, the follow-up book, includes several such cameo appearances, including one by a Hollywood actor who, for purposes of his military service, went by the name John Hamilton. Other bit players include Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a Vatican diplomat who later became Pope Paul VI, and Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty (and his butler, John May), whom I had not heard of before reading the author's note Benn appends to the novel, but who is very much worth hearing about.

And that's where you come in: What are your favorite cameo appearances by historical figures in crime fiction? (Here's a link to one of mine.)

*

A Moral Terror is the sixth of Benn's Billy Boyle World War II mysteries, Death's Door the seventh. Today is release day for the eighth in the series, A Blind Goddess, which lands Billy in a case that involves the 617th Tank Destroyer Battalion and racism in the U.S. military.

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

James R. Benn 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

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?

======== 

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

Benjamin Black is history, and so can you

John Banville signing
at Gutter Bookshop,
Dublin. Photo by your
humble blogkeeper

One of the last sights I saw in Dublin last week was John Banville signing books for a crowd that I'd guess was mostly Banville fans but had turned out on the occasion of a book he wrote as Benjamin Black.

Holy Orders is the sixth novel in Banville/Black's series about Quirke, a police pathologist in 1950s Dublin, and Black showed that he has his historical-novelist head screwed on right.

"Rome was our capital" in the 1950s, Banville told interviewer Olivia O'Leary at Smock Alley Theatre, Ireland's politicians taking their cue from the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, he said, he refuses to give his characters the benefit of hindsight. They don't know what the church is doing to them, and they — or Quirke, at least — can't learn from it. No characters spouting reassuringly progressive sentiments here, and the gap between what the characters know and what the readers know is a nice source of tension.

Here's part of what I wrote about the fourth Quirke novel, A Death in Summer:

"John Banville distinguishes between the artistic pleasure he derives from the literary novels he writes under his own name and the craftsman’s pleasure he gets from the crime fiction he writes as Benjamin Black. This makes it fair to ask a craftsman’s questions of the Black books: How well do the parts fit together? How smoothly does Black execute them? Are they beautiful? Do they work? Does the finished product perform the functions essential to an object of its kind?"

Get all the answers in the complete review, which appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Banville's remark about characters and hindsight in mind, what must a contemporary author do to make historical fiction work? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Magistrate Pao: Chinese crime fiction from the eleventh century

Connoisseurs of exotic crime stories may know of the Dutch author, scholar, diplomat and collector Robert Van Gulik and the stories he wrote about the real-life Tang Dynasty magistrate Di Renjie, or Judge Dee.

Van Gulik translated an eighteenth-century story about the seventh-century Dee, then went on to write a series of original novels and stories featuring Dee. The tales, along with Van Gulik's forthright and illuminating introductions, shed light on Chinese life in the period, on Chinese taste in crime stories, and on the profound differences between those tastes and their Western counterparts.

Dee was not the only magistrate who found his way into Chinese drama, folklore, opera and crime fiction down through the centuries. This week at Sleuth of Baker Street in Toronto, I found The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao: Chinese Tales of Crime and Detection, a book of stories about the Song Dynasty (960-1279) magistrate Bao Zheng.

Like Dee, Pao was a magistrate, a position in the Chinese imperial system that combined the roles of administrator, mayor or governor, detective, prosecutor, and judge. Like Dee he was so noted for his rectitude that his fame has lived on in popular art for more than a thousand years.

Leon Comber's rendering of the Pao stories offers a hero more interested than Dee in repairing the social fabric torn by crime. In particular, he delights in finding new mates for those bereft by crime (in accordance with the principle from the Chinese classic of Mencius that "Three things are unfilial, and of these the worst is to have no offspring.")

The Wikipedia article on Bao Zheng says that "In his lifetime, Bao was renowned for his filial piety, his stern demeanor, and his intolerance of injustice and corruption." Official corruption continues to be a problem in today's China, though the Dee and Pao stories suggest the problem has been around for centuries.  If murder is the defining crime in Western crime writing, does official corruption occupy a similar place in Chinese crime fiction? If so, I wonder how the old stories resonate in today's China.

Here's an interesting passage from Wikipedia's article on Chinese crime fiction (and isn't it interesting to see that term applied to popular literature so many centuries older than Poe and Conan Doyle?):

"In the Song dynasty, the growth of commerce and urban society created a demand for many new forms of popular entertainment. `Stories about criminal cases' were among the new types of vernacular fiction that developed from the Song to the Ming periods. ... they nearly always featured district magistrates or judges in the higher courts. ... The plots usually begin with a description of the crime (often including much realistic detail of contemporary life) and culminate in the exposure of the deed and the punishment of the guilty. Sometimes two solutions to a mystery are posited, but the correct solution is reached through a brilliant judge."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A short history of crime fiction in Israel, Part 2

Last month I turned this blog over for a day to Uri Kenan, who offered a brief, eye-opening introduction to the history of crime fiction in Israel. Uri's back now to take the story from the 1980s until today, taking in along the way perhaps the only Israeli crime writer whose name many non-Israeli readers might recognize. Uri is an engineer for a Web-design company, but before that he compiled a résumé perfect for crime writing: "market research, journalism, documentary film production, private investigation (a lot more boring than it sounds), cooking, and managing a bar." He lives in Jaffa with his girlfriend and their two children, and he writes when he can.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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

By Uri Kenan

In the fifty years between the first appearance of detective fiction in Hebrew and its breakthrough into the mainstream of Israeli culture during the eighties, Israeli society had changed in ways that rendered it unrecognizable. Wars, waves of immigration, and ideological and generational shifts have shaped a society that is in constant conflict both internally and externally.

Mirroring this conflict, every decade since the sixties has seen the appearance of a literary wave trying to differentiate itself from previous ones and reshape Hebrew literature. In this way the old taboos about writing genre fiction were eventually viewed as outdated. This opened the door for change in attitude toward detective fiction, but it would take more than that. The true key to the critical and commercial success was to make the fractured nature of Israeli society the star.

Outside looking in

Due to their many successes in various wars and conflicts, the Israeli secret services, the Mossad and Shabak  (General Security Service), have achieved international renown. It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that in early attempts at Israeli detective and suspense fiction writers tried to cash in on these “brand names.” The first stories centering on Mossad agents had appeared during the seventies, but these were pulps and were written under pseudonyms.

In the early eighties Amnon Dankner, who wrote the political thriller Al Tiru Banasi (Don’t Shoot the President) was the first writer to publish Israeli suspense fiction under his own name. He was soon followed by Amnon Jackont with the spy novel Pesek Z’man (Translated as Borrowed Time), and the way was paved for scores of spy thrillers focusing on the Israeli intelligence community. None of these, however, has achieved the commercial and critical success of the Michael Ohayon and Lizzy Badihi novels, by Batya Gur and Shulamit Lapid respectively.

Saturday Morning Murder, which appeared in 1988 was Batya Gur’s first novel and it introduced her most enduring creation: Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon. Ohayon, a quiet, sensitive man who seems more intellectual than policeman, would traverse through the course of six novels into one closed community after another, interpreting their cultural norms and taboos on the way to solving the case.

Ranging from the psychiatric community and the academia to the kibbutz, from the world of classical musicians to the ethnic tension in a Jerusalem neighborhood and the backstage of a television channel, Gur’s subjects were communities trying to maintain their identities against outside forces while serving as stages for internal struggles. As it matured, Gur’s work became increasingly political. Her resentment towards Israeli policies in the occupied territories as well as her frustration with discrimination in Israeli society featured more and more prominently. Her last novel, Murder in Jerusalem, was a critique of Zionism and Israel society after the crash of the peace process in 2000. Batya Gur died in 2005, aged 57.

Shulamit Lapid was already an established writer when her first Lizi Badihi novel appeared. Contrary to a considerable amount of Israeli literature and film, which centers on Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, Lapid used the city of Beersheba in the Negev desert as the setting for her novels.

Badihi, a reporter for a local newspaper (a trend introduced to Israel in the 80s), was a lanky, clumsy bachelorette with a nose for a story and a natural dogged curiosity that would not back down from threats. Beersheba, normally sleepy town, appears in the Badihi novels as a battleground for passion, greed and revenge. In describing this microcosm, where everyone knows everyone else, Lapid makes use of anthropological insights, humor and even surrealism. From the ongoing rivalry of Badihi with her two police detective brothers in law to her mother’s constant attempts to get her married, from the hippies in of the remote Negev villages to the powerful bureaucrats of Beersheba’s elite Lapid’s novels are never short of color.

Ohayon and Badihi have much in common. Both are perpetual outsiders in their communities, unable to find their proper place except when busy investigating. Echoing one of the most recurrent sources of tension of Israeli society, both protagonists are Sephardic Jews created by Ashkenazi writers. In that sense they are not only tools for exploring the surrounding communities but themselves the subjects of investigations by the writers.

Gur and Lapid are the first names in Israeli crime fiction but far from the only ones. Yair Lapid, the son of Shulamit Lapid and an established Israeli publicist in his own right, has also published several detective novels; his Josh Shirman detective series is the most faithful attempt so far to bring Raymond Chandler’s style to an Israeli setting. Adiva Geffen has written suspense novels that combine detective mysteries with elements of romance. It’s also more common, these days, to encounter Israeli writers and poets who publish one-off attempts at detective fiction.

Making up for lost time

In Israel, the late eighties were filled with a spirit of change, not merely in literature but throughout Israeli culture. Post-Zionism, the critical analysis of Zionist ideology and practice, became more and more prevalent in academic circles. The most outspoken proponents of this view belonged to a group labeled “The New Historians” who challenged almost every aspect of Zionist historical narrative sparking a heated, emotional debate. This new awareness of the past led to a new appraisal of the past as subject for genre fiction. 

The first historical whodunit to appear in Hebrew was Adonis, by the poet and writer Arieh Sivan. The novel, published in 1991, takes place sixty years earlier, around the time of David Tidhar and “Sifriyat Habalsah (Detective Series),” has become a cult favorite in recent years, but only after several years of going virtually unnoticed.

Towards the end of that decade, several more novels focusing on the period of the British Mandate in Palestine appeared. Boaz Apelbaum, who had been former Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ chief of staff, wrote under the heading of the nostalgic detective. A few years later, Ram Oren, one of Israel’s most popular suspense authors, published several historical novels set around the same time period.

In 2002, Amnon Dankner published The Boneless, a mystery novel that jumps from late-nineteenth-century Paris, where the idea of Zionism was first taking shape, to twenty-first-century Jerusalem, where “new” and “old” historians are bickering over the results of this idea. A series of murders links the eras and ties the story together.

Conclusion

Detective, crime and suspense fiction has gone from hidden, guilty pleasure to legitimate voice in popular Israeli fiction. It has done so by the processes most outcast cultural forms go through when breaking into the mainstream: tapping into the social and cultural zeitgeist and reflecting it in new and original ways. That is not much of a mystery. What the success of crime and suspense fiction says about Israeli culture and society is, arguably, more revealing.

Despite the image it projects, both to the world and inward, Israeli culture and society is far from uniform. It is, rather, a continuous battleground for competing narratives. In the early days of Israel this competition could be relegated to a minor role because of the demands of the Israeli melting-pot project and the threat posed by the outside Arab world. Over time the narratives became more focused and sought for a place at center stage.  

The more overt this struggle has become, the more traction and legitimacy detective fiction has gathered. It is has given readers peeks at the various Israeli subgroups and, in some cases, a voice to those less often heard. The trend of historical detective fiction can be viewed as a nostalgic reaction, a yearning for “simpler days” when everyone knew his or her place, or else as a genuine attempt to reevaluate the past, in light of current ambiguities.

(In writing this article I relied upon the many written eulogies to Batya Gur as well as several of her interviews. I have also relied on Interviews reviews and biographical Information about Shulamit Lapid, Amnon Jackont, Amnon Dankner, Arieh Sivan, Boaz Aplebaum and Ram Oren as well as ,off course, their novels. As with the first post I would also like to thank Nir Yaniv and Lior Oryan for their valuable input.)

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

(Read Part 1 of A Short History of Crime Fiction in Israel.)

How Swede it isn't: Is Italian crime fiction the next wave?

I gave up speculating about next big things a few years after the Beatles broke up, but it occurs to me that the next cosa grande in crime writing could be Italy.

Three of the six novels shortlisted for the CWA's International Dagger Award this year are Italian: The Dark Valley by Valerio Varesi (translated by Joseph Farrell), The Potter's Field by Andrea Camilleri (tr. Stephen Sartarelli), and I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni (tr. Anne Milano Appel), the last of which is also up for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger. Furthermore, the good folks at Hersilia Press, who specialize in Italian crime fiction and who publish I Will Have Vengeance, are also bringing out an English translation of A Private Venus, a 1966 novel by Giorgio Scerbanenco, the father of Italian noir. That's good news.

The De Giovanni, titled Il senso del dolore in its original version and set in Italy's Fascist period, will make an interesting comparison with some of my favorite historical crime fiction: Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy of Carte Blanche, That Damned Season and Via delle Oche. (Read the first chapter of I Will Have Vengeance at the publisher's Web site.)

Hersilia, by the way, was the wife of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. Hersilia are also long-spinnered bark spiders. What this says about ancient Roman women, I don't know.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Meet Kevin McCarthy

The world's best crime fiction comes from Ireland, and one of the country's best new crime and historical-fiction writers has started a blog.

The author is Kevin McCarthy, his first novel was Peeler, (which no U.S. publisher has seen fit to pick up in a print edition; it is available as an e-book), and the blog is A Criminal History?  Here's a bit of what I wrote about Peeler in 2010:

“When Clive James turned into Francis Fukuyama three years ago and as much as declared the end of crime fiction (`In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.'), I dissented.

“For one thing, the where can constitute its own what, a setting so different from the reader's own that it offers fictional possibilities even Clive James never dreamed of.

“I've just now opened Kevin McCarthy's novel Peeler, and its plot, its dueling epigraphs, and the note of uncertainty in its second sentence offer the promise of an exciting and maybe even morally serious work. And it's all because of where the story takes place: in Ireland, during the country's war of independence, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the IRA each investigating, unknown to the other, a young woman's killing.”

The book fulfilled its promise, and it performed one of those acts of alchemy that always leave me in awe: It conveyed not just the facts of the novel's historical setting (the founding years of the Free State of Ireland), but also the feeling: the rural and urban poverty in West Cork, the moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler. (McCarthy talks about the history behind the novel and the Royal Irish Constabulary at Crime Always Pays.)

It's up there with Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels and Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year as the best historical (crime) I've read since this blog first saw the light of day.

Take it away, Kevin.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

History, humor and violence

How does an author of historical fiction evoke momentous events and famous names without growing turgidly self-important?

James R. Benn' s most recent Billy Boyle mystery, A Mortal Terror, opens with a giant wink to the reader that promises a fair bit of fun along with the human drama and military history: "Kim Philby owed me one."

That's a wonderfully disarming invocation of one of the twentieth century's most notorious celebrity spies.

***

Back in the American West, I've read a few more of Edward A. Grainger's Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories, and I can add pulp appeal to the reasons crime readers might like these Westerns:

"Cash cleared leather first and opened a dark hole in the rapscallion's forehead. A third blast came through the shattered door and then a stream of small fire joined in the dance."

or

"Miles rolled sideways, ignoring the pain, and popped the third man in the right eye, sending chunks of brain out the back of the man's head."

If you like Mickey Spillane's action but are leery of his politics, try some Cash Laramie!
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A late addition to the year's-best list

I was premature a few weeks ago when I listed the best crime fiction I'd read this year.

Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year is more historical fiction than crime fiction, if one must squeeze it into a genre, but it's mainly a fine, penetrating, and moving piece of fiction, no need for labels, and it may be the best novel I've read since I started this crime-fiction thing five years ago. Its hero is a coroner investigating a murder, so crime is as good a label as any other.

It's also a serious and frightening meditation on the dangers of faction, fanaticism, and hypocrisy (it's set as religious war moves ever closer in seventeenth-century England), on the blessings of true charity, on the elevating powers of love religious and sexual.

Finally, it's beautifully written, not a word wasted, description reinforcing narrative, plots reinforcing one another, character, plot and setting of a dense, immensely affecting piece. And how can even such a hero as Atticus Finch be as admirable and noble a character as Bennett's loving, strong, vulnerable, wise, compassionate, truth-seeking John Brigge?

I once wrote that The Coffee Trader, David Liss' novel of love, religious prejudice and commodities trading in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, offered the most thorough, convincing fictional world I had ever entered. Bennett's book stands besides it, it not outright elbowing it to one side.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Ronan Bennett's historical crime novel earns coveted DBB rating

I may have found the perfect historical novel.

Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year (2004) answers every qualm I've had about the genre. It's saturated with history without hitting the reader over the head with names and dates.  Its plots and subplots are inextricably bound up with the historical issues at hand (religious and political strife in seventeenth-century England), so there is no tension between history and mystery.

The dialogue has the barest hint of archaism to it, light enough not to be obtrusive, but just enough to remind readers that the story's time is not their own. The protagonist, a discreetly Catholic coroner and civic official named John Brigge, is one of the most admirable characters in all of fiction, at least through the book's first two-thirds or so. There's even a murder mixed in.

I do much of my reading late at night, so I could well rate books by how late they keep me up. Havoc, in Its Third Year receives the first-ever, surely soon to be coveted 6+ rating, for keeping me up past 6 a.m.

***

Bennett is from Northern Ireland and, as he did in his novel Zugzwang, set in Russia in 1914, he works in references to Ireland. Here's my favorite so far:

“Indeed, sir. Many have it that the air of the fens is notorious and unclean, and the life there so uncivil that people say, to describe a fall in the world, that a man goes from the farm to the fen and from the fen to Ireland.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Cleverly does it

Here's another crime novel I think I might like though it's a bit outside my normal range.

Barbara Cleverly's The Blood Royal is the ninth in her series about Joe Sandilands, a detective on London's Metropolitan Police who becomes involved in cases in Europe and in Great Britain's colonial possessions.

Cleverly sets the series in the 1920s, which gives her rich territory for international intrigue, what with Russian exiles, the fraying of the British Raj, and strife in Ireland. At least two of the three will apparently figure in this novel, set in 1922.

A chapter plus into the book, I like the rich though unobtrusive detail. I was especially pleased that the prologue, while obviously setting the stage for the story to come, did not batter me about the head with teasers and cliff-hangers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Flashman and America

(Photo by your humble blog keeper.)

The Fourth of July is a day of quiet reflection in the United States.

Families gather over frugal meals to debate the legacy of the Federalist Papers, and when darkness falls, the populace comes together to discuss such topics as French influence on the doctrine of the separation of powers and to sit in rapt awe at the number of vowels in Montesquieu's name.

Independence Day is wrapping up here in America, and that may be why some passages in Flashman on the March, set though the book is in Abyssinia in the nineteenth century, resonate in the United States of America in the twenty-first:

"I've a sight more use for him and his like than for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip-service to delivering the heathen from error's chain by preaching and giving their ha'pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a thought for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilization and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn't wish for your worst enemy."

That's as least as fine a burst of rhetoric as "Support the troops."

Flashman's misgivings about "a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat" might provoke a shock of recognition, as will this exchange, about a leader known for his massacres of thousands:

"This makes it simple; the bastard'll have to go."

"You will try him, in a court, and put him to death?"

"Oh, I doubt that. ... "

"But you said of Theodore, `he will have to go'!"

"So he will, one way or t'other. Bullet in the back o' the head, shot trying to escape, dead of a surfeit of lampreys, who knows?"

If Larry Gonick, who writes and draws The Cartoon History of the Universe, is the new Herodotus, then Flashman's creator, George MacDonald Fraser, was the new Thucydides. And each is probably funnier than the original.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Flashman on the March: A hero's credentials

Last week's endorsement in this space by Gary Corby was just the most recent recommendation I'd received of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of comic historical adventures, but it's the one that pushed me over the edge to try them myself (though I'm starting not at the beginning, but with Flashman on the March, last of the twelve books).

The series takes Flashman, the scapegrace schoolboy of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), and puts him in the middle of just about every British military engagement of the nineteenth century and a number of American ones. The books, published between 1969 and 2005, won praise for their historical accuracy,  and here's what P.G. Wodehouse had to say: “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."

Flashman needs no more praise after an endorsement from P.G. Wodehouse, so I'll confine myself to a few items from the biographical note appended to the beginning of Flashman on the March. (The books purport to be Flashman's diaries):

"FLASHMAN, Harry Paget, brigadier-general, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E. ... Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary) ... San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class ... occasional actor and impersonator. Hon. mbr of numerous societies and clubs, including ... hon. pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females ... (performed first recorded `hat trick,' wickets of Felix, Pilch, Mynn, for 14 runs ... )"

Yep, I can see why Wodehouse liked this guy. I think I will, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

History and mystery: Three authors of historical crime fiction on what they do and why they do it

When talk turned to anachronism a few months back here at Detectives Beyond Borders, several authors of historical mysteries weighed in both privately and in the public discussion. I have always been in awe of the task that writers of such fiction set for themselves. In addition to writing a satisfying and entertaining crime story, they must serve the muses of history and of accuracy. They can't screw up details, and they must convey the flavor a bygone period while holding contemporary readers' attention.

As a good historian would, I went to the source and asked three authors of historical crime fiction to talk about what they do and how they do it. Let's meet our three guests and get to the questions.

Rebecca Cantrell writes the Hannah Vogel mystery series set in 1930s Berlin, including A Trace of Smoke, A Night of Long Knives, and A Game of Lies. Her short stories are included in the First Thrills anthology. She also writes the YA iMonsters series, including iDrakula, as Bekka Black. She lives in Hawaii with her husband, her son, and too many geckoes to count. She is online at www.rebeccacantrell.com and www.bekkablack.com.

***

Gary Corby has been fascinated by ancient history since he was a teenager.  "What happened for real, thousands of years ago, was as exciting and even more bizarre than any modern thriller," he writes. " I also love the puzzles of murder mysteries.  So I combined the two to create an historical mystery series set in classical Greece.  The Pericles Commission was released last year,  The Ionia Sanction is out in November. I live in Sydney, Australia, with one wife, two daughters, and four guinea pigs.  My daughters tell me I must now include the two budgies we've adopted.  You can catch me on my blog at GaryCorby.com." 

***

I. J. Parker was born in Munich, Germany, and attended German and American universities.  Her Akitada mystery series, set in eleventh-century Japan, was partially the outcome of research into Asian literature.  She writes both novels and short stories, the latter published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  In 2001, "Akitada's First Case" won the Shamus award.  Her books have been translated into ten foreign languages. She is also a contributor to the recent Shaken: Stories for Japan. 

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

How important is period detail to a successful historical mystery?

Rebecca Cantrell: "Crucial. The reason I read historical mysteries is to time travel within the pages of a book. If the detail isn't there, or if it's incorrect, the time machine breaks, and I'm thrown out of the story into my own time. This makes me a cranky reader. So, as a writer, I take great pains to make sure that everything is as accurate as I can make it so that the readers stay safely inside the time capsule. If I must deviate from history for plot reasons, I am always careful to note that in the Author's Notes at the end of the book. That said, don't read those notes before you read the novel, as they sometimes contain spoilers. If you do, don't say you weren't warned." 

Gary Corby: "Period detail is essential. Some people read historical mysteries because they like mysteries, and the exotic background is a bonus. There are others who read because they want to be immersed in a different time and place; those people don't really care `who done it.'  For them, the puzzle aspect of the story is merely a device to keep the plot moving so they can explore more of the world. I've been surprised and gratified by the number of people who've told me they enjoyed reading my book, and then add that they picked up more ancient Greek history from reading a light whodunit than they ever learned at school."

I.J. Parker: "Very important, provided it doesn’t interfere with the story.  The setting in a historical novel takes in much more than the background. It also involves customs and mindset of the time (and place). The author must guess at just how much and what detail the reader needs without knowing his education or experience. Putting in too much will ruin the book." 

What kinds of anachronisms can kill a historical mystery?

RC: "Modern attitudes and language." 

GC: "There's the classic wristwatch-on-the-chariot-driver type of error. Those are relatively easy to catch. There are anachronistic phrases, and they can be deadly. My characters in 460 BC should not be quoting either Shakespeare or the Bible. You would not believe how many stock modern phrases come from Shakespeare and the Bible. On the plus side, it stops me from using clichés. Finally, there are the more subtle historical errors which only an expert is likely to catch. To prevent those you have to become a pseudo-expert yourself."

IJP: "Factual ones.  Here again, the problem of the unknown reader.  How much does the reader know?  Best not to take any chances and do the research. Historical novel web sites are full of readers mocking authors for making silly mistakes (like having thirteenth century Venetian cooks prepare potato dishes)." 

How do you juggle the tasks of portraying a historical period faithfully and making a story inviting and accessible to contemporary readers?

RC: "I research and research until I know the era fairly well and have far more details in my head than I could cram into a novel. Once I know enough to do so, I put myself in Hannah's shoes and see only what she sees and know only what she knows. This means that I cannot have her make comments about events that haven't happened, guess about future events without evidence, or go into long soliloquies about how the Olympic Stadium was constructed (even if the details of the construction are fascinating to me personally)." 

GC: "Any detail you mention has to be directly to do with the problems your characters face in the story. Never explain anything, unless it genuinely needs to be explained to a character. Any dialogue that begins, `As you know...' is a red alert.

"For example, I know in classical Athens sewerage pooled in gutters running down the middle of the street. I could write a couple of pages on the drainage system of Athens in 460 BC, but somehow I have a feeling you're not going to read it. Instead, when my hero Nicolaos is dragged off down the street by a couple of thugs, something squishy that doesn't bear thinking about gets caught between his sandal and his foot, and he has to hop on the other foot while shaking the first to get it clear. A whole day's research on drainage has devolved into two lines of book text about a messy foot. That's good, because a foot with poo on it is story and character, a treatise on drainage is not."

IJP: "There’s the trick.  The story becomes accessible through the characters, not the other way around.  Make your characters fully developed human beings that readers can relate to, and the rest follows.  However, modern readers do not relate well to certain historical customs. Those must be handled carefully." 

Which authors of historical mysteries do you admire? Why?

RC: "I love Kelli Stanley's Miranda Corbie series. (A City of Dragons is the first; start there.) She has a wonderful voice and a strong sense of the place and time. I also think Laurie King, Anne Perry, and Charles Todd write evocatively of the era between the wars. For a lighter touch, I like Rhys Bowen's Royal Spyness books." 

GC: "I'm going to cheat by starting with three historical authors who did not write mysteries: The Flashman stories of George MacDonald Fraser. Fraser is the gold standard for accuracy in historical novels. Also, his Flashman is hilarious. The Greek novels of Mary Renault, because they're the best novels of ancient Greece ever written. Patrick O'Brian wrote the best sea adventure stories ever, set during the Napoleonic Wars. They're generally known as the Aubrey-Maturin novels, after the two heroes.

"There are so many excellent historical mysteries these days, it's hard to know who to include without doing injustice to many others. Ruth Downie writes a series set in Roman Britain, starring a doctor named Ruso. The books are very funny, Ruso is a wonderful character, plus we get to see a Roman doctor at work. Rebecca Cantrell's mysteries are set in Germany at the height of the Nazi party, starring a reporter named Hannah Vogel. A tough subject, and she carries it off brilliantly. The mysteries of John Maddox Roberts, Steven Saylor, and Lindsey Davis were the first to be set in the ancient world. C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake is an investigator in the time of Henry VIII, working for a chap named Cromwell. Very high-quality writing."

IJP: "Robert Van Gulik, of course.  To a lesser degree, Lindsey Davis.  Both have the trick of drawing the reader into the book.  Van Gulik relies more on the exotic setting.  Davis portrays her protagonist much like the modern hard-boiled detective."

Why did you choose to write about the period you did? If you were to write historical fiction about a period other than the one you do, which period would you choose? Why?

RC: "I've been toying with the idea of writing something set in Berlin during the Cold War, maybe even the 1980s. I lived there then, so I could remember details about popular songs and political events. But the thought of writing about an era of my own life as historical document makes me feel so old that it gives me pause."

GC: "Nicolaos begins his adventures in 460 BC, right at the start of the Golden Age of Athens. Democracy was invented about five days before his first murder investigation begins! It was a period packed with tales of adventure, war, conspiracy, lust, love, corruption, power politics, assassination. . . . you name it, and it happened, all at one of the most critical periods in human history. If he can survive his highly hazardous missions, Nico will live to see the founding of western civilization.

"I can tell you three I definitely would not write: ancient Rome (and Roman Britain), mediaeval England, and Victorian London. All three have been done extensively by many fine writers, and fun as they are, there's no need for me to add to the existing corpus. There are so many fascinating periods. I might be tempted to go further back in history, for example, to somewhere like Mesopotamia. Renaissance Italy would be fun too."

IJP: "I loved Van Gulik’s books and the literature of eleventh-century Japan.  As for other periods, I have written a book set in eighteenth-century Bavaria.  I like the eighteenth century and will probably do more of this." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

History lessons and reading out of order

We have a nice discussion going about the covers to James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels, so I thought I'd take a look inside one of the books.

Evil For Evil has Billy, an investigator on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff during World War II, in Northern Ireland to look into an arms theft. Here Billy chats with Kay Summersby at a hotel bar:

"`I know what you mean. The Black and Tans burned the center of Cork in 1920, so I'm familiar with the heavy hand of the British Empire.'"

"`I know,' I said. `My uncle Dan told me afterward the Black and Tans tied pieces of burnt cork to their revolvers, as a message to anyone who resisted them.' I could recall the stories Uncle Dan had told of the Irish Civil War, when the British recruited veterans of the World War to bolster the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were issued a mixture of surplus military and police uniforms. The army uniforms were khaki, the police uniforms darker. The colors gave them their name ... "

Is that an information dump, a chunk of expository prose that slows the story down? I don't know, but it fits Billy's character. He's a young, brash Irish American police detective, still wide-eyed at the new sights he encounters overseas, always comparing new situations to what he had known back home in Boston. He'd naturally be prone to talking about what he knows and what he sees.

I once heard an author of historical mysteries say that if you're going to describe Paris, have an outsider do it. That way the description seems natural for the character, and the author conveys the information painlessly, or nearly so. Benn does it here.

***

A bit later, Eisenhower tells Billy, apropos a British officer, that "I know the two of you didn't get along during that affair with the Norwegians, Billy. But this time he's coming to ask you for a favor, and it ought to be one you won't mind doing."

"That affair with the Norwegians" is the events related in Billy Boyle, the first book in the series. I'd read that book, so for me, the remark was a bit of an action-stopper, a perhaps necessary direct address to the reader. But if I'd read Evil For Evil first, the remark might have seemed a tantalizing bit of mystery — something I'd have gained by reading out of series order.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010