James McClure on television

A skeptical commenter yesterday asked for a few more excerpts to justify my enthusiasm for James McClure.  I'll suggest an entire category: McClure's descriptions of South African landscapes. Here's one, from The Sunday Hangman:

"Apart from some thorn scrubs, there were no trees except those gathered  together for a definite purpose: to shade a tin-roofed homestead, or to provide a trading store with its windbreak. The sort of God's own country where every farmer began his day with a very deep sigh."

The same commenter mentioned that television came to South Africa only in 1976 and presumed that McClure's novels reflected this. I had noticed no such reflection, I replied. But when I picked up The Sunday Hangman to resume my reading, I came across a series of comic set pieces involving television — no surprise in a novel published in 1977 and possibly written in the crucial television year:

"`Tomorrow night the TV's in Afrikaans,' she said, keeping hold of his hand, and they went automatically through to the kitchen for their coffee. `They've invited us again, so can you come over?' 

"`What's on?' 

"`An Australian baritone singing translations form real Italian opera. I'm going.' 

"That, thought Strydom, was exactly what the old Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had warned against when describing television as the Devil's instrument. Not once that week had they sat down together as man and wife and talked over his more interesting cases."

Elsewhere we get scenes of Strydom haggling over the price and features of a television set and amazing onlookers with the weird results of his fiddling with the color dials. But that one excerpt will suggest that McClure has an eye for social history and gentle comedy as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

John Connolly, Scandinavian crime fiction, and me

John Connolly cited James Lee Burke during his Bouchercon 2010 discussion with Declan Hughes of "Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die."

Among other things, he said there are "two landscapes in crime fiction. One is psychological." In Burke's evocation of landscape, Connolly said, "We have kind of an association with Scandinavian crime fiction."

I was thrilled to hear that because I'd written about landscape in my Following the Detectives essay on Arnaldur Indriðason. Here's some of it:

"People disappear in Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but the soil has a way of yielding them up again. An earthquake cracks the land, drains a lake, and uncovers a body; a victim turns up on a construction-site excavation; in spring, corpses come to light in a lake, where winter ice had concealed all signs of their disappearance. ... `The setting is a character' is a commonplace in modern discussion of crime fiction; in Arnaldur, the setting is a narrative agent as well. The landscape swallows up victims, whether of murder, accident or natural disaster; geological disruption lays them bare again."

What other authors give landscape a similarly important role?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Draining Lake and its unique setting

Arnaldur Indriðason wrote this novel well before Iceland's financial crisis, but it shares concerns aroused by the bank crashes about Iceland's vulnerability as a small, isolated nation:

Kleifarvatn is both the name of a real lake in Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula and the novel's title in its original Icelandic. The lake is (or was), in fact, disappearing after an earthquake, and the book's stark, one-word title must have resonated strongly with readers in Iceland.
The vulnerability is not just physical. Iceland's small size also makes it harder for its people to hide, should they choose to do so. This quite naturally will play a large role in police investigations, perhaps complicating them:

I'd thought Arnaldur's Jar City (Tainted Blood in the U.K.) took better advantage of its setting than any other crime novel I'd read. Now I'll go one step further and say that Arnaldur has Iceland in his bones and that no crime novelist I can think of has ever written books so inextricably tied to their setting.
I'll also invite you to disagree with me, or at least to name your candidates for stories that could not have been set anywhere else.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008

"`Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland?' Sigurður Óli asked.
"`No,' Ellinborg said firmly. `There are too few of us.'"

"`You remember the big south Iceland earthquake on the seventeenth of June 2000?' she said, and they nodded. `About five seconds afterwards a large earthquake also struck Kleifarvatn, which doubled the natural rate of drainage from it. When the lake started to shrink people at first thought it was because of unusually low precipitation, but it turned out that the water was pouring down through fissures that run across the bed of the lake and have been there for ages. Apparently they opened up in the earthquake. The lake measured ten square kilometres but now it's only about eight. The water level has fallen by at least four metres.''