Hammett, his granddaughter, his editor, and me in The Philadelphia Inquirer

A long-lost work by Peter Rozovsky surfaces in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer: my review of Dashiell Hammett's The Hunter and Other Stories, interspersed with comments from my interview with Julie M. Rivett, a co-editor of the volume and also Hammett's daughter's daughter.

Yes, it was a wandering granddaughter job.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Pulp in the paper: I review Day Keene in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of The Case of the Bearded Bride and Other Stories: Day Keene in the Detective Pulps, Vol. #4 (Ramble House) appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

The book is a collection of stories that originally appeared in pulp magazines covering two periods in the prolific Keene's career: 1931-35 and 1942-1950. 

The first group, written under Keene's real name, Gunnard Hjerstedt (spellings of both names vary by source), shows affinities with the wisecracking, fast-talking detective tales that had become popular in the late 1920s, such as Frederick Nebel's long-running Kennedy and MacBride tales. The later stories, written as John Corbett, move in darker territory that may evoke Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis.

That facility in widely different styles will likely be the most fascinating aspect of the volume for crime readers in today's era of specialization: Keene could write anything for a market that demanded everything. He was an earlyish representative of a crime fiction tradition whose last examples include Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block.

That's one reason this review, though a bit out of my territory, was among the most fun I've written. A tip of the battered old fedora to the editor who asked me to write it.

Here, again, is the review, And here are the Keene entries at Gold Medal Corner and the Thrilling Detective Web Site. Not only did the man write everything, he wrote lots of it and for a long time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Dance of the Seagull, latest of Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano to appear in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The title," quoth the Inquirer, "refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him and his dreams throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates this dream into the mystery more skillfully than he has done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.

"... introspection and empathy need not imply surrender or resignation. Indeed, Salvo not only solves the murders and arrests the murderers, but he also manages to exact a bit of revenge from a powerful target."

Spoiler alert: Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

I review Nesbø in the Philadelphia Inquirer

The novel is Phantom, ninth of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole novels, and my review begins thus:

"I once suggested that some Nordic crime novels are Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins with enough mildly leftist musing thrown in to make readers feel intellectually respectable."

More than in my previous reviews, I write about why I think Nesbø made some of the choices he made. The man has a living to make, after all.

Read my guesses about Phantom, Nesbø, Nordic crime, and why readers read it in the complete review here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A New Zealand crime writer in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Paul Cleave's The Laughterhouse appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

This New Zealand crime writer knows what he's doing, and I had fun with this review. Take a look.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Münster's Case, my review

My review of Münster's Case, sixth of Håkan Nesser's Van Veeteren novels to be published in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"Håkan Nesser has long disproved the stereotype that Scandinavian crime writers aren't funny," the review begins. "His humor is observational and quiet, however, rather than slapstick or outrageous.

"In Münster's Case, Nesser carries the quiet amusement further than ever before, at least in his novels available in English, making of it a major plot point that I won't give away here. But you'll get it as soon as you come to it."

(Read all my blog posts about Håkan Nesser, including an interview with him from 2008.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charlie Stella, Christy Mathewson, and me

One way I keep sane amid my current wave of side projects is to read for work during the day, for pleasure at night. That way I do what needs doing, and I send myself to sleep on a wave of good thoughts, work the farthest thing from my mind.

My most recent pleasure reading was Charlie Stella's Rough Riders, and man, this guy keeps getting better and better. He sets this novel, his eighth, in and around Minot, North Dakota, where he went to college. A killer from his 2001 book Eddie’s World has entered the federal Witness Protection Program and wound up in North Dakota, working a sting for the feds and also a side project of his own: a murder for hire in return for a share of a heroin stash into which a crooked Air Force physician has stumbled by accident. But a New York detective wants the killer also and tails him across the country to get him.

The plot, needless to say, is complex but not obtrusively so. Nor is Stella condescending in the least toward the characters and the landscape so different from those of his previous books. And he handles the clash between local cops and the FBI, a feature of approximately every American police novel or television show of the last twenty years, with great understatement and, hence, believability.

The jokes are fewer than in Stella’s previous books but the conversational byplay is just as bracing. And that tells me that Stella knows how to write believable human interaction and not just jokes.

Here are my previous posts about Stella (click the link, then scroll down), whom I recently proclaimed my favorite American crime writer.

And here, for the first time before the crime reading public, is the first of those side projects I keep going on about: my piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a century-old baseball book by that remarkable character (and great player) Christy Mathewson that's as fresh as today’s headlines.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Larsson-y: I review Lars Kepler in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of The Nightmare by Lars Kepler in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer posits the existence of a school of Nordic crime writing called Stieg Larssonism (its practitioners are Larssonists) that

"combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader get dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time."

While preparing the review, I came across a comment by Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, that Stieg Larsson had revitalized crime fiction and that the Lars part of their pen name was a tribute to him.

At the same time, I was reading Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate, which includes a chapter on the Larsson phenomenon but also another called "The Anti-Larsson Writers."  Finally, my post on realism, naturalism, and their opposite in crime fiction elicited this comment in Larsson's defense:

"[Larsson] was doing something different. He loved potboilers. He wrote fanfic when he was young and omnivorously consumed pop culture. He wrote a mashup of everything he loved and borrowed from Modesty Blaise to Sarah Paretsky but he also threw in everything he cared about in his day job as a journalist."

That commenter and I analyze Larsson and Larssonism in substantially identical terms, in other words, though her assessment is more positive than mine.

This, plus Forshaw's chapter on anti-Larsson writers, leaves me with a bracing feeling that I and the world now understand Nordic crime fiction better than we once did and the hope that we'll be spared further silly invocations of this, that, or the other utterly un-Larssonian writer as the next Stieg Larsson.

But mostly I liked writing the review because I got to define Stieg Larssonism as "potboiler plots with didactic political intent; call it Harold Robbins meets Noam Chomsky."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nykänen in my newspaper

My review of Harri Nykänen's novel Nights of Awe appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer under the headline "A Finnish thriller stars a Jewish cop."

Click the link to find out why I call Nykänen

"part of the blinding ice storm of Nordic crime writing that has buffeted the world since Stieg Larsson died and went to publishing heaven"

and add that

"he stands out from the crowd for at least two reasons: his deadpan humor, and his thrilling ability to sustain narrative pace on little but routine details, personal interactions, and professional observations over the course of a police investigation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Andrea Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Potter's Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian crime novels about Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the first in which Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Typically for a Montalbano novel,” I write, “the investigation becomes one of mob connections, heated emotions, and family secrets. But crime, investigation, and solution are the least of the Montalbano novels. Every word is a commentary, sometimes wry, sometimes righteously angry, sometimes touching, on the protagonist’s political, social, professional, and personal worlds. To choose just one typical example, `Ingrid’s husband was a known ne’er-do-well, so it was only logical that he should turn to politics.'”

Read the full review, and learn how to impress your server the next time you visit an Italian restaurant.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The new (Benjamin) Black in my newspaper

My review of A Death in Summer, by John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer:

"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?"

Read the complete review for all the answers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Nesbø in my newspaper

My review of Jo Nesbø's The Snowman appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer. I had a bit of fun writing this one, and the headline writer picked up the fun rather nicely.

Here's what Nesbø had to say about that fun topic in my interview with him:

There's a big wave of Nordic crime fiction. Do you consider yourself part of that?

I am part of that whether I consider myself part of it or not because it's sort of a commercial label. It doesn't necessarily have much to do with Scandinavian writers having the same style. When I've been asked what I think are the similarities between Scandinavian authors, I would say that they were either from Denmark, Norway or Sweden.

I think my style is probably closer to some of the American writers — Bukowski, Hemingway — than to other Scandinavian writers. Then again, I write from Oslo, so the atmosphere would probably be similar to Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell.

For me, my inspiration doesn't come mainly from Scandinavian crime writers. It comes from Scandinavian literature, like Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, lots of other Norwegian and Danish and Swedish writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Read a review, win a book

My review of Gerard O'Donovan's novel The Priest appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, and it was a tough one to write.

An aspect or two of the book drove me nuts, and this distressed me for two reasons: I don't like knocking books, and I feared that my quibbles might seem like idiosyncratic nit-picking.

But I saw my editor preparing his bamboo shoots and thumb screws, so I wrote the review, and I'm glad I did. My complaints only brought into sharper relief the novel's most interesting aspects: It's about a serial attacker/killer, but it does not get inside the attacker/killer's head. Nor, despite the horrific injuries the attacker inflicts, does O'Donovan dwell on them in loving detail.

***

A reader from the state of Fatti maschii, parole femine knew that Pope John Paul II's visit to Dublin forms part of the backstory to The Priest. Her womanly words win her a copy of the novel. Congratulations.

***

My editor excised from the review one damned I'd used as an intensifier. What would he have made of this story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Declan Hughes in the news

My review of Declan Hughes' fifth Ed Loy novel, City of Lost Girls, appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Here's part of what I had to say about this bracing Dublin/Los Angeles P.I. story:

"In his fifth novel featuring Dublin private investigator Ed Loy, Declan Hughes:

• "Sets major parts of the story in Los Angeles, complete with breathtaking and melancholy scenery.

• "Gets inside a serial killer's head.

• "Sends great torrents of yearningly romantic prose tumbling onto the page.

• "Offers up any number of wisecracks and world-weary observations.

"Crime writers have done all that for years, so how does Hughes keep it fresh?

"By the sheer exuberance of his prose, including some gleeful stomping on Bono's reputation.

"By the angry topicality of his observations ... And mostly by the high respect he has for mystery."

Read my Inquirer review of Hughes' The Price of Blood and a whole lot about Hughes, including the fourth Loy novel, All the Dead Voices, right here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Wake Up Dead reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The thriller," I write, "the second novel from its South African author, is chock-full of types from those movies. An adventurer who comes home looking for what’s his. A woman in trouble and living by her wits. A crook who tries, too late, to make good. A hint of redemption. Even, after a fashion, a doomed story of obsessive love.

"Only the scene is not New York, San Francisco, or some nameless Midwestern town; it’s violent, deeply divided Cape Town, mostly the deadly slums known as the Flats. The setting recaptures all the blood and menace that time and nostalgia have effaced from Raymond Chandler’s mean streets — and redoubles them."

I also sneak in a plug for two more of my favorite crime authors, list a few more names from South Africa's flourishing crime fiction scene, and point the way to a good source for even more information. Read the complete review here after 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and, in the future, on a good database near you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fred Vargas in the newspaper

My review of Fred Vargas' The Chalk Circle Man appears here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Matt Rees in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Matt Beynon Rees' third Omar Youssef mystery, The Samaritan's Secret, appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

The book mines an ancient but little-known corner of history for its mystery, and it involves both secrets and some not so good Samaritans. Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matt Rees here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

"Via delle Oche": Carlo Lucarelli's historical noir reviewed in Words Without Borders

My review of Via delle Oche, third volume in Carlo Lucarelli's stripped-down, tensed-up De Luca trilogy, appears in Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature.

A heads-up: I liked the book a lot.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Carlo Lucarelli
Italian crime fiction
historical mysteries

Declan Hughes in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Declan Hughes' third novel about Dublin P.I. Ed Loy, The Price of Blood (The Dying Breed in the U.K.), appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer:

"A fist to the jaw carries with it an intimacy that a bullet to the gut just can't match."

That's how the review begins. Read the rest on the Inquirer's Web site, or pick up the paper at a newsstand near you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Declan Hughes\
Irish crime fiction