Why George V. Higgins but not Ross Thomas?

Crime writers and readers revere George V. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but we don’t talk much about Ross Thomas these days. This puzzles me, since Thomas was better than Higgins at some of the things Higgins is celebrated for: gritty looks at men at work, including criminals, and razor-sharp dialogue cleverly contrived to convey character and create the illusion that this is how people really speak.

 I base these remarks on Thomas' Missionary Stew, which appeared in 1983, thirteen years after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that's where the caveat comes in. Though an experienced novelist by the time ... Eddie Coyle appeared, could Thomas have been influenced by the younger writer, the way the similarly older, more experienced Elmore Leonard was?

I ask because the three previous Thomas novels I had read (Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw, and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side) either predate The Friends of Eddie Coyle or appeared the same year, and I don't remember those books bringing Higgins or Leonard to mind.

Though I don't get the esteem in which Higgins was held, I have no desire to knock him. But I would like to see a revival of interest in Thomas, and not just because he wrote with such wit about politics.

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

A wise commenter on my skeptical 2009 post about Eddie Coyle wrote: "I think it's comparatively rare for pioneering texts to stand up in the long term." Maybe Higgins is an example of that pioneer phenomenon, surpassed by his followers. I should like the guy, because I enjoy authors who look up to him and whose works is often compared to his: Bill James, Garbhan Downey, Dana King, Charlie Stella.

I'd hate to think that readers and critics might be scared off by Thomas because he wrote about politics. Don't be; he makes his subject real and funny/
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The collective will and the collective won't, or should Dominique Manotti say no to nostalgia?

A cover blurb on one of Jean-Patrick Manchette's novels once referred to the author's "post-1968 leftism."  It has taken several years and the work of another politically oriented French crime writer to make me realize that the phrase is more than an ungainly and vacuous neologism.

The novelist in question is Dominique Manotti, whose Escape includes the following:

"There was an initial forging of collective thinking and a collective will."

and

"`That open letter could be the starting point for a collective analysis. We need to read it and discuss it, together and with other left-wing organisations.'" 

The second bit is dialogue, if you can believe that anyone would ever talk, as opposed to write, like that. Sure, that's a character speaking, not the author. But Russel McLean's interview with Manotti suggests that Manotti's own nostalgia and regrets figure in the book. "We were passionate," she tells McLean, "and a large part of France's far left was influenced by the Italians." (Much of the novel's early action, at least, takes place among Italian political refugees in France.)

Having read Manotti's previous work, with its astringent observations about the depravity of the French elite and that elite's horrifying exploitation of migrant workers, and having found nothing in that work approaching the clumsy political speech sprinkled through the opening pages of Escape, I wonder if Manotti is better off sticking to dispassionate analysis and avoiding nostalgic recollection of her own activism.

That's where Jean-Patrick Manchette's "post-1968 leftism" comes in. The three latest of the four novels of his that have been translated into English, published in their original French between 1976 and 1981, have moved well beyond the possibility of talking seriously about collective anything. I don't recall the word struggle occurring in any of the books.

The earliest of Manchette's novels available in English, though the most recently translated, suggests, as does Escape, that nostalgia and politically pointed fiction do not always go well together. The novel is called The Mad and the Bad, and

"at the worst, it reads as a mildly nostalgic reminder of a time before the triumph of consumerism, corporations, celebrity, and "content" was complete, before a time when multibillion-dollar corporations like Facebook and Apple were considered cool."

But Manchette got the nostalgia out of his system, and 3 to Kill (original publication 1976), Fatale (1977), and The Prone Gunman (1981), are three dark, stark noir classics, the last of them in particular chilling for its dissection of how powerful elites can exploit, debase, and discard an individual no longer of use to them, an individual, that is, who has no recourse to collective action or the struggle.

And now, in a collective spirit, I turn the question to you, readers, and ask: Is sharp political crime fiction incompatible with authorial nostalgia?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A Bastille Day post: Tocqueville on France and Algeria

I somehow neglected this in my springtime frenzy of reading about the French-Algerian War, but its ringing words may be even more relevant in the waning moments of Bastille Day than than they were in April.

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

I still don't know why France treated Algeria differently from Tunisia and Morocco, making of it a full-fledged colony while holding the others as protectorates. It couldn't really be because of a fly swatter, could it?

It transpires, though, that some of the impetus for France's decision about how to proceed after its invastion of Algiers came from the guy better known for writing about America:

"Tocqueville himself had sought such an incorporation when, in his 1847 report, he described the goal that would guide France's elusive, destructive, and ultimately failed project in Algeria:

"`We should set out to create not a colony properly speaking in Algeria, but rather the extension of France itself across the Mediterranean.'"

I don't say that makes him a perp, but he is at least a person of interest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fun and games from Garbhan Downey

Here's the post I was going to put up a week ago when the author, Garbhan Downey, preempted my plans by offering some comments that I turned into a guest post. The original post was to have been about matters humorous and serious (that is, soccer and politics) in the book, but Downey took care of the serious part with his guest. So this post is  fun and games. And here's a post about another political crime writer who also loved and wrote about soccer (football).

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

Garbhan Downey says his novel Across the Line is about politics and football (soccer), the lines being both those on the soccer field and that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

So it's no surprise that two of the book's best jokes are about soccer, to wit:

"He'd always hated the descent into Cityside Airport. Because of the airport's topography, the little jet had to stay almost five miles up until it was directly above the runway. The first sign you knew it was on its way down was when the London stewardesses, to a man, would belt themselves into their seats, close their eyes and bless themselves. After which the plant hit the ground quicker than an Italian striker."

and

"`The entire squad walked out of Muff Hall last week when they heard I'd been signed as centre-forward.' 

"`You're joking?' 

"`I'm afraid not. Something about mafias taking over football clubs. That they wouldn't go the way of Chelsea."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Ross Thomas on politics and other absurd subjects

In honor of the day's events, I'm bringing back two posts I made way back at the beginning of the campaign season about Ross Thomas, a great political satirist, humorist, and Edgar Award-winning crime writer.

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

Thumbs up to Ross Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw for its title, its subject, and its humor.

The political strategists at the Pen & Pencil Club here in Philadelphia are almost as bad as the cigar smokers and the lawyers, but Thomas' operatives, plotting a campaign for the first election in the newly independent fictional African nation of Albertia, make the profession sound like delightful fun without being more cynical than thou:

"I'm going to call him Chief," Shartelle said firmly. "It’s the first time I’ve ever worked for anybody who was a real chief and I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to address him by his rightful title.”

The book is also full of amusing social observations about its time (it appeared in 1967):

“English lit—right?”

“Wrong. Letters.”

“Letters?”

“As close to a classical education as Minnesota got that year. It was an experiment. A little Latin, and less Greek. It was to produce the well-rounded man. I think they abandoned it in favor of something called communications shortly after I was graduated.”

How good a writer was Thomas? He won two Edgar Awards, but I'm two-thirds of the way through the novel, no crime has been committed, and the book still works as highly entertaining political comedy.

With an American presidential election campaign on, the book will make especially entertaining reading. (Of course, there's almost always an American presidential campaign on.)

***

Speaking of American presidential campaigns, did I mention that, in a burst of serendipity Thomas could hardly have envisioned when he wrote the novel forty-five years ago, one of its characters is the Ile of Obahma? © Peter Rozovsky 2011

It's a strange land, where normal rules don't apply, where shifting tribal loyalties make life dangerous for the unwary, where even the most careful and idealistic visitors may soon get sucked into the intrigue and become indistinguishable from those whom they had previously affected to deplore.

It's Washington, D.C., and it's the setting for Ross Thomas's 1967 international thriller Cast a Yellow Shadow. Less overtly a satire of politics than the two Thomas novels I'd read previously (The Seersucker Whipsaw and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side), the book is nonetheless full of snippets of dialogue and nuggets of description evocative of their place and time in politics:

“The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. `Two votes a precinct,' he said for the dozenth time. `Just two lousy votes a precinct.' “`When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,' I said as Karl handed me the phone.”

and

“He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn’t and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.”

and

“It sounds like a typical American intelligence plot,” he said. “Only 2,032 things could go wrong—and probably will.”

Here are some notes about Ross Thomas and a Thomas bibliography. While you browse them, ponder these questions: What is your favorite Washington crime novel? Your favorite political crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Detectives Beyond Borders' greatest hits: The Assassin

 Work threatens to swamp the quiet precincts of Detectives Beyond Borders. While I struggle bravely to stem the flood, here an old post that's relevant both to my recent crime reading and to the current American political season. As a bonus, the novel in question, Liam O'Flaherty's The Assassin, contains one of my favorite little speeches in all of crime fiction: "Don't mind him, Kitty. He's mad. Have a sausage."

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

I've just finished The Assassin, that 1928 novel by Liam O'Flaherty that Declan Burke called "arguably the bravest Irish novel ever written."

The novel is, for the most part, an exploration of the solitary psyches of an assassin and his co-conspirators. It does, however, contain a passage or two that are, one might say, more relevant today than ever. The first may be especially so in the United States:

"Unity was always McShiel's programme, because it did not necessitate taking sides on any definite question. ... As it was impossible to impose a budget on the community sufficiently large to provide emoluments for all the politicians simultaneously, it was obviously impossible to unite them. But the programme was attractive, as it allowed of unlimited intrigue."

Political questions in the United States tend to be less urgent than they probably were in the early years of Irish independence. The cry here is less for unity than for its relative, bipartisanship. This cry tends to arise when one party loses control of Congress or even of Congress and the White House together. Parties in control tend not to discuss bipartisanship as much.

Back to Liam O'Flaherty:

"`Man, man, there are thousands waiting to rush out, waitin' for their chance.'"

"`To loot,' said McDara calmly, `That's not force. There's no reason in that. That's mob anarchy.'"

Seems to me that McDara, the novel's protagonist, and quite possibly O'Flaherty as well, is one disillusioned or at least disappointed revolutionary. Or maybe revolution is just a more complicated affair than we outsiders can know.

How does politics find its way into your favorite crime stories or maybe into your less favored ones?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

What's your favorite Washington and/or political crime novel?

It's a strange land, where normal rules don't apply, where shifting tribal loyalties make life dangerous for the unwary, where even the most careful and idealistic visitors may soon get sucked into the intrigue and become indistinguishable from those whom they had previously affected to deplore.

It's Washington, D.C., and it's the setting for Ross Thomas's 1967 international thriller Cast a Yellow Shadow. Less overtly a satire of politics than the two Thomas novels I'd read previously (The Seersucker Whipsaw and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side), the book is nonetheless full of snippets of dialogue and nuggets of description evocative of their place and time in politics:

“The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. `Two votes a precinct,' he said for the dozenth time. `Just two lousy votes a precinct.' “`When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,' I said as Karl handed me the phone.”

and

“They liked to mention that Hennings Van Zandt was eighty-two years old and that he had been one of the first whites to be born in the country that he served as Prime Minister. He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn’t and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.”

and

“It sounds like a typical American intelligence plot,” he said. “Only 2,032 things could go wrong—and probably will.”

Here are some notes about Ross Thomas and a Thomas bibliography. While you browse them, ponder these questions: What is your favorite Washington crime novel? Your favorite political crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Politics and new money in France

I read Dominique Manotti's Affairs of State again this week, and I'll begin this post with the continuation of a passage I quoted in June from the novel's afterword.

The passage called the 1980s in France "a time when entrepreneurs and financiers became the new heroes of modern times."

The immediately succeeding sentence tells us that

“The Socialists, who came to power with Mitterand when he became President of the Republic in 1981 – having been sidelined over a period of decades – assumed and practiced their new religion with the zeal of neophytes."

And that ought to demonstrate that a crime writer can be political without being partisan and remain amusing at the same time.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Politics and crime

In honor of this week's first vote in the long American presidential election season, some quick remarks about two crime novels shot through with American politics.

It's a bit scary to think that Bill Clinton loved Ross Thomas' writing, as Tony Hiss reports in his introduction to The Fools in Town are on Our Side, Thomas' 1970 novel of political manipulation. The book's central plot line is the deliberate corruption of an American city in order to facilitate its political takeover. Allies are surrendered up for humiliation and ruin in order to lull the opposition into complacency

Why is this scary? Because Clinton, whatever one thinks of his policies, was widely admired and detested for being such a superb politician. How much did he learn from Thomas? How much of a kindred spirit did he recognize in Thomas' fixers and PR men?

*

The Comedy is Finished, due out next month from Hard Case Crime, is Donald Westlake's last novel.  The story is that Westlake wrote the book decades ago but decided against publishing it in the 1980s for fear that readers would think it too similar to Martin Scorcese's 1983 movie The King of Comedy. Westlake apparently gave Max Allan Collins a manuscript of the book, and Collins passed it on to Hard Case, so the world gets one more novel from the prolific Westlake, who died Dec. 31, 2008.

Westlake's comedian is Koo Davis, a star of radio, television, and stage shows who made his name on USO tours during the Korean War and continues into the Vietnam era, filled all the while with questions about the world and how it's changing around him.

The format allows Westlake much room for amused observations about American entertainment of the 1950s from the perspective of the late 1970s. Unsurprisingly for a book set in the '70s, a kidnapping figures prominently. Davis' question-and-answer sessions with his kidnappers yield some unexpectedly moving introspection on his part and, I suspect, on Westlake's as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dominique Manotti, apolitical political novelist

The recent discussion of Dominique Manotti's Affairs of State in this space has leapt from grammar to gender and sex, and that means politics can't be far behind.

That's appropriate for Manotti, who writes about greed and decadence among France's ruling elites. Though Manotti is decidedly of the left politically, her books shun politics in the everyday sense of policies, debates, and party affairs. The bad guys in Affairs of State are Socialists, but that's only because the Socialist Party, in the person of Francois Mitterand, held the French presidency in the mid-1980s, when the book is set (though certain details of Mitterand's past may have fired Manotti's imagination). In Manotti's world, money is all that matters. (She's an economic historian when not writing award-winning crime novels.) Here's how she begins a short afterword to Affairs of State:

"In France, the 1980s were commonly referred to as the `years of easy money,' because during this decade money came to represent, for an entire political class and regardless of whether they were in power or in opposition, an end and a value in itself, at a time when entrepreneurs and financiers became the new heroes of modern times."

Manotti is not quite as bleak as Jean-Patrick Manchette, but she shares with him an aversion to overt partisanship that makes her books all the sharper as social critiques — and all the more effective as fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Were Sjöwall and Wahlöö the last romantics?

Why not? Their observations about urban decay wrought by technology are less polemical than wistful (or, at most, gloomy), whether about factory-produced bread putting an end to local bakeries or, as in The Fire Engine That Disappeared, about cars and highways:

"It was not exactly a scintillating panorama that lay spread out before his eyes. A dismal industrial area and a motorway, of which all lanes leading into the city centre were crammed with vehicles jerking along at a snail's pace. Martin Beck loathed cars."

How could such a pair of Marxists be so philosophically Romantic? (That unimpeachable source, Wikipedia, quotes a definition of Romanticism as "In part ... a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.")

And then it hit me that Marx flourished smack in the heyday of High Romanticism in music. His most productive period coincided almost perfectly with Wagner's, for example, and they died the same year. (That year, 1883, was a watershed for artists and thinkers who made our view of modern life. Édouard Manet died then, too.)

So now I can relate Marx to Romanticism in one direction and to Sjöwall and Wahlöö in another. Who says crime writing is not educational?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Who is the hero in a Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel?

Sure, Alan Blair's translation of The Man on the Balcony (1968), third of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck mysteries, includes several instances of the word society and one of the welfare state, but much of its social observation is homelier than that:

"Kvist ... inhaled the smell of fresh-baked bread, thinking that these small bakeries were getting rare.

"Soon they'll vanish altogether and you'll be able to buy nothing but mass-produced bread in plastic wrapping and the entire Swedish nation will eat exactly the same loaves and buns and cakes."

These days Kvist might have added "... and drink the same coffee, talk on the same phone, and read the same book on the same e-reader from the same company," but the sentiment remains pertinent today.

***

The novel gives the thought not to Martin Beck or even to his close colleague Lennart Kollberg, but rather to Kvist, a low-ranking officer who makes an important discovery in the scene and plays no role otherwise. Later in the book, two similarly low-ranking officers make an even more important discovery purely by accident.

What is a reader to make of the juxtaposition of serendipitous breaks by underlings and the lengthy, draining, sometimes heart-rending work put in by their superiors? Is this merely a more realistic account of how investigations work? A polemical attack on the convention that a novel must have a central figure? A raspberry aimed at authority by a pair of mischievous leftists?

Whatever the reason, other Scandinavian crime writers, Karin Fossum and Håkan Nesser among them, followed Sjöwall and Wahlöö's lead, dispersing the focus away from a central figure and distributing it among a larger cast.

Why do they do this? What other authors focus more on a cast of characters than on one central figure? What effect does this have? (Please remember to write your name on your blue books before you hand in your test papers.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The golden age of paranoia

Alan Glynn, author of Winterland, looks back at the golden age of paranoia in an article on the Mulholland Books Web site. He traces the era from a morally serious period of high paranoia in the early 1970s, marked by Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and The Conversation through a period of bloated, jokey weirdness (The X-Files), and on to a more recent revival.

These latter-day incarnations "take their nod from the golden age, and that's a good thing," Glynn writes. "Because at no time over the past thirty or forty years has that '70 sensibility seemed more relevant or, indeed, more necessary."

I was a bit surprised to read of Glynn's attraction to paranoia because, while Winterland impressed me greatly, I thought it more an amateur-gets-in-over-her-head adventure, albeit a violent, thoroughly contemporary one, than a paranoid nightmare. But what do I know? I can't read Glynn's mind — yet.

Glynn proposes an interesting division of post-1970s paranoia into the over-the-top school, whose representatives include James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy, and more direct nods to the golden age (Peter Temple's Truth, Michael Clayton).

I'd have added Jean-Patrick Manchette to the roster of Golden Age paranoiacs and Dominque Manotti to the list of current practitioners, Manchette for how deeply power controls, warps and ruins the individual in his books, and Manotti for how widespread and ruthless the corruption is, and how high it rises, in hers.

What about you? Who are your masters of paranoia in crime and thriller fiction and movies?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

"The truth? Would you fuck off, would you?"

The blurbs for Alan Glynn's Winterland are full of words like powerhouse, resonant, memorable, classic and uncomfortable, but my favorite one is wit.

The line quoted in this post's title passes from a decayed but alert inmate of a retirement home for Irish politicians to a younger pol about to attain a lofty position and belatedly seeking the truth about a long-ago incident.

The old man's dismissive incredulity marks a sly, comic turn in the final hundred or so of the novel's 311 pages. In those pages, newspapers both sensationalist and somber speculate with great gravity and greater inaccuracy over the cause of a multiple killing.

In those pages, the protagonist, a woman seeking the reason for the deaths of her identically named brother and uncle, a woman who might reasonably have spent the final hundred pages being driven to hysteria or death, pauses to deliver a genre-tinged mission statement that must have had Glynn smiling as he wrote it:

"`I don't know,' she says, her voice a notch or two louder, `but I think I'm going to continue doing what I've been doing all along.'

"`What's that?'

"Closing one eye, Gina raises the gun and points it at the wall. `Asking questions.'"

Many a crime writer has used real estate development as a plot device and a vehicle for political corruption. Not many let corruption and the uncertainty created by its concealment seep into their characters' bones as deeply and drive so many to distraction, painkillers, alcohol, and painfully wrong — though sometimes grimly entertaining — guesses.

***

Alan Glynn talks about paranoia, money, crime writing (“I haven’t read a lot of it, really.”) and other interesting subjects in an interview with Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A delicious way to spend your hard-earned pounds

It's funny, it's Ireland, it's America, and I'll be embarrassed if there are any typos in it.

Buy it here or here, and read what Detectives Beyond Borders has had to say about the author here (scroll down after clicking.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Sports is the continuation of politics by different means

For all kinds of reasons, sports and politics seem less intimately connected in North America than in Europe.

Perhaps that's because on my continent, most major-league cities have just one team in each sport. That means fewer politico-religious divides like that between Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, and fewer teams with noxious political associations like Italy's Lazio.

I thought of this most recently when I came across the following in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's novel The Man of My Life. The protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, recalls a stage comedy with Catalan nationalist undertones from his youth:

"It was the period when the Catalan language was undergoing a timid revival, and the Franco authorities allowed the play to be put on in church halls. Despite the restrictions, the actors usually managed to insert a few subversive jokes. Carvalho recalled how the Devil, defeated yet again by the Archangel Michael, and flattened on the stage with the angel's foot on his back, lifted his head a couple of inches and shouted: `Miquel! Miquel! Sembles el Real Madrid, que sempre vol guanyar!"*

* Michael! Michael! You're like Real Madrid, you always want to win!

It will surprise no one to learn that Vázquez Montalbán was both a man of the left and an FC Barcelona supporter. In fact, I may prepare a post on why Vázquez Montalbán's politics are so engaging.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

In the rough

P.G. Wodehouse's Oldest Member must be turning over in his grave. First Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez attacks golf as a bourgeois game, sparking a war of words with the U.S. State Department.

Then this, in Dominque Manotti's novel Rough Trade:

Police Inspector Daquin has just interviewed a powerful man at an exclusive golf club. The powerful man has urged discretion, equating his own business interests with France's national interest, to which Daquin responds on his way back to the office: "People who play golf are capable of anything."

Come to the defense of sports, readers. What are your favorite uses of or references to sports in crime fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A meaty book from Derry

Planning to be in Northern Ireland for America's birthday? Get yourself to Easons, Foyleside in Derry from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. July Fourth to join Garbhan Downey in celebrating the release of his novel War of the Blue Roses.

"The subject is roses," Detectives Beyond Borders wrote in April, "specifically a competition to design a peace garden for the White House – and if you think gardening is a clean pursuit, this book will shock you. Downey brings back some of the characters from his previous books, tough, savvy, engaging and, in some cases, unscrupulous folks from Ireland north and south, and he throws in Americans and Englishmen this time. These last give Downey fresh new satirical targets."

Newly pertinent professional ethics prevent me from saying much more about the book, but I hope you'll find the proofreading satisfactory.

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

Here's what I've written about Roses and Downey's four previous books of political crime comedy (His Yours Confidentially made my short list of best international crime fiction published in 2008).

And here's Downey's Web site for info about the books, a promotional video for War of the Blue Roses, and some covers that will make you smile.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Garbhan Downey beyond borders

I owe my presence in the United States to U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy and former Representative Brian J. Donnelly, both of Massachusetts. More than twenty years ago, they sponsored legislation to let 30,000 people a year obtain permanent residency ("green cards") in the U.S. under relaxed requirements.

The 30,000 places were allotted by nation, ranging, if memory serves, from 9,000 from Ireland and 4,000 from Canada down through smaller numbers from other countries and territories.

Since the four annual incomers from New Caledonia were far less likely than the 9,000 from Ireland eventually to swell the voting rolls of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts, I am predisposed toward fond sympathy with Garbhan Downey's upcoming novel, War of the Blue Roses. As the novel opens, the (fictional) Irish taoiseach, or premier, chides the (fictional) U.S. president for overstating his (the president's) Irish ancestry. "Don't knock it," the president replies. "It was enough to get me elected." Irishness has a powerful political presence in America, and Downey gleefully follows his cast of politicians, gangsters and hangers-on to the U.S. and Canada for significant chunks of the new book.

The subject is roses – specifically a competition to design a peace garden for the White House – and if you think gardening is a clean pursuit, this book will shock you. Downey brings back some of the characters from his previous books, tough, savvy, engaging and, in some cases, unscrupulous folks from Ireland north and south, and he throws in Americans and Englishmen this time. These last give Downey fresh new satirical targets.

Pre-publication etiquette forbids my saying much more. And what does the future hold for Downey? Massive international success, perhaps, and adaptations of his work into comic operas. Is Mozart still working?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009