Dashiell Hammett, copy editor's friend

Dashiell Hammett is better known these days for his novels and the movies made from them than he is for his short stories. But he had established himself as one of the great crime writers ever at least six years before his first two novels appeared. While I delve once again into the Library of America's volume of Hammett's Crime Stories and Other Writings, here's an old post about just one more reason to admire Hammett.

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In recent posts, I've taken one book to task for misusing a word, another for its surfeit  of dialogue tags, and a third for using a word not coined until the 1960s though its story takes place in 1953.

More recently, I picked up a book that uses a word in a sense it did not acquire until years after the date when the book is set, and last night, a misused homophone/heterograph  momentarily marred my enjoyment of one of the most moving, exciting crime novels I have read in years.

Since you're likelier to hear tales of ludicrous copy editing changes than thanks for errors caught before publication, we proofreaders and copy editors must blow our own horns or rely on critics to say what we would say if we thought anyone would listen.

Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, another invaluable book about Dashiell Hammett from the good folks at Vince Emery Productions, offers some delightful examples from Hammett's days as a mystery-fiction reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Evening Post.

Here's Hammett on The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine:

"This Philo Vance is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition and his conversational manner is that of a high-school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary. He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he managed always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong."

Can you imagine caring enough about what you read that you would write something like that?

Here's Hammett on Sydney Horler's 1926 novel False-Face. Besides lampooning Horler's ludicrous plot and his contempt for seemingly every nationality but his own, he makes fun of Horler's sloppy sentences:

"Scotland Yard promises to `safeguard the safety' (page 29, if you think I spoof) of an American inventive genius who has business with the British government."

Now, what is a reader to do, especially if that reader happens to be a copy editor in his professional life and, moreover, a copy editor who has heard authors complain that publishers expect authors to pay for editing that publishers would have paid for twenty years ago? Shrug off mistakes with the bland acceptance that nothing is perfect? Bang one's head against the wall and shout that the world is going to hell?

I don't know the proper course, but I sure wish reviewers and critics would follow Hammett and highlight defects in the form as well as the substance of books they write about, because there really is no difference between form and substance when it comes to writing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

My Bouchercon panels: Charles Kelly and Dan J. Marlowe

Chapter 14 of Charles Kelly's Dan J. Marlowe biography reminded me that I attained my majority in a degenerate age:

"On March 23, 1976 ... Marlowe told a friend in a letter, `Gold Medal has just cancelled flat my Operation series.' Fawcett Gold Medal editor Joseph Elder had informed Marlowe, `Basically this kind of story is not working at all in today’s market. The mystery/ suspense novel as a paperback category is failing left and right, and very few of the category heroes are surviving.'” 

I was in my mid-teens then, which meant that by the time I was ready to start exploring crime fiction in a serious way, even reprints of those old paperback originals were going out of print, and the originals were often available only under plastic wrap, complete with brittle pages and high prices. (I have no figures to back me up, but I suspect that one benefit of electronic publishing is increased availability of books that had appeared as paperback originals. Gold Medal's decision to drop Marlowe, by the way, happened during CBS' takeover of Fawcett, which ran Gold Medal. No doubt CBS would have told worried readers that it was refocusing its crime offerings to better serve our customers. Always to better serve our customers.)

Kelly's book is called Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe, and it's refreshingly free of lurid details, considering that Marlowe was a professional gambler, an amnesiac, a rambler, and a spanking fetishist who also befriended and collaborated with a bank robber who had made the EBI's Ten Most Wanted list. That Marlowe was also a Rotarian, a small-town Republican councilman, a hardworking businessman, a thoroughgoing professional, and a man who met setbacks with industry and equanimity are salutary reminders that real life is often more interesting and less sensational than the publicity machine (with our enthusiastic complicity) would have us believe.

Above all, Kelly knows that the writing is the thing, and he lards his book with excerpts from and summaries and discussions of Marlowe's work. And quite a body of work it is. The protagonist of the great The Name of the Game Is Death is scarier than Richard Stark's Parker, what Parker might have been had Stark chosen to get inside his (Parker's) head.

If you like Parker (I wrote in a previous Marlowe post), you might like Marlowe. If you like Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you might like Marlowe. If you like revenge stories and you want to see how a master wrote them, you might like Marlowe. If you like man-on-the-run stories, you might like Marlowe. If you like your sex scenes with a bit of an edge, you might like Marlowe. (Read a sample of Kelly on Marlowe from Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.)

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Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras," and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Hopscotching back to 1975 with Brian Garfield (and why fellow authors must love him)

With a hat tip to Sarah Weinman, I'm reading Hopscotch, which won Brian Garfield the best-novel Edgar Award for 1975.

Like his poker partner and occasional collaborator, Donald Westlake, to whom Hopscotch offers at least one explicit tribute, Garfield is a thoroughgoing professional who, moreover, has thought deeply about the work of his predecessors in crime writing. And he likes to poke gentle fun at the publishing business. (The protagonist of Hopscotch is a former spy who teases the world and his publishers by sending out, piecemeal, chapters of his tell-all political and professional memoir. A sample line: "Don't count on publishers to act logically. I've seen them pay a fortune for a boo and then drop it right down the gratings.")

Other good jokes include this, on the protagonist' disdain for the FBI:

"The Bureau had its talents—like establishing Communist cells so that its agents would have something to report on—but the FBI wasn’t likely to track him down unless he stood in Constitution Avenue waving a Soviet flag."

and this:

"Jaynes had a deep suntan and a huckster’s compulsion to touch anyone to whom he spoke. He was a film producer ..."

My only quibble is with Garfield's use of French words at odd times in the book's Paris section. Characters don't get out of elevators on the third floor, but on the third étage. They drop jetons, rather than tokes, into public phones. Pour the hell quoi, Brian?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Who needs copy editørs?

I don't like crime-novel cover copy that brags that the author is a lawyer for the same reason that I don't like covers that identify the author as So-and-so, Ph.D. Such braggart branding plays on the intellectual insecurity of readers. It's a not so subtle effort to bully shoppers into thinking that the author must be smarter than they are, so they will either improve themselves by buying the book or else get a dirty little insider's glimpse at a world they would never know without the author's help.

Me, I don't give a crap what authors are or what degrees they have; I want to know what they can do.

I was thinking about this while reading the following this evening on the back cover of a trade paperback edition of Easy Money by Jens Lapidus when something else caught my attention:

"From one of Sweden's most successful defense lawyer(sic) comes an unflinching look at Stockholm's underworld."

Someone's not paying to have cover copy proofread carefully.

And note the o with a slash in the cover's rendering of the book's title. Jens Lapidus is Swedish, and he wrote the book in Swedish. Ø is a letter in Danish, Norwegian, and Faroese — but not Swedish.

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In recognition of professional reality, I have taken a number of the posts I'd previously classified as "Things that drive me nuts" and reindexed them under the heading "Who needs copy editors?" Read them and weep. Just don't expect to be paid for your tears.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Pulp in Italy: An interview with author/editor/publisher Matteo Strukul, Part I

Matteo Strukul's Edizioni BD publishes Italian translations of comics, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction by authors including Dennis Lehane, Alan Moore, Joe R. Lansdale, Moebius, Michael Chabon, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee, Kazuo Koike, and Jacques Tardi. The Revolver imprint, of which he is line editor, brings hard-hitting authors such as Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Russel D. McLean, and Victor Gischler to Italian readers, with more to come from the likes of Charlie Huston and Christa Faust. He lives in Padua (Padova) in northern Italy's Veneto region and, when not publishing and editing, he writes. His first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, was shortlisted for Italy's Scerbanenco Prize. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Matteo Strukul talks about pulp fiction, Italian hard-boiled authors, comics, and his own discovery as an author by Massimo Carlotto. And, proving himself true kin to Detectives Beyond Borders, he has kind words about some of this blog's favorite Irish crime writers.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matto Strukul.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: Talk about the Revolver imprint, about the authors you chose, and why you chose them.

Matteo Strukul: First of all, Peter, thank you for the opportunity that you have given to me. It's great to answer your fantastic questions. I’m honored. Now, about Revolver… Revolver is an imprint focused on pulp crime fiction. We love to collect fast-paced novels. Every story has to be a real roller-coaster, a furious, well-plotted patchwork of wit and wise guys, ultra-violence and thrills, and unpredictable, lunatic characters. For these reasons we chose authors like Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, Tim Willocks, Christa Faust, Ray Banks. Personally, I love all these authors who are completely crazy and original but all of them have an intriguing, fascinating, irreverent approach to the genre. We want to have authors who have courage enough to break rules and to have faith in their stories and characters, doesn’t matter how crazy and strongly cruel those stories are. 

DBB: Your online biography says you were discovered by Massimo Carlotto. How did this discovery happen?

MS: Well, I was at the international Book Fair in Turin (Il salone del libro) in 2010 and, of course, Massimo Carlotto was also there. I remember that I went to the E/O publisher’s stand and said to him that I have a novel for him. Well, it was incredible when he said that he want to read it, because, man, I was and am a real fanatic of his work. At that time I was press officer with an independent and well-reputed publisher: Meridiano Zero.  I organized press campaigns for authors like David Peace, James Lee Burke, Derek Raymond. So, of course this fact doesn’t mean that I was an author but means, without any doubt, that I had a strong background. For this reason, I mean, he was curious.  I wrote for “Il Mattino di Padova,” my hometown newspaper, so he knew who I was, because Massimo is from Padova, too. So I was very lucky, in fact. Anyway, after some months, Colomba Rossi, who was responsible, together with Massimo, for a new imprint at Edizioni E/O, called Sabot/Age, sent to me an e-mail. I remember she said that my manuscript was fantastic and the character of Mila was amazing. She said also that Massimo Carlotto was really impressed and so, after that, they told me that they want to have me on board as author for the new imprint. It was amazing! 

DBB: Italy has produced some excellent, dark crime writers, such as Leonardo Sciascia and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Besides Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli (with the De Luca novels), who are the best modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers? And what does the Anglo-American tradition give Italian readers that they will not find in Italian crime writing? Who are your favorite writers, artists, and filmmakers from that tradition?

MS: Modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers are Giancarlo De Cataldo, author of Romanzo Criminale and many other novels. A bigger-than-life and epic criminal saga, a cruel, merciless, bloody and magnificent tale about Banda della Magliana: a gang of thugs and mobsters that during the end of the seventies created a criminal empire in Rome and Italy. The novel tells the story of the relationship between criminals and corrupted politicians in Italy at that time, with gangs fighting for the control of drug traffic, prostitution and gambling in the different quarters of Rome. Another wonderful Italian novelist that I love is Maurizio De Giovanni, author of the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples in the early ‘30s, a fantastic police-procedural series.

DBB: Your own first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, which was based on a comic book. You also publish a novel by Victor Gischler, whose work sometimes reads like a comic book without the pictures. How do comics influence the fiction you write and publish?

MS: Comic books are a big inspiration for my work. More than this, recently I have written Red Dread, an arc, drawn by international artist Alessandro Vitti (Marvel), with Mila as the main character. The arc was awarded the “Premio Leone di Narnia 2012” as best comic-book arc of the year. But anyway, I love authors like Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Victor Gischler, as I said they are a big influence, in particular I think that Mila has a big debt to Ennis' The Punisher. When you read comics, sequences and cruel feelings like violence, anger, hatred, are literally graphic. I love to study the rhythm, the action, the storytelling. Comic-books and movies are a big inspiration for my work. For instance, Punisher stories like “Mother Russia” or “Barracuda,” by Garth Ennis, or “Welcome to the Bayou,” by Victor Gischler, are stylish visions of hell. You could taste (thanks to the amazing work of guys like artists Goran Parlov or Leandro Hernandez) reasons and motivations, souls and blood, and at the end of the story what you really think is that authors like Garth and Victor are able to go right to the point. No mercy on you, as reader, no fuckin’ cheesy lines.

DBB: A number of the authors published by Revolver write slam-bang, action-packed novels: Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Victor Gischler, and Christa Faust, for example. But you also publish Brian McGilloway, a quieter and more reflective writer than some of your other authors. How does McGilloway fit in with the publishing philosophy of Revolver?

MS: You know sometimes, we have to breathe. As you said, we love to publish action-packed novels, but at the same time we would like to offer different kind of crime fiction, different tunes and tastes, and Irish noir, for instance, is a wonderful new creature that, as publisher, we would like to show to the Italian readers. I hope to publish as soon as I can guys like Adrian McKinty or Stuart Neville but sometimes you cannot publish everything you want.

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Practise your Italian at Revolver's Web site and at Matteo Strukul's own site. Read about Italy's best current crime writers, crime in northeastern Italy, and a new Italian literary movement and crime fiction festival, coming soon in Part II of Detectives Beyond Borders' interview with Matteo Strukul.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Rushdie on the state of writing

Yesterday's main reading was not crime fiction, though the author has notoriously had a price on his head.

Step Across This Line collects Rushdie's nonfiction from 1992-2002, and there's more to the man than his love of U2, a subject with which he deals frankly in an essay called "U2."

I especially liked what Rushdie had to say about the state of writing and not just because he says of his experience judging a competition that

"There was a group of son-of-Kelman Scottish novels in which people said `fuck' and `cunt' and recited the names of minor punk bands. There was, too, the Incredibly Badly Sub-Edited Novel. I remember one set in the sixties in which a Communist character couldn’t spell `Baader' or `Meinhof' (`Bader,' `Meinhoff”'. Many of the entries read as if no editor had ever looked at them."

More to the point, he wrote, publishers were publishing too many books because

"in house after house, good editors have been fired or not replaced, and an obsession with turnover has replaced the ability to distinguish good books from bad. Let the market decide, too many publishers seem to think. Let’s just put this stuff out there. Something’s bound to click. So out to the stores they go, into the valley of death go the five thousand, with publicity machines providing inadequate covering fire."

It may surprise you to learn that the essay from which these passages are taken is highly optimistic about the state of the novel. The creative, bold, skilled, and sensitive writers are there. The people whose task it is to get those writers to us, he says, were not doing their jobs.

How does this jibe with your view of the crime-fiction market, especially if you have trouble finding the kind of crime fiction you like to read?
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Ideological zeal and "ordinary" crime

Those good folks at Soho Crime, who have done so much to bring international crime fiction to U.S. readers, have sent along their latest sampler.

The slim volume offers excerpts from some of the books Soho and Soho Constable will publish this fall, and it includes new work from a number of authors you may have read about here: James R. Benn, P.J. Brooke, Leighton Gage and Martin Limón as well as The Boy in the Suitcase, a Danish mystery by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis.

I was especially interested in the bit from Stolen Souls, the third novel from Stuart Neville, following on The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve in the UK) and Collusion. I've been thinking about Northern Irish crime writing recently, about how one of its big themes is that tentative sectarian peace leaves paramilitary gunmen on both sides of the Troubles unemployed — and ready to move into "ordinary" crime.

Stolen Souls picks up a thread of that "ordinary" crime from Collusion — the, er, collusion between Loyalist gangs and Lithuanian human traffickers in Belfast's prostitution trade. A Ukrainian prostitute manages a bloody escape from her captors and, according to the synopsis that you'll find by clicking on the novel's title in the paragraph above, her flight provokes a bloody gang war.

From what I know of Northern Ireland, gleaned mainly from crime novels but also from one hair-raising article in the Derry News, the ideological zeal of the Troubles led to a certain Puritanism on both sides, Catholic as well as Protestant. Paramilitaries would make a great show of executing drug dealers in an effort to burnish their bona fides as defenders of the community. And the notion that righteous warriors would sublet prostitution rights to foreigners induced a certain unease in Collusion.

So, however the exciting escape in Stolen Souls turns out, I suspect the book will lay bare hypocrisy and maybe, just maybe, teach some of us to be skeptical of killers, drug dealers, gunmen and pimps who proclaim the righteousness of their cause.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Jakob Arjouni's Germany

Next up is Kismet, Jakob Arjouni's fourth novel about Kemal Kayankaya, a German private detective of Turkish descent.

The earlier Kayankaya books offer novel takes on the hard-boiled P.I. tradition, so I thought I'd bring back one of my earlier comments about Arjouni as I begin this latest book. The remark was part of a post about One Death to Die, a book I thought relied a bit too often on hard-boiled clichés but was full of interest nonetheless:

Better are Kayankaya's encounters with obstructionist officials, a more subtle way of portraying racism. Best is Kayankaya's searing verbal assault on a neighbor who he finds out supports a "moderate" right-wing party that doesn't want to kick Turks out of Germany but won't accept them either. The poor neighbor thinks himself humane and morally superior to Germany's "real" racists, and all it takes is two words from a furious Kayankaya not just to puncture his complacency, but to utterly shatter him. The words? "Heil Hitler!" Longtime readers of this two-day-old blog will recognize that this fulfills my top criterion for "international" fiction: It takes full advantage of its setting. Such a moment could not happen, or at least not with the same dynamic effect, anywhere but in Germany.

Here's the rest of that comment along with my other posts about Arjouni.

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My edition of Kismet is published by Melville House. I had not heard of the company before, but it appears to publish a fine list of crime and non-crime books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

He wrote the book on e-books

(At right, a page from the world's largest book. No word whether the book is available for download.)

Apropos of recent discussion about e-books and short crime fiction comes this interview with Jay Hartman of Untreed Reads, courtesy of an interested reader.

As you might guess from its name, the company publishes e-books. To this publishing outsider, it seemed that Hartman had much of interest to say. Particularly salutary is the reminder that "market forces" is a deceptively benign term. A market winds up the way it does because of specific actions that people take, or do not take when they could or should have.

Among the highlights:

"Untreed Reads didn't initially set out to have such a large focus on short form, but it just happened and the response has been HUGE.

"The overseas markets are especially hungry for shorts."

and

"Every retailer out there claiming to offer 70% royalties has some catch: the title has to be purchased in the US, the title has to be priced at $2.99 or more, there's a fee for transmitting the story, there's a fee for processing the credit cards ... SOMETHING. And in those cases the author SHOULD be getting the 70%, because the retailers aren't doing any publicity, promotion, marketing or anything else to help them get the word out. They're not designing covers, they're not formatting the title."

and

"Do you know that before Amazon created DTP the average price of an ebook over a ten year span was $5.99 and nobody had any problem paying for it? Then, places like Amazon and Lulu made it possible for anyone to publish their own work. What happened was a huge influx of material into the market filled with poor writing, bad grammar, typos, bad layouts and all sorts of other things that set the ebook industry back years.

"People weren't willing to trust they were going to get good content because they kept picking up titles that were poorly written and filled with flaws. Then, along came $9.99 pricing which only made things worse. Authors, fearing a backlash to both the $9.99 pricing and the badly written stuff that was hurting the industry, panicked and started setting their prices ridiculously low in an attempt to woo back a jaded audience. The result? The market that it is now. The market still has poorly written material that anyone can throw up there, but it also has some of the BEST material to come along in a long time. After all this, it's not the PUBLISHERS who caused anything over $2.99 to be considered expensive, it's the AUTHORS."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Happy birthday, bird

Today is the official seventy-fifth anniversary of Penguin, which is hard to believe because it's hard to imagine a time when Penguin wasn't around.

Here's a Web site with all sorts of Penguin-related stuff, including old photos and galleries of covers. Seventy-five years — May all publishers last at least this long.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Publisher attacks readers who complain about sloppy editing

You may well have heard of the Australian cookbook that called for "salt and freshly ground black people" — instead of black pepper — to be added to one recipe.

Penguin Group Australia had to recall 7,000 copies of the Pasta Bible because of the error, according to news reports, and publishing head Bob Sessions was not pleased. His target was not what one might expect, though.

"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," he said, according to The Age newspaper of Melbourne. "We've said to bookstores that if anyone is small-minded enough to complain about this ... silly mistake, we will happily replace [the book] for them."

Has recession eaten into editing budgets?

Mr. Sessions is half-right. Trouble is, he may also be hiding something. The error was a silly mistake, and I suspect that it was unintentional and indicates no racism on anyone's part. But before I absolve him, I want to know how much time and money Penguin Australia devotes to editing now, and how much it devoted five, ten and twenty years ago.

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(Mr. Sessions received kid-glove treatment from several media outlets that edited out or paraphrased his insult that complainers are small-minded. Read one such example on the BBC News Web site.)

The BBC is even more protective of Mr. Sessions than I realized. As of this writing, the photo caption on the site to which I link immediately above reads: Penguin said it was "mortified" over the "silly" mistake in its pasta cook-book. In fact, as Mr. Sessions' statement makes clear, Penguin is mortified not by the mistake, but rather that the mistake has become an issue.

That's a subtle though importance difference, and I trust the BBC will correct its honest but silly mistake.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

E-reading in NI

I didn't know when I proofread Garbhan Downey's The American Envoy that the book was something of a landmark in Northern Ireland publishing.

Downey says Guildhall Press is the first Northern Irish publishing house to issue a novel simultaneously in Kindle and printed form and possibly the first in all of Ireland.

In an article he wrote for Verbal: The NI Literary Review, under a headline I'd have been happy to write ("Don't fear the reader"), he's sanguine about a technology and possible business model that have some readers, authors and publishers apprehensive.

To wit:

"Finally, and very importantly, it looks that e-publishing could be good news for writers. Some authors have already negotiated between 50 and 75 percent of the royalties to their digitised books – as opposed to the eight to 15 percent they get from printed volumes.

"In addition, publishing houses will be more inclined to recruit and develop new talent on an “e-book only” basis, as the financial risk to them is much lower.

"And of course, your work can be dispatched instantly to readers across the planet, without any additional cost or haggling with distributors. Just try getting a single US chain to take one hundred copies of your hardcopy novel. You could literally drown in the paperwork."

I was especially interested in the last paragraph. You've seen the debates elsewhere about e-readers. Here I'll ask you to think about what electronic publishing means for books beyond borders, for reading translated work and other literature from outside your own country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Cover stories

I posted a comment last week about the phenomenon of different books with sometimes startlingly similar covers. This week Belinda Mountain of MIRA Books, whose cover for Paul Johnston's novel The Soul Collector sparked the discussion, weighs in. She offers a short comment on my post, then holds forth at greater length on her own blog.

Her comments will speak for themselves, but they did put me in mind of something obvious that I had nonetheless not thought of before: Books with similar themes may well lead to similar covers. Johnston's book, she writes, "features a character named The White Devil, and a killer who draws pentagrams near his unfortunate victims, so the pentagram/star icon was incredibly well suited to this book."

Pentagrams and the fear of Satanism figure prominently in Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, which helps explain the similarity between its cover and that of Johnston's novel. But then, Nesbø's book itself is just one of several Scandinavian novels translated in recent years in which Satanism plays a prominent part. Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (The Savage Altar in the U.K.) also come to mind.

Belinda offers some sensible reasons for publishers' decisions, so thank her for weighing in. And the next time you think about "copycat" covers, think about "copycat" books, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Crime Scene Europe and Beyond

Bob Cornwell of Crime Time magazine in the U.K. sends news of a project that should interest anyone reading this blog.

Crime Scene Europe, produced under the auspices of the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Policiácos/International Association of Crime Writers and published in Crime Time, will offer practical guides "to the crime fiction of what I hope will be many European countries — and beyond."

The first, on France, downloadable here, offers a brief history of French crime fiction, an overview of the French crime novel today, a directory of key publishers, lists of crime-fiction festivals and prizes, selections of French crime writing available in English, and rosters of bookstores, Web sites and publications of interest to crime fiction readers.

That's a lot of useful information in one small package, and more countries are to come. The Netherlands and Switzerland are up next, with Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy to follow. A roster of other European countries is being assembled, and Cornwell says he hopes to expand the idea beyond Europe, possibly to Japan and Latin America.

What countries do you think belong on the list?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Hey, publishers, what's behind the covers?

Euro Crime notes the near-identical cover designs of The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø and Paul Johnston's upcoming novel The Soul Collector. In this case, the copycatting seems more blatant than usual, right down to a word in the subtitle of the Johnston novel.

Euro Crime has highlighted a number of such copycat covers, as have other blogs, and the issue has sparked discussion throughout the blogosphere. Some seem to think that publishers, looking for ways to save money, find it easier to use stock photos than to pay artists or photographers. But I haven't heard publishers weigh in.

If you're a publisher, how do you explain and justify this practice? How do you answer the accusation that copycat covers make publishers look cheap, cheesy and foolish ? And when did the phenomenon begin? When did publishers start relying on stock photos for their covers?

Once again, a bouquet for Hard Case Crime, which commissions paintings for all its covers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Are publishers cheap?

The Rap Sheet and other blogs have weighed in on publishers’ penny-pinching use of stock photos for book covers and the inevitable result: that a lot of covers wind up looking suspiciously similar.

The miserliness may show up between covers, too. In a review headlined “The lost art of the editor,” Crime Scraps discusses a novel whose ludicrous errors include this discussion of a super-light handgun:

"For you I'd recommend a Walther TPH. It's a seven round weapon, .25 calibre, remarkably accurate for up to 100 yards and light as a feather at three kilograms."

As Mr. Scraps points out, 6.6 pounds is pretty damned heavy for a handgun. Unlike the copy editor that the publisher apparently failed to pay for, Scraps did his research and found that the Walther TPH weighs 325 grams, not three kilograms.

In my own recent reading, I’ve run into an official briefing about an impending visit of political dignitaries that includes this on one page:

“ … in exactly twenty-seven days’ time, Air Force One, with the American President on board, will be landing at Gardemoen Airport, Oslo”

and this on the next:

“I don’t need to tell you how short a time two months is, but it means what we’re going to need daily coordination meetings … ."

Elsewhere, I’ve run across a book that confused want and wont and a memorable volume that spelled one character’s name three ways in three consecutive uses on two consecutive pages.

I raise these examples because it’s my understanding that publishers often farm out their copy editing to free-lancers. If that’s the case, one can understand the benefit to publishers: They avoid the necessity of having to pay health and other benefits. But I expect that such a practice would also eliminate copy editors’ chances of feeling that they have a stake in a book’s success.

I invite readers to submit their own examples of such errors. Perhaps we can shame publishers into taking steps to eliminate them. I especially welcome comments from anyone in publishing, whether they are victims of such practices, perpetrators, or merely knowledgeable observers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A word from the publishers

It's a Crime! ... (or a mystery) links to this interview with four independent publishers, of whom Francois von Hurter of Bitter Lemon Press might be of especial interest to readers of this blog. Here's what von Hurter said when asked what he had not been seeing from major publishers:

"The recklessness it takes to publish edgy foreign novels. The ability to introduce new cultures and genre-breaking fiction."

© Peter Rozovsky 2006