A wandering granddaughter job: My Bouchercon Hammett panel

Here's a post from December 2013 that is more relevant today than ever. I'll be discussing Dashiell Hammett with Julie M. Rivett and Richard Layman at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., next month in a session called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett."  The Bouchercon schedule calls it a special event, and I agree. Hammett was the best ever, and Julie and Rick know more about him than just about anyone else. See you there; the fun starts at 8:30 a.m., Saturday, Oct. 10.

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Julie M. Rivett, co-editor of The Hunter and Other Stories, the new volume of previously uncollected and unpublished work by Dashiell Hammett, drove up from Orange County to chat with Detectives Beyond Borders about the book, Hammett, the movie interpretations of his work, his critical reception at home and abroad, and other subjects—including some of her favorites among current crime writers.

Rivett is not just a Hammett scholar and researcher, she's also the daughter of Hammett's daughter Jo (she met her grandfather once, when she was 3 years old) and, she says, "What I want to come from this is that people will read [Hammett's work] as literature. I want to make him a rounder character."  Your humble blogkeeper says the book, co-edited with the noted Hammett biographer and scholar Richard Layman, will do just that, especially in the form of "The Secret Emperor."

Rivett says the combination of her personal contacts and Layman's professional ones strengthens their partnership. (They also worked together on Return of the Thin Man, which brought together two previously unpublished stories about Nick  and Nora Charles.) And, asked about the portrayals of Hammett as a communist, a drunk, or a bad family man, Rivett rebuts some of the stories, concedes others, and says: "It's always a difficult thing for me when people co-opt my actual grandfather."

Her list of favorite contemporary crime writers includes Declan Hughes, Dennis Lehane, Michael Koryta, and George Pelecanos, and if I were a crime writer favored by a descendant and scholar of the greatest of all crime writers, my sinews would come unstrung and my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth for a few minutes before I was able to resume writing.

Coming soon: Rivett on Hammett's reception in France and Italy, and the possibility of more Hammett material to come.

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Rivett and I met for tea and a wine chaser at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, close to stars on the Walk of Fame that honor several figures prominently connected with Hammett's life, career, and interests. Mary Astor's, Myrna Loy's, and Fatty Arbuckle's stars are within a block and a half of the restaurant, and later I found Peter Lorre's and also the one that honors some guy named Bogart. Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet were perfect for their roles in John Huston's celebrated film version of The Maltese Falcon, Rivett said, and Bogart, she added, while not physically perfect for the role, did marvelous things with the character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Executioner pursues me across California, finds me in Philadelphia

Selfie at California Citrus State Historic Park,
Riverside. All photos by Peter Rozovsky, your
not so humble blog keeper.

Don Pendleton's first Executioner novel, War Against the Mafia, turned up free as an e-book earlier this week.  In honor of the discovery, here's a post from my trip last year to that mecca of action-adventure stories, Southern California, where I could not, however, find a copy of War Against the Mafia. Early chapters suggest that the book might make interesting collateral reading to Richard Stark's The Hunter and The Outfit.

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Not much to note from yesterday's crime reading, except that Don Pendleton's second Executioner novel, Death Squad, takes its hero and his cast of associates on a path through Southern California nearly identical to that I have followed in recent days. Yesterday that took them to the citrus groves around Riverside, where I had just spent the day, and let me tell you: Having one's steps dogged by Mack Bolan and his gang of Mob-hating, authority-snubbing, police-respecting gang of expert killers gives a jasper a screwy feeling.

Mission Inn Riverside

Yesterday's book yield, from the Downtowne Bookstore in Riverside: a collection  of secret wartime cables between Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What I learned staring at the walls (of California restaurants)

Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your formerly
humble blog keeper.

It was no shock to discover on my recent Bouchercon-and-after travels that restaurant food is spicier in Southern California than it is in my part of the country; I'll chalk that up as a benefit of Mexican influence. Eaters here also know their hot sauce and will express preference for Tabasco or Cholula without in the least sounding like an East Coast foodie.

I was surprised, however, that those nostalgia photos that constitute the decor of so many restaurants on the East Coast actually mean something in California. Rather than the patently generic, sepia'ed after the fact, "instant ancestors" obtained in bulk from a restaurant design house, photographs here might depict surveyors laying out the town that became the city that would eventually include the restaurant where you're eating your chipotle steak.

That, I suppose, is because California is so new and its history so fresh in the minds of the people who live there. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts might have been the same had photography been around in the seventeenth century. As it is, I was happy that California restaurant walls offer something to study rather than sneer at.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Musical and other weirdness in Southern California

Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, Los
Angeles. All photos by Peter Rozovsky,
your formerly humble blog keeper.

I dined with a friend Wednesday evening at Berri's Cafe in Los Angeles, which had the exquisitely awful idea of piping in throbbing, droning club music during the earlyish dinner hour. Not only were we subjected to the worst music ever created, but at a time that not even lovers of that music could like. This is music for 3 a.m., not 8 p.m.  The food was not bad, though.

Did I say the worst music ever created? That's the New Age trance music that a Marina Del Rey-area Starbucks pumped in during yesterday's coffee. For all its top-down corporate paternalism and its mangling of the English and Italian languages, Starbucks generally offers good music to drink one's mispronounced doppio macchiatos by. But not here. There are many great things about Southern California, but the music offered for public consumption is not one of them.

Sunset off Malibu Beach

Then I landed in Philadelphia, where a television in the baggage claim area blared a  breathless news story about arrangements for the White House Christmas party. You expect that sort of thing from entertainment channels like Fox or MSNBC, but this was CNN. I understand that "serious" and "American television news" are mutually contradictory, but CNN was once considered serious, wasn't it?

Wigwam Inn, Rialto, Calif.

Lying Los Angeles bus-shelter sign

And then I went to wait for my train into the city, where loudspeakers lent an Orwellian/Kim Il Sungian aspect by blaring, indoors and out — the worst music ever created.

Also from the Page Museum

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

I took some pix on Route 66

I visited no bookshops yesterday, though I did buy the book at right at last night's lodging place, one of America's most fun destinations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

No cats, just books

Book Carnival in Orange was closed when I was in the neighborhood Sunday, but no worries; I bought some books from them in the dealers' room at Bouchercon in Long Beach last week.

A trip to the nearby Bookman yielded two novels by Joe Gores and three Executioner novels. The latter fit a trend I've noticed in secondhand bookshops here to take vintage paperback originals in general and men's adventure in particular more seriously than do bookshops on the uncivilized East Coast.

Here's the men's adventure section at The Bookman:

Here's my photographic version of an, er, iconic American painting, as shot by me at Knott's Berry Farm:

And here's what Orange County looks like after a hard day's driving, eating, and book shopping:

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More book shopping, more cats

Basketball players and midgets can take their custom elsewhere. (Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper)

First, San Diego's Balboa Park is now one of my favorite places in the world. What more could one ask than botanical wonders, lush grass, a good restaurant or two, and more museums than you could shake a palm frond at?

Iconic!

Saturday's book shopping at the Adams Avenue Book Store and Marston House in San Diego and Counterpoint Records & Books in Los Angeles yielded Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities; two by P.G. Wodehouse, including a collection of his one-liners; thoughts on evolution from E.O. Wilson; Mischief, by Bouchercon discovery Charlotte Armstrong; and a good photo of one of the Adams Avenue shop's two cats.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Book shopping in Southern California

Cat at Gatsby Books, Long Beach, Calif. Photos by Peter
Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper.

Secondhand bookshops may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Southern California, but there are some good ones here. Gatsby Books in Long Beach, welcomes crime writers in to give readings, and I bought a handsome book on Long Beach architecture in its local-history section.

Booktown USA in Anaheim offers antiquarian books, a big mystery section, and shelves full of Western and men's adventure books, which one does not often see these days. I bought titles in the Executioner and Destroyer series, a Pocket Books edition of Donald Westlake's The Hot Rock, and a nice old hardback called Pictures of the Gold Rush, and I got change back from a twenty-dollar bill. You might well stop there on your way to Disneyland or the Mexican border. No cat there that I could find, though.

And, because one must keep up one's strength while buying books ...

(For more independent bookshops, go here. For more In-N-Out Burgers, go anywhere in Southern California. You can't miss them.)

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Don't let me forget Dave's Olde Book Shop, in Redondo Beach, where I bought Line of Fire, by Donald Hamilton.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Dan J. Marlowe plus an urban hideout

I've been reading much Dan J. Marlowe on this vacation. Among other things, the man's career spanned the transition from the nervous 1950s to the more permissive 1960s, and Marlowe negotiated the shift better than he might have.  I'll be back with a full report, but in the meantime, here'a vintage hideout perfect for laying low in the heart of New York compact yet bustling state capital!!!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crime, defined

(From the excellent Bucks County
Bookshop in Doylestown, Pa.)

"What is crime, anyway?" Palmqvist said as we shared a pizza.

"I'll tell you," she went on before I could answer:

"1. Crime, adopted from OF-F, derives from L crimen, *that which serves to sift (hence, to decide), decision, esp a legal one, hence an accusation,  finally the object of the accusation—the misdeed itself, the crime: for *cernīmen (cf regimen from regere, s reg-), from cernere, to sift: f.a.e. CERTAIN, para 1."

No, I'm not

We'd planned the heist for months, timing cash deliveries and pickups, noting the employees' habits: who showed up on time, who made sure everything was locked and sealed, who didn't give a crap because the bank was likely to be sold to a whole new, bigger bank, with a whole new set of customer-service slogans and a whole new set of fees by the time she got back from lunch.

We knew things could change, but we never imagined that Your Local Bank would be sold off and converted to a pizzeria before we could stick it up. So Palmqvist and I had reason to be pensive.

"Robbery," I said,

"derives from MF roberie, robber from MF robeor, both F words coming from OF-ME rober, to rob, whence, ME robben, E `to rob'; OF rober comes from OF robe, booty, whence, in MF-F—from booty in the form of robes—a gown, a robe, adopted by ME: and OF-F robe comes from W Gmc *rauba, booty: cf OHG roub, MHG roup, G Raub, spoil, robbery, and OHG roubōn, MHG rouben, G rauben, Go bi-raubōn, to which are prob akin the Go raupjan, to pluck, and OHG roufēn, MHG roufen, G raufen, to pluck, to fight, and perh akin, the ON riūfa, L rumpere (nasalized *rup-), to break."

"I know what you mean," she said, sighing. "I'm bedraggled. See draggle at DRAW."

[More to come (pt came, pp. come, presp [and vn] coming ...)]

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Seven Pillars of Inexpensive Wisdom

Another atmospheric hideout 
on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Yesterday's prize acquisitions at Market Street Books in Salisbury, Maryland: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a U.K. Penguin edition for barely 28 cents per pillar and Volume Two of Francis  Parkman, France and England in North America, in a Library of America edition with slipcase for $12.50.

I shall try to tease some crime out of my reading of history.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What ever happened to Nelson Algren, and why?

Nelson Algren was not a crime writer, but he wrote about hustlers and gamblers and addicts and hoods and corrupt politicians. While such non-crime writers as Charles Bukowski and John Fante and Jim Tully occasionally find their way into discussions of crime fiction, however, I have never heard Algren's name at a crime convention or read it on a crime blog. Why is this?

(Nelson Algren Fountain base with part of 
inscription from Chicago: City on the Make)

I have not read Algren, but last month I stayed in the heart of Algren country in Chicago's West Town, a block from the small, boarded-up fountain in the "Polish Triangle" that I think is the neighborhood's only memorial to Algren. The inscription at the fountain's base reads: "For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart" — a sentiment perhaps out of step with contemporary America.

(The Nelson Algren Fountain)

(The Man With the Golden Arm was the first winner of the National Book Award for fiction and was made into a celebrated film starring Frank Sinatra as the splendidly named Frankie Machine. Algren was Simone de Beauvoir's lover for years, when she could get that pesky Jean-Paul Sartre out of the way, and I'm guessing Lou Reed read Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side. The inscription on the fountain's base comes from Algren's essay Chicago: City on the Make, a copy of which I could not find in Chicago.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A fond farewell to L.A.

Los Angeles is an easy target, and the jokes are as cheap as they are deserved. The smog. The corruption. The shallow garishness of the parvenu. In fact, there is much of beauty to see here (OK, there; I'm back home now), some of it due uniquely to the city's social and historical circumstances. While I catch up on work and recover from jet lag, I'll show you a bit of it before returning to my normal programming later this week. All photos by your humble blogkeeper.

Los Angeles has some fine older buildings, though it has leveled many and done less than it might have to preserve the rest.

Its industrialists and other moneymakers caught the art bug later than did their East Coast counterparts, which means they were left to acquire unusual and eccentric pieces by European artists after the artists' major works had been scooped up by rich, socially ambitious collectors in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.

The Norton Simon Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have excellent collections of Asian art, and the Getty has all kinds of good things, both at its main museum and also at the Getty Villa. And you may have heard about the city's sunsets and magnificent trees. Have a good night. I'll be back.

(A weather-related note: I began this journey in Chicago, where the locals went out in T-shirts when temperatures hit the low 50s. I ended it in Los Angeles, where Angelenos shivered in coats, hats, scarves, and gloves in 60-degree weather my first two days in town. The United States is one big country.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013