Discussion by Kalteis and Frankson, photo by Detectives Beyond Borders

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper, Porto, Portugal, 2011)

Dietrich Kalteis, a novelist whose debut I reviewed earlier this year, also has a penchant for verbal mano-a-mano and an eye for atmospheric scenes, and he has chosen to illustrate some of the former with some of the latter. His newish Off the Cuff site pits Kalteis and fellow author Martin J. Frankson in a series of discussions that include the kinds of questions I like to ask and, in its current edition, some thoughts on crime-novel titles that I suspect you will enjoy reading. And now Kalteis, whose Facebook feed regularly includes stunning photography, plans to illustrate his posts with my noirish photos. The current Off the Cuff discussion unfolds under a photo I shot in Porto in 2011 (above/right). So feast your eyes and feed your head.

And read what I had to say about Kalteis' Ride the Lightning: 

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I read Dietrich Kalteis' debut novel, Ride The Lightning, as an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed. But trust me: The book is pretty good.

What I like best is that it sustains a breakneck pace without sacrificing character to action, or action to character. Kalteis made me care about his cast of lowlifes, screw-ups, and marginals without stopping the action too often for endearing moments of humanity or self-conscious wit. What these characters show of themselves, they show in the act of doing what they do. 

What they do is grow, develop, and sell drugs; rip each other off; try to stop each other from growing, developing, and selling drugs; and seek revenge. Even the worst of the main characters is good enough at what he does that he earns a reader's respect. He gets kicked around and beaten up and gets his leg caught in an animal trap, all of which he deserves, and his very resilience is admirable. I also like Kalteis' understated nude-beach scenes.

This novel, appropriately for a book under consideration at Detectives Beyond Borders, crosses the U.S.-Canada border, from Seattle to Vancouver, where most of the action happens. So Karl, the bounty hunter who loses his job and has to shift from the U.S. to Canada, muses that he expects less violence as compensation for his reduced income. (Karl states this in a more entertaining fashion, but this was an uncorrected galley, so no quotations allowed.)

I also like characters' references to Medicine Hat, Alberta, as "the Hat," as well as the mostly downmarket setting, not so much because I got to go slumming, but as a reminder that peaceful, low-key Canada has its lowlifes, too. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More pics, plus a couple of novelists sitting around talking

All photos by Peter Rozovsky

Those two good guys, Dietrich Kalteis and Belfast's own Martin J. Frankson, talk about bad guys in the 13th installment of  Kalteis' Off the Cuff discussions. Once again, Dietrich illustrates the noirish palaver with a photo by your formerly humble blogkeeper photographer, shot right here in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago (right). 

Says Kalteis: "I love dialogue and there’s nothing better than some foulmouthed bad guy to lend color to the page."

Kalteis knows something about writing bad guys. Here's part of what I wrote last year about his novel Ride the Lightning:

"What I like best is that it sustains a breakneck pace without sacrificing character to action, or action to character. Kalteis made me care about his cast of lowlifes, screw-ups, and marginals without stopping the action too often for endearing moments of humanity or self-conscious wit. What these characters show of themselves, they show in the act of doing what they do."

Here are all the Off the Cuffs, at http://dietrichkalteis.blogspot.ca/. Here, too, are some more recent photos.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2014

An off-kilter noir photo at Off the Cuff

(Photograph by Peter Rozovsky,
your humble blogkeeper)

Once again Dietrich Kalteis and friends sit for a chat among authors at Kalteis'  Off the Cuff site, this time to talk about character, dialogue, and dialect. Here's a sample of the discussion:

"Back to the accent/dialect question: you can do more with it - with perhaps more reader interest - than simply using a typical vocabulary or syntax of a place. You can use dialect-like giveaways and ‘verbal tics’ to reveal many aspects of character, while also making your characters separate and distinct from one another."

Read the complete discussion at Dietrich's place under the heading Off the Cuff 5.

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Kalteis demonstrates once again that the right side of his brain works as well as the left. He's a novelist, he also has an eye for photography, and he again illustrates Off the Cuff with one of my noir photo (left).  Here are the first two noir shots of mine that he used (click the link, then scroll down)  and, if you're on Facebook, here are all my noir shots.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

"Fuck, it was cheese": Dietrich Kalteis' The Deadbeat Club

I'm not as high on Elmore Leonard as some crime fiction readers are, and my misgivings about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle verge on heresy, according to at least one highly partisan commenter on this blog.Yet some of my favorite crime novels of recent years—by John McFetridge, Declan Burke, Charlie Stella, Garbhan Downey—are of the Higgins/Leonard school, with its humor; its ensemble casts and multiple points of view; its wry views of men and women at work; and equal measures of sympathy, understanding, and careful observation granted to cops and criminals alike.

The latest entry is Dietrich Kalteis' second novel, The Deadbeat Club, about the complications unleashed by a drug war in southern British Columbia, a war with at least five sides and ensuing complications of which Kalteis good narrative advantage.

Throw in fast action, an interesting observation about Canada and the United States as settings for crime*, and a use of cheese that you've likely never seen before in a crime novel, and you've got a few hours of heartwarming and violent fun on the way.

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* "His baby face defied his age, hair as wild as Tanner himself. Plenty of practice with Russian AKs, Tanner did a stint in the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Left a body count up and down the Congo, hunted Al Qaeda and Islamics, popped off insurgents in Iraq, Darfur, more in the Gaza and Georgia. Now there was talk of North Korea. All the same to Tanner. A resume that had the military contractors drooling.

"North of the border things were different, no military contractors up here. Tanner lying low and getting high, starting to feel bored. So when he heard Travis wanted guns, sending his boys to the shipyard, he offered to throw in, not worried what the gig paid."

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Bad guys and good pictures at Off the Cuff

Photo by Peter Rozovsky in some
big city not far north of here.

"Is it just my nature?" asks Linda L. Richards. "Why am I suspicious of everyone?"

Linda talks about good guys, bad guys, and unreliable narrators as part of the latest discussion at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff site. But can you believe her?

Fellow author Sam Wiebe joins the discussion, hosted by Kalteis and Martin J. Frankson.

Once again, Kalteis, a fan of photography, illustrates his virtual roundtable with one of my noirish shots (above right). So go on over, feed your head, and feast your eyes.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Three authors in a dark and friendly place

(Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper)

Once again, Dietrich Kalteis and Martin Frankson discuss aspects of crime writing at Kalteis' Off the Cuff site, this time with fellow author  Robin Spano as a guest. Once again, Kalteis illustrates the discussion with one of my noir photos (above).

This discussion  touches on a number of issues that have come up here at Detectives Beyond Borders, noticeably that off setting a crime story in a historical period other than one's own. So head on over, have a seat at the Friendly Lounge, and join the discussion.

And here are a few more photos.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Crime in Vancouver

Museum of Anthropology at the University of British
Columbia. Photos by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders

Montreal-style bagels in Vancouver

I've just spent six days in Vancouver, one evening at a Noir at the Bar that also served as a book launch, another at a question-and-answer session with four local crime writers at the Vancouver Public Library, and part of an afternoon at a crime fiction bookshop. (Yes, Philadelphians, some cities have those.)  Oh, and I shot the photo that became the poster used to promote the Noir at the Bar.

Sam Wiebe

Janie Chang

The bookstore was Dead Write Books, and the book that received its unofficial launch was Fast Women and Neon Lights, a collection of stories inspired by the 1980s. Michael Pool, who put the collection together, read at the Noir at the Bar, as did Dietrich Kalteis, Linda L. Richards, Will Viharo, and Sam Wiebe, all of whom contributed stories to the volume.  I also did some non-crime stuff.

Will Viharo

Dietrich Kalteis

Lions Gate Bridge

Sam Wiebe, Michael Pool, Linda L. Richards,
Will Viharo

Lions Gate Bridge

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

"Double Meditation on Looking: Linda 2016." Digital
iPhone print, artist's private collection

Sam Wiebe, Dietrich Kalteis, SG Wong, E.C. Bell,
Janie Chang, Linda L. Richards

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Why you should read Dirtbags and John McFetridge

Eryk Pruitt's Dirtbags is a tall tale, a couple-on-the-run story, a moving noir story as Jim Thompson or, especially, David Goodis might have written it, a rural roman noir, a dark comedy with a touch of Southern Gothic, and satire without hitting the reader over the head to make its point.  It's also a serial-killer story for readers who hate serial-killer stories, thanks to its blessed absence of interest in abnormal psychology.

One review calls the novel "sort of like a book about a serial murderer written by Carl Hiaasen, only a lot darker," but don't let the Hiaasen comparison stop you; this book is funny without, however, degenerating into a cheap yuk-fest.

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I wrote Saturday about Dietrich Kalteis' The Deadbeat Club, so this is a good time to remind you to read A Little More Free, by Kalteis' fellow ECW Press author John McFetridge, Nobody is better than McFetridge at seamlessly blending big crimes, small crime, social/historical setting, and an appealing protagonist.  This and Tumblin' Dice are my favorite McFetridges.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Westlake, Kalteis, Frankson, Morganti and me, plus a question for readers

Dietrich Kalteis and Martin J, Frankson are back with another Off the Cuff discussion, this time with Canadian novelist Charlotte Morganti, hashing out a matter dear to my heart: setting as character in crime fiction. Once again, Dietrich illustrates the discussion with one of my nourish photos (left), whose setting is right here in South Philadelphia.

Elsewhere, here's Donald Westlake, interviewed by Al Nussbaum in 1974, from the Westlake nonfiction collection The Getaway Car:

"I have felt for some time, with growing conviction. that there weren't any stories around to be written. I haven't been able to do a Richard Stark novel in a year and a half, the comedy caper is dead, story lines are drying up like African cattle.  Storylines reflect, refer to and attempt to deal with their period of history, and that's why they become old and obsolete and used up. Another reason is that the same story gets done and done and done and done, and suddenly one day nobody wants to read or hear that story again."

1974 marked the beginning of Westlake's 23-year hiatus from the Parker novels he wrote under the name Richard Stark. It was also the year of Jimmy the Kid, the worst of his comic caper Dortmunder books, Westlake's writing of which began to grow more sporadic around the same time. Instead, he concentrated on standalone novels for the next few years, though he eventually returned to both Parker and Dortmunder. So 1974 obviously marked a kind of crisis for Westlake. Now here's your question: Was Westlake's crisis merely personally, or was 1974 indeed a crisis year for crime fiction? Was his gloomy pronouncement accurate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Brian Williams, Jon Stewart, and the society of the spectacle

All photos by your humble
blog keeper/spectacle
maker, Peter Rozovsky

It is fitting that Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle should be available free of charge online; I would hardly expect such a text to adhere to the bourgeois concept of property rights.  I thought of Debord's work, and decided to consult it for the first time, because of the outpouring of social media agony over Jon Stewart's decision to leave The Daily Show. ("... sometimes it's more important to step back and reconfigure a conversation than continue the same conversation because you know how to do it," Stewart was quoted as saying. Reconfigure a conversation. Jesus. I prefer one commenter's speculation that Stewart might have been pissed he did not get David Letterman's job.)

The mourning for Stewart naturally included hosannas and lamentations for Stephen Colbert as not just a satirist, but an essential alternative voice, a position not easy to reconcile with his having left Comedy Central to take what I suspect is an eight-figure job with a vast media conglomerate. And then there's that other entertainer, Brian Williams, whose garbled recollections of Iraq, whether deliberate or not, gave rise to predictable public airings of ethical concern and inquiries into the workings of human memory — serious stuff.

I don't know if I'll be able to accept Debord's explanation for the weird ritual/spectacle aspect of so much public life; phrases like modern conditions of production make my cheek muscles go slack and my eyelids get heavy. But Debord was surely right that in a society where those conditions prevail, "life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles."

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There is no contradiction in being attracted to the spectacle aspect of Debord's Situationist thought even if one is dubious of his Marxist rhetoric. At least there was no such contradiction for Jean-Patrick Manchette.

Over at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff, Dietrich, Martin J. Frankson, and David Swinson make spectacles of themselves talking about good guys and keeping them just bad enough to hold a reader's interest. Once again, Dietrich illustrates the chat with one of my photos, this time of the noose-like apparition you'll see here at top right. Shadows play weird tricks where I live.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

What's so great about Noir at the Bar?

Funny you should ask, because Dietrich Kalteis asks the same question over at his place in conjunction with a Noir at the Bar to be held in Vancouver March 24, and I don't mean Vancouver, Washington. That's a nice bunch of folks who'll be reading, mellow and cheerful, as befits their balmy and civilized setting, like Portland or Seattle, but without the hype. And they write some good books, too.

Here in Philadelphia, I chronicle the dying winter with more photos of rain, snow, sky, and slush, all photos by your humble blogkeeper/photographer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Shot in Philadelphia (and Long Beach)

And then there's this shot, with which Dietrich Kalteis illustrates his current discussion withSam Weibe and John McFetridge. That's John in the photo at lower right. His current novel and his next one include a photographer named Rozovsky.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Bouchercon 2017: A photographic gallery of Canadians

Bouchercon 2017 in Toronto happens in two weeks. Here are some photos I shot at previous Bouchercons. I've been attending Bouchercons since 2008, but these photos date from the modern era, which began in 2014 (Long Beach), when I bought my first good digital camera.

First up is John McFetridge, who writes terrific crime novels, always volunteers to help out at Bouchercon, and has a big role in hosting the 2017 version in the city where he lives.

Next, Sarah Weinman, a member of a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh. Sarah will return the favor in Toronto when she leads a panel called "History of the Genre," on which I make my first Bouchercon appearance as a panelist.

Sticking to the Canadian theme for a Canadian Bouchercon, here's Jacques Filippi, co-editor with John McFetridge of the upcoming Montreal Noir collection from Akashic Books. This is a rare bar photo, from Bouchercon 2015.

Finally, Dietrich Kalteis, on a panel in Bouchercon 2014, with Cara Black. Dietrich is from Vancouver, so the photo has 50 percent Canadian content.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

A German best-of list

Internationale Krimis occasionally mentions the monthly top-ten list compiled by a panel of German, Swiss and Austrian crime-fiction critics. In a recent post, blogkeeper Bernd Kochanowski discussed the panel's best-of-the-best list, its choices for the ten best crime novels published in German in 2007.

The list includes the books known in English as This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas, The Broken Shore by Peter Temple, The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto and The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin, plus novels by John Harvey and James Sallis.

It also includes books not yet known as anything in English because they appear not to have been translated: Die feine Nase der Lilli Steinbeck by Heinrich Steinfest, Feuertod by Astrid Paprotta, and Kalteis by Andrea Maria Schenkel, all written in German, and Der Grenzgänger by Matti Rönkä, translated from Finnish. I'm especially curious about Matti Rönkä, since so little Finnish crime fiction is available in English.

That's four novels originally published in English, three in German, and one each in French, Finnish and Italian. What does that tell you? Are German-language readers more commendably broad-minded than we are? Should they be up in arms that only three books original to their own language made the list?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Off the Cuff in Canada, with Canadians

Over at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff, talented crime writers, organizers, and editors from Canada talk about crime writing in that country, their discussion illustrated by a Canadian who lives in this country.

The participants are Jacques Filippi, Sam Wiebe, and John McFetridge, and the illustrator (photographer, really) is your humble blogkeeper, with the noirish shot reproduced above right

Talk turns to Canadian identity in crime fiction, and both Jacques and John (the latter of whose gifts include a flair for naming minor characters) suggest that Canadian crime writers can best get themselves noticed by writing novels that could be set nowhere but Canada. 

But Canada's immensely long border with the United States, and the cultural ties between the two countries, are part of Canada's uniqueness. That may be why a fair amount of Canadian crime fiction, including John's, Dietrich's, and Howard Shrier's, straddles the border and embraces the geographically equivocal position. That, I think, is part of that makes their writing special.

Elsewhere in the discussion, Jacques muses on clichés, and I hope he won't mind if I quote him at length:

"Clichés are usually bad, but hockey, poutine, maple syrup, the Québécois swear words and bad driving; our politeness; our bilingualism (when in fact we are bilinguals in only 2 provinces and part of a third one out of 10), etcetera, are all aspects of who we are. If some of these Canadian attributes end up in your story, should you edit them out to avoid clichés? I don’t think so if it’s not just decorative to your story. I don’t think Louise Penny would have the same success if Three Pines was a village in North Dakota, Wyoming, or any other states for that matter. Penny inserts some of the Québécois clichés in her novels, but they are clichés only to those who know about the Québécois way of life in small villages. To Penny’s readers, the so-called clichés are Québécois and Canadian ‘flavours’."

Finally, as I wrote in a comment to their post, Canada is by reputation polite, progressive, and civilized, and its crime writing has not had the international impact deserves. Sweden, on the other hand, is by reputation, polite, progressive, and civilized, and we all know what its crime writers have done.  Why is this?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Detectives Beyond Borders goes back Off the Cuff, with pictures

I'm up once again at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff, one of my noirish photos illustrating Dietrich's discussion with Martin J. Frankson and their guest, author-filmmaker Glynis Whiting, of how writers do their thing.

Above and right is the photo in question, and here (at left I think) is one of Dietrich that I took at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. The rest are a few shots from Southern California, with signs of habitation by humans and earlier creatures. All photo by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014