Yasmina Khadra's images of corruption

Commentators have noticed less than complimentary remarks about women in Yasmina Khadra's novels about Algiers police superintendent Brahim Llob. Take this selection, from the first page of Morituri:

Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed -- she holds no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she's there when I am afraid of the dark.

What saves Khadra from censure for such remarks? For one thing, perhaps, Khadra himself was thought for years to be a woman. "Yasmina Khadra" is a nom de plume borrowed from two of his wife's names. Khadra's real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul; he took the alias when the Algerian army, in which he was an officer, demanded that he submit his work to military censors. (He revealed his identity only in 2001, after he had fled to France; Morituri was published in 1997.)

For another, that passage is full of pathetic, desperate tenderness. For yet another, the remark is in no way gratuitous. Disgust with the flesh is only part of the larger atmosphere of disenchantment that pervades Llob's world. The terror, the fear, the disillusionment, the political and moral corruption are so pervasive that they invade the most intimate aspects of the characters' lives. Poor Brahim Llob is alienated from even the most basic desires.

So, what saves the Llob stories from being total downers? The narrator/protagonist's grim sense of humor even among the direst circumstances. Here's Llob with Sid Lankabout ("Sid Spider"), one of the cast of vicious, slimy opportunists who populate the Llob books:

It seems (says Lankabout) that you are in the process of giving birth to a third tome.

This time (replies Llob) I'm writing about anti-matter.

Interesting. I didn't know you were an alchemist. Does anti-matter really exist?

Fundamentalism is its most active manifestation.

The defining rivalry of Llob's Algiers is that between corrupt, murderous Islamic fundamentalists and corrupt, monumentally rotten and venal government. Llob's disgust with the hypocrisy of both sides (and with the megalomania of the third side that reveals itself toward the ends of Morituri and of the second in the series, Double Blank) is characteristic of his appalling world. It also makes him an appealing crime-fiction protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Yasmina Khadra and Bill James interviewed

This evening's Web surfing turned up recently published interviews with two of my favorite crime writers. The interviews are more interesting than most and should make good reading even if you don't know Bill James and Yasmina Khadra (and I think you should know both).

Epic India carries this discussion with Khadra, whose work includes crime novels featuring Algiers Police Inspector Brahim Llob. Khadra speaks bluntly about terrorism, Western media, and Arab leaders as well as with passion about his own background and his love for certain Arab writers who may be unknown in the West.

Here's what he says about the Llob novels, which are funny but also chilling in their evocation of violence and corruption:

“I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. I dreamed to reconcile the Algerian reader with his literature. I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” (The interviewer speaks English, and Khadra speaks Arabic and French, which may account for the very occasional odd-looking word. But trust me: Khadra always makes himself clear. )

Could this sensitive and talented author be guilty of underestimating his own work or perhaps even of condescension toward crime fiction, to which he has made memorable contributions?

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

Crimespree has just republished this 2oo4 interview with Bill James, author of the Harpur and Iles series. James' topics include his manic co-protagonist Desmond Iles ("He's basically a good cop. But very basically."), the laughable pretensions of his drug dealers, and some interesting thoughts on female characters I have not discussed here.

He also talks about the music he likes (Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, among other musicians), and his non-crime writing (He's written and published a study of Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra goes to the movies

A new post brings the exciting news that the movie version of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri is to be released in France April 25. The site offers clips, stills, reviews, production notes, and interviews with Khadra and director Okacha Touita. The clips make the movie look like an urban war film, and Khadra's comments lead me to expect a film noir. Both are entirely appropriate, given the bleak and draining atmosphere of 1990s Algiers, as pictured in Khadra's novels about police Inspector Brahim Llob.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra's "The Attack" is up for a Dagger

I'd always considered Yasmina Khadra's crime novels about Inspector Brahim Llob of the Algiers police as something apart from his other novels — The Sirens of Baghdad, The Swallows of Kabul, Wolf Dreams, The Attack — which constitute a voyage through the Islamic world examining the corrosive effects of fear and extremism on everyday life.

Khadra apparently felt the same way, once telling an interviewer that in the Llob novels, “I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. … I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” If his crime books were not quite the same as his other books, I reasoned, then his other books must not be crime books.

Perhaps, then, Khadra shared my pleasant surprise when the Crime Writers Association in the United Kingdom short-listed The Attack for this year's Duncan Lawrie International Dagger award, alongside novels by Karin Alvtegen, Christian Jungersen, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Fred Vargas.

The Attack is a curious kind of crime story. Its protagonist and first-person narrator, Amin Jaafari, is an Arab surgeon living comfortably and successfully in Tel Aviv who is shocked when a suicide bomb rips through a crowded restaurant, and his wife disappears at the same time. Though the novel has police as characters, the investigator is Jaafari himself, driven to find out what compelled his wife into an association with terrorists. Perhaps this is why the CWA judges called The Attack "A harrowing psychological novel which explores the motivations of a suicide bomber, and lifts the conventions of the whydunnit."

And Jaafari is a curious protagonist. The novel's first eighty or so pages contain numerous references to the effects of his wife's disappearance: "The tornado that knocked down all my supports" or "when I resolve to guard against losing control." At least in the novel's first half, though, Jaafari never seems in danger of losing his moorings. He's too vital an observer, too interested in reporting on the seething world around him to be convincing as a man in danger of falling part. And that makes him a lively investigator.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Algeria in the '50 and the '90s: Yasmina Khadra and Alistair Horne

I'm still burrowing into the complicated history of France and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century via Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace,  In the meantime, here's an old post about an Algerian crime novel that paints a grim picture of the country a few decades after the events Horne recounts.

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

Yasmina Khadra's novels about an Algiers police inspector named Brahim Llob owe much to the tradition of the alienated detective, but Khadra's wit is more bitter than is usual for that wisecracking tradition, and his target is his own country. Thus the opening pages of Dead Man's Share offer this:

"I try to catch the wall doing something wrong so I can investigate it."

but also

"We Algerians react only to what happens to us, never to forestall something that might happen to us.

"While waiting for the storm, we carry on with our rituals. Our patron saints take good care of us, our garbage cans are overflowing with food, and the planet's impending economic crisis is as distant as a comet—to us."

The novel's opening pages are full of bitter reflections on what Algeria does to its thinkers, how it consumes people of talent, how its leaders want to keep the people dumb. There may be a touch of autobiography to such passages; "Yasmina Khadra" is a pen name that the author, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, adopted to avoid censorship when serving as an Algerian army officer. He now lives and writes in France.

***

Dead Man's Share, published in French in 2004 as La part du mort and translated in 2009, is the fourth Brahim Llob novel. Khadra's comprehensive Web site (in French) includes excerpts, summaries, news, interviews, and the author's explanation of why he writes in French rather than Arabic.

A 2007 article surveys Khadra's work, including the Llob novels and non-series books that constitute a travelogue the Muslim world's miseries and agonies (The Attack, The Swallows of Kabul, The Sirens of Baghdad). And here are previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts about Khadra (click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012, 2013

L'humour et la violence de Yasmina Khadra

Je viens de commencer Morituri, le premier roman par Yasmina Khadra qui concerne le commissaire Brahim Llob de la police d'Algers (il'y en a quatre dans la serie jusqu'à maintenant). J'essaie de le lire chapitre par chapitre -- un chapitre en traduction anglais, puis le meme en version originale. Patientiez-vous s'il vous plait, mes chers lecteurs!

Comme le deuxieme dans la serie, Double Blanc (Double Blank), les premieres pages de Morituri sont plein d'images de la violence, l'ordure, la crainte, la mort et la pourriture -- et aussi d'un humour frappant et tres noir: Le lieutenant de Llob "ne rentre plus chez lui, a Bab el Oued, depuis qu'un brelan de barbus est venu predendre les mesures de sa carotide pour lui choisir un couteau approprie."

"Sais-tu ce qui arrive aux gars qui se font trop de souci, Lino?" dit Llob a cet lieutenant traumatise. "Ils ont des enfants chauves."

Prochain: Morituri comme portrait de la corruption.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Commentary on Khadra

An article in CrimeSpree Magazine's online version shares thoughts about Yasmina Khadra, whose many novels include four about the Algiers police inspector Brahim Llob. The article discusses some of the controversies surrounding the complex figure of Khadra, among them his service in Algeria's army.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A Temple-Khadra connection

I've just come across a December article from the Australian called What the writers read, in which authors as well as critics are asked to choose the best books they read in 2006. Peter Temple chose Kel Robertson's Dead Set, for example, and he also had this to say about Mike Davis's Planet of Slums: Davis' "brilliant synthesis of the works of dozens of scholars leads to a frightening prediction: a world of `feral, failed cities' in which the well-off live in fortified sanctuaries while helicopter gunships patrol the slums and extremist religions of all kinds are among the opiates of the wretched masses."

Recent headlines from Rio de Janeiro lend credence to that vision. But so does the work of a writer I've discussed here several times: Yasmina Khadra. Here's Algiers police Inspector Brahim Llob in Khadra's novel Morituri: "Once past a police barrier we cross a downtown neighborhood with the air of an Indian cemetery, bypass a part of Bab el Oued where the simple folk fornicate ardently to keep themselves warm, and climb the sinuous road which leads to the city heights. Without warning the hovels vanish and we burst upon a little Eden bedecked with opulent villas, Swiss chalets and hanging gardens ... `Hell! Just take a peek at those fortresses, Super.'"

Earlier in the novel, Llob "gaze(s) at the guru in the photo: twenty-eight years old. Never went to school. Never had work. Messianic peregrinations across Africa, preaching absolute virulence and an implacable hatred toward the entire world. And now here he was setting himself up as a righter of wrongs: thirty-four murders, two volumes of fatwa, a harem in every bush and a scepter in every finger."

One generally associates wretchedness of the kind Davis discusses with teeming Asian or sub-Saharan African cities, but it sounds as if Brahim Llob's Algiers is right up there. Or down there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Love and war

Yesterday (or, strictly speaking, early this morning), I wrote about the corruption of Yasmina Khadra's Algiers in his novel Morituri. So pervasive and all-penetrating is the rot that it poisons and saps the protagonist's desire for his wife.

Today, in Philadelphia's excellent Big Jar Books, I chanced upon the following on the back cover of a Vintage paperback edition of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida:

"In medieval literature, Troy represents the perfection of normal human life on the brink of its destruction by a more corrupted force. By writing about this norm, Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

As in fourteenth-century England, so in 1990s Algeria. Khadra knew what he was doing when he opened Morituri with a scene of poisoned love.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Who will be the next Samir Spade? Or the first one? (Crime fiction in the Arab world)

An article earlier this month from the London Book Fair (hat tip to Sarah Weinman) touched on issues that crop up from time to time at Detectives Beyond Borders. The subject was a speech by Amr Moussa, secretary general of the League of Arab States, on the "immense challenges" facing the Arab books world.

"The Arab League recognizes the shortcomings of education in the Arab world," he said, highlighting issues that included the inability of many would-be readers to afford books. But all was not negative. Moussa cited positive signs, including what he said was a decline in censorship, and more translation abroad.

Both the positive and the negative judgments dovetail with matters that have arisen on this blog. One of my early posts concerned a trip to Tunisia, where I found no crime fiction. Our local guide suggested an explanation that tallies with one of Mussa’s: that many Tunisians simply earned too little money to afford books.

Some time later, the questions of poverty and censorship arose in an exchange of e-mails with Matt Rees, who sets his novels in the Palestinian territories. Though the subject was crime fiction, the discussion touched on subjects Moussa raised in connection with Arabic literature in general.

“There are two separate issues,” Rees wrote. “One is that the book market is very small … My theory is that the Arab world is very prone to conspiracy theories, but the uncovering of the truth is generally not encouraged by governments or religious establishments – in political terms. Though the detective novel grows out of situations of corruption (Hammett's San Francisco or Chandler's Santa Monica), it also depends on a conception that when right is uncovered, it can also be carried through. Unfortunately the Arab world suffers from a lack of that freedom."

Rees also said crime fiction was virtually unknown in the Arab world, in part for reasons outlined above. What does this all mean? Perhaps that if Amr Moussa is right, and if a measure of liberalization does come to Arabic culture in general and publishing in particular, a new Arabic crime fiction might result.

There might be a way to go, though, at least in some Arab lands. The Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra, author of the searing Brahim Llob crime novels, writes in French because "I wanted to write. In Russian, Chinese, Arabic. But to write! At the beginning, I wrote in Arabic. My Arabic teacher ridiculed me, whereas my French teacher encouragd me." And Khadra, who lives in voluntary exile in France, once told an interviewer that:

"Algerian readers like me a lot. They read me in French because I am not translated into Arabic. I am translated into Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, in the majority of the languages, except in Arabic. But that has nothing to do with the Arab peoples. It is the leaders who seek, as always, to dissociate the people from the elites so they can continue to reign and cultivate clanism and mediocrity."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Love, war, crime fiction, and a question for readers

I posted more than a year ago about the chilling opening chapter of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri, in which the ravages of fighting in Algeria have sapped the protagonist even of the consolation of sexual desire:

"Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed – she holds no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she's there when I am afraid of the dark."

The next day, I found a discussion of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida that said: "Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

In A Grave in Gaza, Matt Rees' protagonist is haunted by deaths he has witnessed:

"Omar Yussef dreamed of death ... Death wasn't following him anymore. It was sharing his bed, not like a wife, but like an illicit lover, jealous and angry, giving him no sleep."

Once again, war is a destroyer of love (though only in his dreams for the eminently well-adjusted, decidely non-screwed-up, warped, embittered, cowed or otherwise damaged Omar Yussef). What other modern crime stories use this ancient theme?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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More about fictional detectives of a certain age (notes on genre)

A reader's critical remarks about my recent post Deadline in Athens, Part II prompted some thoughts about the nature of "genre" fiction.

The reader objected to my inclusion of Peter Temple's Jack Irish on a list of (mostly) middle-aged detectives with bad, sad or questionable marital histories and, in some cases, a tendency toward alcohol and self-pity (and, yes, Jack Irish is a detective, even though he might not list "detective" as his profession if asked to do so on a tax return. There is ample precedent for using the term even if the sleuth in question is not a police officer or professional investigator. T.J. Binyon's excellent history Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction includes amateurs of all kinds. For the purposes of my discussion, a detective was anyone engaged in trying to solve a crime or conduct an investigation. Detective seemed more serious and proper a word than sleuth.)

The reader's main objection, though, was to my having lumped Jack Irish in with other crime-fiction protagonists. Jack Irish, he wrote, "has more friends than is natural, and is one of the most interesting and complex characters in the genre." Further, he admonished me to read more Jack Irish novels "before you cram him into a pigeonhole."

He's right -- on the first point. With respect to the admonition, however, a pigeonhole is the last thing I tried to cram Jack Irish into. If anything, I pushed him onto a pedestal. Here is part of what I wrote in October about Bad Debts, the first Jack Irish novel:

"Yes, Jack Irish has lost his wife to a violent killer. Yes, he came close to personal and professional ruin because of it. But no, he does not sink into self-pity. More to the point, he is capable of clear-eyed self-analysis that no self-dramatizing American, self-pitying Scottish or self-conscious Swedish detective-novel protagonist would be able to manage."

Irish's low-key perspective, I wrote, "makes this something quite new in tone."

The larger issue, though, is genre. My light-hearted list included, in addition to Irish, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Hector Belascoaran Shayne, Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and a few others. That's an interesting and varied group of protagonists, and it is not "pigeonholing" to recognize that they are of a type. Authors themselves often recognize this in ways that are far too numerous to list here. They allude or refer specifically to earlier crime writers or detectives. Their scenes echo illustrious precedents in great detective fiction.

The link can be subtle, as in Brahim Llob's chilling account of how the fear and violence in Algiers have blunted his sexual desire for his wife in Yasmina Khadra's Morituri. Or it can be explicit and hilarious, as in Robert Crais' Stalking the Angel, where Elvis Cole welcomes a beautiful female client to his office, as so many previous fictional private investigators had, only Cole is standing on his head at the time.

Even if the author does not make the connection, the reader does. If someone writes a "mainstream" novel about a divorced, 45-year-old accountant who likes a drink from time to time and has a job to do, no one thinks anything of it. But substitute detective for accountant, and all kinds of associations come into play. The author may move against this type, may move with it, may ring changes on it, or may do all at the same time in a kind of counterpoint between writer, reader and genre, but the type is always there. Even in the face of something as unfamiliar as the eighteenth-century Judge Dee story translated by Robert van Gulik, most readers, maybe all, will invoke the more familiar fictional detectives, if only as examples of what Judge Dee is not. (Note: That book, published in English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, inspired Van Gulik to write his own series of Judge Dee novels.)

In any case, this story has a happy ending. I'd been thinking of reading more Jack Irish, and the thoughts that led me to write this comment also sent me to a nearby bookshop, where I bought Black Tide, the second Jack Irish novel. I've read the first chapter, and it's brilliant. But then, I expected no less when I paid tribute to Jack Irish by including him on my list of interesting and distinctive fictional detectives who happen to share certain demographic and social characteristics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Ethics and crime stories?

Clea Simon posed some questions on this subject last month on her blog. Her queries included:

Do you think mysteries have or promote ethical systems?
Do you care if justice is served?
and, perhaps most provocative,
can a book be moral or immoral?

I'll pass those questions on to you, but I won't let you off with any yes/no answers. Instead, I'll ask how a crime novel or story can express its ethics in ways other than simply the good guy winning in the end. Is ethics the same as justice? What about stories in which a villain wins or no one wins? What can one say about the ethics systems of such stories? Be sure to give examples!

Such writers as Yasmina Khadra, Jean-Claude Izzo, Jean-Patrick Manchette and perhaps Matt Rees upend or put novel spins on the good-guy-wins-in-the-end ending. One variant is the good-guy-left-standing-alone ending. What others can you think of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Happy birthday to this blog, plus a note on Tokyo Year Zero

Today is the first anniversary of the first Detectives Beyond Borders post, which I mention because I have read that few blogs last this long. Mine, I think, is beyond the teething stage by now and is even walking on its own. So, thanks to all of you who have read and commented over the past twelve months. Keep on doing it, and tell your friends, colleagues and loved ones to join you.

I begin the new blog year with another post about Tokyo Year Zero, this time about its technique. Author David Peace has interpolated memories, presumably the narrator's, and sound effects of the decaying and rebuilding Tokyo into the novel's text. The interpolations are set in italic type, which fairly screams Technique! The same is the case with the frequent repetition of sentences, sometimes with minor variants in word order.

But Peace has put the technique to exceedingly good use. The constant ton-ton-ton-ton of hammers and the repetition are highly effective ways of translating the noise, squalor and monotony of a war-ravaged city into terms a reader can understand and feel. The devices are far more effective than exclusively descriptive passages would be, though Peace offers plenty of those, too, and does it well. Peace makes the squalor a part of the very texture of the narrative. He does as good a job of describing war's effects on people's minds and daily lives as does Yasmina Khadra in Morituri.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The Politics of Killing a Victim by Decapitating Him and Shoving His Head in a Bidet

Yasmina Khadra is another pretty interesting guy -- yes, he's a man, despite the female name. (He's a former Algerian army officer who began writing under his wife's names to evade military censors and later fled to France in a self-imposed exile.) He's probably best known these days for novels that examine the causes and effects of terror and militant fundamentalism among ordinary people in the Middle East and North Africa: The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, In the Name of God and, coming next year in English translation, The Sirens of Baghdad. Khadra has also published four crime novels about an honest and disillusioned Algiers police inspector oppressed by his city's squalor and surrounded by terror and corruption.

Double Blank, the second of the four, makes my list because -- stop me if you've heard this before -- it takes special advantage of its setting. Setting is everything here, in the physical, political, social and psychological senses. Squalor abounds. Uncertainty pervades all. Fear and corruption seep into characters' work, into their diets. In the first book of the series, they even invade the protagonist's sleep. So, how does Khadra's Inspector Brahim Llob survive? He's honest. He's compassionate, yet without illusions. He's wary of power, but he confronts the powerful when he has to. He has a dry sense of humor. He's a North African Philip Marlowe. (He's not quite that, though several reviewers have seen stylistic parallels with Chandler. Hammett is a pertinent comparison, too. Double Blank's final pages are a distant echo of The Maltese Falcon's.)

The first murder victim, whose grim fate I borrowed for the title of this post, is a senior diplomat. This is Algeria in the 1990s, so Islamic fundamentalists must be responsible, right? Llob is not so sure, and his investigation takes him in surprising directions. Not that Llob is sentimentally disposed toward Islamic fundamentalists. One such character is called "the Hairdresser" -- because he has a history of chopping off his victims' heads.

The novel's two dark forces -- murderous fundamentalism, and spectacular official corruption -- hover like specters above everything, and a third force creeps into play before the villain gets his in the end. Llob must work against and around all three, without illusions and with a grimly humorous attitude, to solve the crime. Here's Llob with a powerful figure in the government who has called him in for a secret assignment:

"I must admit, I'm taken by surprise. Why me?"

"Why not you?"

That's not good enough for me. After thirty years of hand-to-hand combat with disappointment, I'm certain that nothing in our country happens by coincidence.

And here he is with a sleazy character, a possible small-time terrorist who has been evading him and withholding information:

I address Big Chief Standing Yak: "I've got an idea. Let's play Arabian Nights, okay? You be Scheherazade and I'll be the sultan. You can tell me all about your little pals, their hideouts, their plans. Ewegh, over there, he can be Damocles. If you stop talking, he'll hit you over the head until your brains start leaking out of your nostrils. If you survive, you earn a reprieve until tomorrow night. What do you think?"

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

For all its wisecracking, Double Blank is a serious book. It is also elliptical, with shock chapter endings and days- or weeks-long leaps of time that leave out much of the detail one would find in a conventional police procedural. These two traits of the Llob novels account for a rather spectacular piece of literary snobbery in a blurb on Double Blank's back cover from a Washington Post review of Morituri, the first Llob novel:

"Khadra is often able to finesse the prosaic bits of information-gathering and interviews with suspects that hobble less intelligent mystery writers." (The highlighting is mine.)

May the odious prig who wrote that sentence spend an eternity of sleepless nights on a mattress filled with the collected works of Ed McBain.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Life during wartime

I've just picked up Dan Fesperman's Lie in the Dark, published in 1999 and featuring Vlado Patric, a homicide investigator in wartime Sarajevo. The opening pages offer an eerie description of daytime calm in a war zone, and an unexpectedly testy confrontation between the coffee-deprived Patric and a speechifying reporter.

"I think you are oversimplifying a complex situation," Patric tells the reporter, who replies: "Yes, well that's what I'm paid for, isn't it. Take all the nice blurry grays and turn them into black and white for the public to digest before moving onto the horoscopes and the latest from the Royals." (The reporter's preachiness and self-pity are interesting, considering that Fesperman is himself a reporter who covered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, according to the book's author information.)

I am guessing that this somewhat uneasy opening is Fesperman's way of dealing with the special problems of setting a murder mystery in a war zone. It reminds me of the uneasy self-justification J. Robert Janes offers at the beginning of each of his St. Cyr-Kohler novels, about a French detective and a Gestapo investigator who team up to solve crimes in Nazi-occupied France:

I do not condone what happened during these times, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France the everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?

Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob novels and Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy handle the task more smoothly. Khadra integrates the horror and tension of 1990s Algiers into his first-person narrator-protagonist's everyday activities and observations. Kerr does something similar, plunging his blunt, wise-cracking protagonist directly into the action and offering wry observations about all that surrounds him, including noxious signs of Nazi terror. The observations are all the more striking for their off-handedness. No need for self-justification here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

An interview with Matt Rees

Matt Rees spent a decade as a reporter in the Palestinian territories and wrote a nonfiction book, Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, before deciding he needed another, richer way to tell the stories he found there. His two crime novels, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (The Bethlehem Murders in the U.K.) and A Grave in Gaza (a.k.a. The Saladin Murders) portray a harsh world, populated by villains as callous, venal and brutal as any in crime fiction. But Rees finds beauty in that world, too. He wrote last year in Mystery Readers Journal that:

"By learning [Arabic], I was able to give my characters some of the formalized greetings and blessings that are an important part of Palestinian speech. I translated them, rather than just putting the original Arabic phrase in italics, because I wanted readers to get the poetry of everyday speech. For example, to wish someone good morning my characters say `Morning of joy,' and the response is `Morning of light.' When someone gives them a cup of coffee, they tell them `May Allah bless your hands.' Isn't that beautiful?"

In a new interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Rees talks about his immensely appealing protagonist, Omar Yussef; the models for his characters and stories; and his own favorite crime-fiction writers. One of the latter may surprise you. He also offers good news about the third Omar Yussef mystery. If you're within travelling distance of New York, you can hear Matt Rees read and discuss A Grave in Gaza on Tuesday, Feb. 12 at Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers in Greenwich Village.
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Omar Yussef is a high school history teacher. Why a teacher? And why history?

People are always suggesting to me that Palestinians are stuck in the past. Of course many are, but I've found a lot of Palestinians to be far more forward-looking than that. I wanted Omar Yussef to be a Palestinian who understood the past – a historian – but whose focus was on the future, the next generation – a teacher.

You write that the crimes in your novels are based on real events. What event or events made you decide, "Aha, I'm going to write a novel"?

When I was Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief, I was in a cabbage field near Bethlehem in 2003, interviewing the mother and wife of a Palestinian gunman who'd been killed by Israeli snipers as he crept home to break the Ramadan fast with his family. They talked about discovering his body in the moonlight and touching his blood to their faces, but they also told me in very profound emotional terms what it had been like to go through such an extreme experience. I remember thinking: "This is too good for Time magazine." That death formed the basis for the first killing in The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first of my novels.

Why are the Palestinian territories, Bethlehem in the first book, Gaza in the second, ripe settings for crime stories?

Particularly during the intifada, there was no law and order for Palestinians. Gunmen ruled the towns and refugee camps as gangsters. If they occasionally shot at an Israeli, they could operate their rackets freely, and of course Palestinians were the victims. In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler. Unfortunately for the Palestinians they have very real bad guys, too, many of whom I've met.

In your first novel, Omar Yussef uncovers truth but does not achieve justice. What does this say about life in the territories? About your own conception of what a crime story can and should do?

Mainly it says that I'm not an idealist, but that I am an optimist.

What is your take on the breach of the Rafah border crossing? Hamas emerges having appeared to face down both Israel and Egypt. Will this enhance its standing among ordinary Palestinians, or will people regard it as a cynical power play against Fatah? More to the point, how might it influence your planning for possible future Omar Yussef stories?

Ordinary Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, are sick of Hamas. They elected them to punish Fatah, which was corrupt. They didn't elect them because they believe in an Islamic state. They expected Hamas to negotiate with Israel, but to do so more toughly than Fatah. Instead Hamas allowed itself to be pushed into a corner and continued to behave like an opposition militia. Palestinians want Hamas to behave like a government, and governments don't blow up border fences. As for how this affects Omar Yussef, the book I'm finishing now, in which Omar goes to Nablus, involves Hamas and the kind of tribal/neighborhood conflict that never seems to make it into the newspapers.

The character Khamis Zeydan is a police officer with a dangerous past, yet one who knows his way around the hazards of the territories and is conscious of the corruption around him. How typical a figure is he? What role do men like him play in the territories today? What role will they play in any future Palestinian government?

He's typical of high-level Palestinian military men – though not those with the absolute top jobs. Most of them are very disillusioned. They thought they'd come back from exile to be policemen, and suddenly young gunmen took over the streets and they weren't allowed to do anything about it. Khamis Zeydan is based on a friend of mine who introduced me to many of his colleagues in this discontented echelon of the Palestinian military.

One reviewer invoked Batya Gur's name in discussing your first novel, but I'd call your work a distant cousin of Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob novels as well. His writing is far bleaker than yours, but the two of you share the theme that when factions fight, ordinary people get it in the neck. Have you read his work? What crime novelists have made a particularly strong impression on you?

I'm glad you find him bleaker than me, because one American journalist said my books were the bleakest mysteries she'd ever read. I told her I thought they were quite optimistic. I don't know Khadra's books, though I shall pick them up. My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett, while I love all of Graham Greene's books, including his mysteries. I'm also a fan of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano, which proves that I'm not bleak and am in fact rather a breezy sort of guy. Well, maybe not – I also love Inspector Morse.

In the video you made to promote your second novel, you fling aside a copy of Time magazine. Was that just a bit of whimsy at a former employer's expense, or are you commenting on the inability of media accounts to portray the reality of life in the territories?

We originally intended to have a voice-over for the video where I would, at that point, say "You won't find the reality of Palestine in a newspaper or a magazine. For that, you have to read my books and imagine you're looking down the barrel of one of these." Then I lift a gun to the camera. In the end, we liked the music so much that we kept the talking to an absolute minimum, but you can see why I tossed Time. Of course it was also a bit of revenge for all those nights I had to watch my stories being gutted.

A piece in a French newspaper said your work had a "typically colonialist perspective." The writer cited your caustic comments in the first book about the Arab revolts of 1936. How do you answer such criticism? More broadly, what does it feel like to be a crime novelist who is probably questioned more often about politics than about crime writing?

The comments you're referring to were that during the Arab Revolt the "freedom fighters" degenerated quickly into gangs and ended up killing more Arabs than British soldiers or Jewish immigrants. So I would answer that particular French journalist by saying that (a) the numbers don't lie and (b) that's also what Palestinian historians of the period say. And (c) I'd say that if a character says something in a novel that sounds colonialist, that makes that character a colonialist (maybe), but not necessarily the author. Which leads me to the next part of your question: essentially that people look at my novels as non-fiction dressed up as fiction. I wrote these novels to escape politics. When people ask me about politics, I use it as an opportunity to demonstrate that my novels aren't actually political and that the realms of Middle Eastern diplomacy and politics are far closer to fantasy than the fiction I write.

Early in the second novel, after Omar has arrived in Gaza, he asks Khamis Zeydan: "Why are you killing each other?" Is there some significance to that you? Does the Bethlehemite Omar Yussef regard Gaza and Gazans as a place and people apart?

No, he means the senior Fatah people like Khamis Zeydan are killing each other. As they indeed continue to do rather spectacularly throughout the novel. The infighting among the people who were supposed to govern the Palestinians and lead them toward statehood and peace with Israel is one of the main subjects of A Grave in Gaza, my second novel.

Can readers look forward to future Omar Yussef novels?

In a year, Omar Yussef Book III will be out. It's being edited now. It'll be called The Samaritan's Secret and its set in Nablus, mainly in the old casbah.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Where we holed up

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Get city folks in the country, and they think: "Where do we store the loot?"

Me and Palmqvist — "Killer" Palmqvist; she says calling a woman by her last name is unladylike — figured that after we knocked over a couple of banks, we'd find some out-of-the-way farmhouse where we could hole up until the heat died down.

We found good escape routes and a place to divvy the dosh, only all the dinky banks that once made such easy targets along Maryland's Eastern Shore had been converted to upscale steakhouses and pizzerias.

So we'll move on. In the meantime, we posed as egg-headed collectors and riffled old books at Bookplate in Chestertown and Unicorn Bookshop in Trappe and Mystery Loves Company in Oxford.

I had to buy something in order to avoid suspicion. I came up with:

Not the Mississippi 
River delta

• A stack of paperback original mysteries
• The Oxford History of Ireland
• A nice old edition of Emerson's essays for three dollars and ten cents
• A book of extracts in the original French from Rousseau's Confessions, which doesn't mean I'm confessing anything
• Peter Ackroyd's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur
• Poets and Murder by Robert Van Gulik
• Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra
• Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
• A book about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
• A guide to trees because I figured nothing marks a fellow as an outsider as much as walking around and pointing up and saying, "What's that?" every two minutes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Some sensible words about crime fiction and a question for readers

I generally squirm at discussions of genre vs. “serious” fiction, especially when it comes to my genre, crime. Anti-genreists are snobs, pro-genreists exaggerate their claims. More to the point of these debates, what’s their point? I can enjoy Fred Vargas or Ken Bruen or Ruth Rendell without agonizing over whether they are as worthy as James Joyce or Tolstoy or Ralph Waldo Emerson.

James Fallows’ recent posting on The Atlantic’s Web site, though, held my interest, and not just because he singled out some crime novelists whose work I especially enjoy. No, what makes Fallows’ essay stand out is that he bases his assessment on the actual experience of reading the books:

“I've figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later – or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to `real' fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards. Rabbit Angstrom, Captain Ahab, and Clyde Griffiths (of An American Tragedy), to choose the first three examples that pop into my mind from American fiction.

“I say that `genre' fiction, like spy and crime novels, ascends into the `real' fiction category when the world it presents can exert the same tenacious hold on your mind.”

Among the crime novels that Fallows says meet that standard are Janwillem van de Wetering’s early “Amsterdam Cops” books (though he cites an odd reason for liking them, and he misspells van de Wetering’s name), and Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto.

I agree with those choices, and I would add a few that present “a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards”: Yasmina Khadra’s novels about life in war-torn 1990s Algeria, the delicious social comedy of Bill James’ middle-period Harpur & Iles novels, and perhaps the yearning hope and despair of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy.

OK, readers, what crime writing does the same thing for you? From which books can you “remember something from the book a month later – or, better, six months or a year on”? (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Welcome, Inquirer readers

Today is a proud day for Detectives Beyond Borders, the blog for international crime fiction: DBB is now linked to the online edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer. (You'll find the link on the newspaper's Blogs & Columns page.)

I like to think of this as a clever and productive way for the Inquirer to take advantage of its staff's latent talents and to offer readers material for which there is insufficient space in the newspaper. I hope Inquirer readers will find it a diverting place to learn about and discuss crime writing and crime writers from around the world.

If you've found this link via the Inquirer, welcome for the first of what I hope will be many visits. Stick with me, and you'll learn about crime writers like Algeria's Yasmina Khadra, France's fantastic Fred Vargas, Ireland's Declan Burke and England's well-known William Shakespeare. You'll take flight with Adrian Hyland's Diamond Dove from Australia, and you'll find out why people keep winding up dead under trains in postwar Japanese crime fiction.

We'll discuss issues in international crime fiction, including strategies of translation, and you'll learn what crime-fiction fans in other countries read. You'll also get to chat with an interesting, knowledgeable and friendly group of readers from around the world, and, if you'd like, to practice your French, Italian, German, Spanish and maybe even Finnish.

Welcome. And now, start reading!

© Peter Rozovsky 2007