“Algérie montait à la tête”

Charles de Gaulle in Aïn Témouchent,
Algeria, December 1960

  Sorry, folks, but, as Alistair Horne remarks several times in A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, “Algérie montait à la tête” — Algeria went to one's head (or, one might say, got under one's skin), and it's gone to mine. I'm not sure I'll visit any time soon (though Morocco or a return trip to Tunisia are not out of the question), but I bought a biography of Charles de Gaulle today and also Algerian White, by Assia Djebar.

Here are some of the small and large delights and surprises of Horne's book for me, who had known little about Algeria, particularly about that savage period in its history:

• Almost seven years into the bloody Algerian war, crowds of Muslims shouting: “Algérie algérienne… Vive de Gaulle!” in Aïn Témouchent — and the event that precipitated the deminstration: de Gaulle's astonishing reference in a 1960 speech to “an Algerian Republic, which will one day exist."
• That same year, as plots against de Gaulle's life by disaffected members of the military and pieds noirs mount by the minute, “A handsome young pied noir playboy, tired of life, decided to ram de Gaulle’s helicopter with his private plane.” He didn't do it because he couldn't figure out which helicopter was de Gaulle's.
• Horne's quotations from Frantz Fanon, known previously to me only as the apologist for revolutionary violence, the author of The Wretched of the Earth, and the revolutionary whose éclat was second only to Che Guevara's, on women's roles the Algerian uprisings.The mentions are brief, but the effects of women taking active roles where they had never done before must have been even more cataclysmic in Algeria's traditional Arab and Kabyle cultures than was the influx of women into the workforce in America during World War II.

I should note, too, that Assia Djebar, mentioned above, who is still around today, writes both in French and under an alias (she took the nom de plume because she feared her father's disapproval, her Wikipedia biography says.) Algerian White, according to a blurb, "weaves a tapestry of the epic and bloody ongoing struggle in her country between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society," which makes her seem like a woman worth reading.

It also sounds a bit like Yasmina Khadra, who writes in French under an assumed name and who criticizes both the state of Algeria and what he sees as Western misunderstanding of the Islamic world. Sounds to me like Algeria is one pretty interesting country, though I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting these days.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria is to France and Vietnam to the U.S. as ? is to ?

I'd decided to let Algeria lie for a while until a pair of passages in Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec made me realize Algeria must have penetrated the French consciousness and conscience the way Vietnam did in the United States.

The character in question (dead by the time the novel begins and invoked for his abominable conduct in the community and toward his family) is said to have had a bullet lodged in his head from the Algerian War, and to have been

"taken off active service and they put him into interrogations. Torturing people." 

Revelations of torture during the war shocked the French public, and the matter still comes up in occasional legal cases.  That Vargas could invoke torture and Algeria in a novel published in 2011 (English translation, 2013) suggests at least some in France are still haunted by the subject, and the character in Vargas' book said to have engaged in torture suggests that Vargas regards torture as the materialization of the worst that France has ever done and torturers as the real-life embodiment of the evil spirit always hinted at in her books.

If Algeria is France's conscience and its nightmare, if Vietnam played a similar role for the United States, what are their counterparts for other countries? And have those counterparts appeared in crime fiction?

*

(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A Bastille Day post: Tocqueville on France and Algeria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Day of the Jackal and the Continental Op

So, what does my recent Algeria obsession, in the form of having just read Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, have to do with crime fiction, anyhow?

For one thing, it reinforces how strongly Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, for all its thriller trappings, is really a police procedural that has marked affinities with hard-boiled P.I. stories as well (No wonder it won the best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972).

The villains of Forsyth's classic 1971 novel are the leaders of the OAS, the breakaway paramilitary organization that, enraged by French President Charles de Gaulle's concessions to Algeria, hires a hit man known as the Jackal to kill him. The OAS were (and perhaps still are) dissident military men who constituted themselves as a group in Francoist Spain, then turned self-destructive fanatics and terrorists both in Algeria and in France.

The OAS and their followers were a complex bunch, not least in that they explicitly adopted tactics and organization from their principal opponents, the Algerian FLN, or National Liberation Front. Some had fought in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. Not all were racist. And there was ample anxiety, suspicion, and contempt on the anti-de Gaulle side between some in the OAS on the one hand, and the ultras among the civilian pieds noirs on the other.

Forsyth wisely sketches this background very lightly or not at all. Instead, after setting the stage with the story of a real-life plot against de Gaulle, he has a council of French ministers and other big shots bring in  Claude Lebel, "the best detective in France," and if that sounds like the leading citizens of a Wild West town desperately seeking a new sheriff — or like the Continental Op being called in to clean up Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest — there's more to come.

Lebel is an ordinary cop, and his belittling by pompous, condescending, artistocratic ministers with whom he meets nightly is a running motif of The Day of the Jackal. This may remind readers readers of a thousand stories about P.I.s or cops who have trouble with authority. One passage near novel's end even calls Lebel "the little detective," which would also work as a description of Hammett's squat little Op.

On the plot side of things, Forsyth alternates sections describing the Jackal's maneuvers all over Europe, and the authorities' efforts to catch him. The idea, of course, is to build suspense by getting the reader wondering if the cops will get to the Jackal before the Jackal gets to de Gaulle, and the chapters devoted to the authorities are an exciting, convincing story of a criminal investigation, only in this case of a criminal who plans to kill the president of France.

(Hear Frederick Forsyth talk about The Day of the Jackal in an interview with the BBC.)

***

A Savage War of Peace has one passage in particular that, whether or nor Alistair Horne intended so, may remind readers of a famous passage from Raymond Chandler. Take it away, Sir Alistair:

"Then, suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. Men think, and behave, differently. It is a recurrent reminder that this is indeed Africa."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas: The Detectives Beyond Borders interview, Part I

Fred Vargas has won three CWA International Dagger Awards for best translated crime novel, and The Ghost Riders of Ordebec could win her and translator Sian Reynolds a fourth this year.

Vargas was born in Paris, trained as an archaeologist and historian, and is known best to crime-fiction readers for her novels about the Paris police commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his colleagues, novels that partake as much of the fairy tale as they do of the police procedural. 

In the first part of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Vargas talks about Algeria, about the overlap between her careers as author and scientist, about the real story behind her entirely positive trip to my native land, and about the careers of the title characters in The Three Evangelists. She prefaces her answers with remarks that shed light on her working methods (and, perhaps, on my overly analytical questions), and she quotes another notable figure famous under a name other than the one he was born with:

"Dear Peter Rozovsky, 

"First of all, I am afraid to disappoint you. As Woody Allen said: `I have no answers to your questions, but I have questions to your answers!' 

"I just want to say that I don’t control everything I do when I am writing novels. A large part of the story comes — or, better, imposes itself — during the writing, and takes me along unforeseen ways that I am obliged to follow. Ways where I can meet characters that I had not envisaged previously, for example the old woman, Léone, whom Adamsberg meets in the path in the forest at the beginning of The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. And there it goes. In a way, I don’t have great freedom, because the book and the words want to decide (except for the sound). 

"So, it is difficult for me to `explain' everything, and you will be probably disappointed by my answers!"

Happily, she is wrong. Enjoy the interview. (And read Part II.)

========

Detectives Beyond Borders: The dead father in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was a torturer in Algeria, a sadist but at the same time a wounded victim of that war. What do Algeria – and the word torture – mean for France and the French in 2013? For you as an author of crime novels?

Fred Vargas: Not as an author of crime novels. What the French army did in Algeria, the torture, remains a great shame for a large part of us. It can’t be and musn’t be forgotten, even if I was a child during this war.

DBB: You call the young fire starter in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec so frequently by the diminutive «Mo» that it’s a surprise when someone calls him by his real name: Mohammed. Why did you do this?

FV: Well, when I present a new character, I don’t say if he or she is white or black or Asiatic. I don’t mention his or her religion, either. So everybody thinks, instinctively, «OK, he or she is white and «classical» (Christian or without any faith). But this is not certain!!! Do we know if Danglard, Retancourt, others, come from Christian or Jewish families, for example? No. And I don’t mind. If I explained, in the beginning, that Mo had Arabic origins, I would single him out. Why should I do that? Mo is Mo, first of all.

In fact, a presentation of his origins would be a form of pre-racism, a sort of discrimination, and I hate that, especially now, with our toxic climate here against French people of Arab origin, the new so-called enemies. OK, he is Mo, as Adamsberg is Adamsberg. Later, the reader will understand why his origin will help transform him into an ideal culprit. But that his name is Mohammed does not imply that he practices the Muslim religion or believes in God. We don’t know that.

DBB: The title characters in The Three Evangelists are historians, one of prehistory, one of the Middle Ages, one of World War I. Why those three historical periods.

FV: I am an archaeologist myself. I specialized in the Middle Ages, but I also studied the prehistoric period. And my eldest brother is an historian, too, one of the foremost specialists in the First World War. It was an obvious pleasure for me to play with these professions I know very well.

DBB: I was born in Montreal, and I appreciated the tension, the jokes, and the linguistic misunderstanding between the French and the Quebecois in Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Why did you send Adamsberg and his team to Quebec in that book ? If you have visited Quebec yourself, did you experience tension of this kind?

FV: Again, a disappointment for you, with a very simple answer: I am not a great traveler, but I have been to Quebec twice. So, as I wanted to go out of Paris, out of France, I placed the action there, where I had been fascinated by the kindness of people, the great beauty of landscapes. I know the small, ancient path across the forest along the Outaouais River. And I was also very interested in the differences between languages from Quebec and France.

Tensions? Not at all, never. Often, with friends, we laughed together about our different expressions. After the publications, there were some people from Quebec who criticized these jokes about language, thinking that I was mocking them. I was sad about this misunderstanding and wrote an article in Le Devoir to explain that it was respect and curiosity.


DBB: The plague plays an important role in Have Mercy on Us All. You have done research on the plague. What is the relationship between your two careers, as a historian and as an author? What does each take from the other?

FV: I assumed over the years that there was no link between my two jobs. Writing detective stories was a way to forget in a small way the hard scientific work during holidays. But little by little, I understood that, probably, my passion for resolving things, problems, for finding the truth, was at the very heart of the two jobs.

In any case, I try not to exaggerate when I use some historical or zoological knowledge in a book. It must remain a detective story, not become a historical one with lessons and everything boring. I had worked seven years to resolve the plague’s epidemiology, and I was tempted to use this great disease as a symbol of a great fear in a novel, so I did. But as I said, it is not me who choose my ideas, unfortunately, it is the ideas which choose me. And the ideas said : «Well, put the plague in this book.» And I answered : «OK.» I write my scientific papers and books in a very different manner, of course. But even there, I try not to lose the reader’s interest.

***

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

Peace to Tunisia!

(Photo of Roman ruins at Dougga, Tunisia, by your humble blogkeeper)

Back in 2006 I visited Tunisia and wrote about it in one of my earliest posts.

A commenter on that post replied that

"In Algeria, they used to say: When Algeria is a man (a warrior), Tunisia is a woman (peaceful) ... "

I hope that pacific reputation survives the country's current political upheaval.

My adventures in Tunisia included a retired English archaeology professor breaking into a show tune from Oklahoma to help explain rivalries between herders and farmers in Punic and pre-Punic times.

An Eid Mubarak! (Blessed Eid!) uttered at the conclusion of any transaction went a long way toward generating good will, earning me smiles, at least one slap on the back, and accurate directions from a shopkeeper who led me out of his store and into the street so he could be sure of steering me right. And I saw a henna-haired woman in a sleeveless top, as slender and graceful as a cypress in the Mediterranean breeze, loading her shopping cart with booze in the liquor section of a supermarket in Tunis.

Peace and good wishes to the sane, hospitable nation of Tunisia!

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Amara Lakhous on conflict Islamic style

Thursday's "Wide world of hate" post took up the diversity of ethnic resentment, conflict, and suspicion as revealed in crime fiction.

Amara Lakhous' Divorce Islamic Style, a social comedy in the guise of a spy story, offers this:

"I have to constantly remind myself that I’m Tunisian, and this neighborhood is full of Egyptians. Many people don’t know that there are rivalries among the Arabs. For example, it’s not smooth sailing between Syrians and Lebanese, between Iraqis and Kuwaitis, between Saudis and Yemenis, and so on and so on. It’s why they can’t seem to come up with a plan for unity, in spite of a common history, geography, Arabic, Islam, and oil. The model of the European Union will have to wait!"

That the Tunisian is really an Italian impersonating a Tunisian – albeit an Italian whose grandfather had been born in Tunisia of Italian parents before returning to Italy, where he longed to return to the land of his birth – suggests the fun Lakhous gets up to.

Here's what happens in the dormitory where the undercover Tunisian finds a place to stay:

“The non-Egyptian tenants are divided into two categories. Mohammed, the Moroccan, and I are in second place; we’re Arabs and we can communicate linguistically with the majority, limiting insult and injury where possible. But for the Senegalese and the Bangladeshi there’s no escape: they’re at the bottom. They have to submit or leave. To be Muslim isn’t enough. It’s better to be an Arab Muslim, but it would be fantastic to be an Egyptian Arab Muslim!”

Lakhous, Italian and born in Algiers, is only my latest reading encounter with Algeria. Didier Daeninckx built his novel Murder in Memoriam around the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters. Yasmina Khadra challenges easy notions that the Islamic world is either fundamentalist suicide bombers or Western sellouts.

Coincidence, or did the bloody end of Algeria's colonial ties to France make the country a moral crucible for relations between the West and the Islamic world?

While you ponder the question, here's a song by the Algerian-based-in-France singer Rachid Taha that you've likely heard before, though perhaps not in this version.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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

Technorati tags:
Yasmina Khadra
Brahim Llob
Geoffrey Chaucer

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

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

Technorati tags:
Yasmina Khadra
Geoffrey Chaucer
Matt Rees
Matt Beynon Rees

In France, as Cara Black said, it's complicated

I've reached a convenient temporary stopping point in my Franco-Algerian reading. Before I go, though, here are some thoughts I found today about the Algerian War's lingering effects in Algeria and France from a crime writer who sets her books in the latter.

The crime writer is Cara Black, author of the Aimée Leduc novels, and her post on the Murder is Everywhere blog begins "They killed our cook, threw her body down the well and stuck her head on the fence post."

Lest you think the post is all partisan wailing, its title is "In France it's Complicated."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Deadline in Athens, Part II

How many countries have given the world disillusioned fictional male detectives with bad, sad or uncertain marital histories and quirkily solitary habits? Let me pose the question another way: How many countries are there in the U.N.?

Kurt Wallander from Sweden, John Rebus from Scotland, Franz Heineken and Jack Irish from Australia, Hector Belascoaran Shayne from Mexico, Pepe Carvalho from Spain, Inspector Espinosa from Brazil, Brahim Llob from Algeria and Sartaj Singh from India come to mind, along with a couple of Americans you may have heard of named Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

I’m sure that if Kosovo and New Caledonia attain independence one day, they, too, will eventually produce angst-ridden, divorced, alcohol-weakened fictional sleuths sickened by the senseless violence of Pristina and Nouméa. And if those sleuths are police officers, they will clash with their officious superiors as often as they clash with murderers, drug dealers and blackmailers.

Petros Markaris’ Costas Haritos, chief inspector of the Athens CID, is decidedly of the breed, though with slight differences. Twenty pages into Deadline in Athens, for example, he hasn’t taken a drink yet. He also may turn out to be a bit more arrogant than most, and I’ll be anxious to see if this figures in the plot or is merely an incidental aspect of his character.

Markaris offers some interesting observations about journalism in Greece -- no surprise, given the novel’s titles (it's called The Late-Night News in the U.K.). A flashy young reporter, he has Haritos tell us, is “A modern-day Robespierre with a camera and a microphone” who refuses to address Haritos by name: “He believed … that he represented the conscience of the people, and the conscience of the people treated everyone equally: no name or sign of respect, courtesies that only lead to distinctions between citizens.”

This interested me because it's American journalists who have traditionally taken themselves seriously and waxed somber about their responsibilities and principles, sometimes to the amusement of their British colleagues. (Haritos has a wonderful comeback for the reporter: “I ignored him and addressed myself to them all as a body. If he wanted equality, he’d have it.”)

Haritos also tells the reader something that ought to make any newspaper reader or employee nod in sad recognition: “Reporters are always on my back. … Once it was newspapermen and newspapers; now it’s reporters and cameras.”

Even at this early stage, Haritos shows signs of the idealism that lurks beneath the crusty surface of so many fictional detectives. He conforms to type in another way, as well. I alluded to the quirkily solitary habits of middle-aged fictional sleuths; Haritos’ habit may be weirder than most. He reads dictionaries for pleasure.

P.S. I would not want to create the impression that this interesting group of fictional detectives is nothing but a big bag of symptoms. Jack Irish and Franz Heinken, in particular, are low on angst. Must be the air in Australia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Petros Markaris
Crime fiction, Greece

Wake Up to Murder, Peter Rabe, sticking it to Florida, and a question for readers

If Day Keene's Wake Up to Murder had appeared this century rather than in the middle of the last one, someone would have turned protagonist Jim Charters quest to remember where he picked up the mysterious $10,000 into an interactive video game.

2) Gil Brewer knew what to say to hot-weather chauvinists who lord it over the friends in the Northeastern United States in wintertime. Here's Lew Brookbank,protagonist of Wild to Possess:

"He took a short quick one. snapping off the neck. and turned to stare at the wall of Florida jungle growth beyond the road shoulder. 

"Florida, he thought. Why can't I get away from it?  Shove it--every last flat, wet, stinking acre."

3) I was not crazy about the first Peter Rabe novel I tried to read, but The Box is different, a slightly darker, slightly funnier version of that familiar theme of non-natives stranded in North Africa with nothing to do but wait ... Highsmith, Casablanca, Camus ... Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia apparently exercised considerable influence over makers of crime novels and movies in the middle of the last century, even before the wars that ended French colonial rule there. Why, readers, was this the case?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

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

Technorati tags:
Yasmina Khadra
Brahim Llob

Chandler in South Africa

A year and a half ago I published a short international list of crime writers indebted in various ways to Raymond Chandler or who paid tribute to him. The list included Matt Rees, who is from Wales and who sets his novels in the Palestinian territories, Ireland's Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, Bolivia's Juan de Recacoechea, Algeria's Yasmina Khadra, Australia's Peter Corris and Garry Disher and, in his delightful social history of English crime fiction, Colin Watson.

Readers' comments added to the list, and this week I've come across a clever tribute in Roger Smith's Mixed Blood. Here's the famous opening of Chandler's "Red Wind":

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

Here's Smith's opening:

"Jack Burn stood on the deck of the house high above Cape Town watching the sun drown itself in the ocean. The wind was coming up again, the southeaster that reminded Burn of the Santa Anas back home. A wind that made a furnace of the night, set nerves jangling, and got the cops and emergency teams caught up in people's bad choices."

Smith repeats the motif throughout the novel, as here, on page 226:

"The wind howled across the Flats, picking up the sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses."

This and other bits like it may describe accurately the brutal Cape Town Flats, but they also constitute an extended homage to one of Chandler's best-known passages.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Group of Death

Jeff VanderMeer has organized a World Cup of Fiction, which groups the thirty-two nations of this year's soccer World Cup and asks readers to handicap the field in fiction instead of football. I'm refining his terms and restricting myself to crime writing.

Group A is the tournament’s Group of Death (and where is that term more meaningful than in a crime-fiction competition?)

For South Africa, Roger Smith, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Richard Kunzmann, James McClure (no one said the players had to be alive), Michael Stanley and Jassy Mackenzie head a lethal group of strikers that could be deep for years.

The French have Dominique Manotti, Fred Vargas and Tonino Benacquista in a midfield that plays a less attacking style than the vuvuzela-tooters but is capable of deadly surgical strikes.

France could wangle for Yasmina Khadra on its side, too, though he could make a dangerous striker for Algeria in Group C.

In Group D, Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Leigh Redhead, David Owen, Chris Nyst, and Adrian Hyland are just a few of the names on an Australian side that is a strong dark-horse contender, just as the Socceroos were in the real World Cup – at least until the competition started. (Temple, by the way, was born in – you guessed it – South Africa.)

Italy has Group F wrapped up, and I'll tab New Zealand to sneak into the knockout stage.

The Netherlands and Japan should fight it out in Group E of the Crime Fiction World Cup, hampered only by the fact that their stars, Janwillem van de Wetering and Seicho Matsumoto, are both dead.

England and the United States could make some noise in Group C.

Who do you think wins the 2010 World Cup of Crime Fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Global Reading Challenge: Africa

Here in North America, I've been asked by a reader in Europe to prepare a list of crime fiction from Africa for a Global Reading Challenge. In the interest of promoting understanding in this globalized, interdependent, multipolar world, I'm happy to comply. Here's a selection of African crime writers and stories I've written about here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

I've recently featured Roger Smith, Meshack Masondo, Richard Kunzmann, Deon Meyer and Michael Stanley from South Africa. Mike Nicol, a novelist and keeper of the Crime Beat South Africa blog, has contributed to Detectives Beyond Borders as well. Crime Beat will also serve as a guide to far more African crime writers than I can mention here.

But there's more. From Algeria (actually from France, where he went into voluntary exile) Yasmina Khadra writes bleak, occasionally grimly humorous detective novels set amid the strife and carnage of 1990s Algiers. The Congolese author Alain Mabanckou wrote the satirical, creepy inside-the-killer's head African Psycho.

Daliso Chaponda, born in Malawi and subsequently a resident of Canada and the United Kingdom, offers a broadly satirical vision of dictatorship in his short story "Heroic Proportions."

Africa also gave the world one of the most distinguished authors ever to turn his hand to crime writing: the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. His novel The Thief and the Dog is a bleak yet touching noir tale worthy of Jim Thompson or David Goodis.

Africa has also attracted the attention of crime writers from elsewhere, including Patricia Highsmith and Michael Pearce, who set his Mamur Zapt series in late colonial Egypt. Among Australia's fine crime writers, Peter Temple was born in South Africa, and David Owen was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Malawi and Swaziland. Both are worth reading whether or not they satisfy the rules of this Global Reading Challenge or any other.

Happy reading wherever you may roam.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Some good books I've read so far in 2013

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil. No big deal that this book is on some crime fiction blog's top-books list; it's one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It's funny, it's acute in its analysis of social types, a kind of grimly prophetic social comedy. (Musil fled Austria with his Jewish wife and died in 1942 in Switzerland.)

Maifya, Charlie Stella.  A bit different from Stella's previous novels at first, with less humor and characters more savage and vicious. But the same multiple viewpoints he uses in the other books—Stella loves to show men and women at work, out, and at home, doing what they do in their daily lives—here make the vicious Russian gangsters even more chilling. The humor picks up  when Stella introduces a few Italian cops and agents, and Stella's sympathy for working men and women struck a chord with me even though my collar would be decidedly white if I didn't wear T-shirts or sweaters to work most days.

Graveland, Alan Glynn. Words are weapons, and Alan Glynn knows weapons can be evasive and defensive as well as offensive. Anyone who says "going forward" clearly would prefer that you not examine what he or she has left behind. Glynn's sensitivity to the evasions that lurk behind fashions in everyday speech are one reason his tales of corporate and government infiltration are so convincing.

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alistair Horne.  Here's an excerpt from one amateur review of Horne's history of the Franco-Algerian war: “Alistair Horne … is first and foremost hopelessly biased in favor of the Algerians.” Here’s a bit from another: “This epic work … remains a remarkably racist work loved by State Department officials and neocons alike … Alistair Horne describes in gory detail atrocities committed by the FLN, or Algerian nationalist rebels, while skimming over far worse atrocities committed by the nice white-guy French."  Horne must have done something right.

The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth. For all its thriller trappings, this story of a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle is really a police procedural—and a damned good one—that has marked affinities with hard-boiled P.I. stories as well. No wonder it won the best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972.

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson. Dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of Thompson's work that I've read.

Pike, Benjamin Whitmer. This 2010 novel is like Daniel Woodrell, but with a tougher edge, maybe with a shot of Jim Thompson mixed in.

Laidlaw, William McIlvanney. Start with compassion and humor. End with such telling detail that one feels one is reading novel observation rather that obligatory place-holders. Here's how the novel opens: "Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. ..." Find me a better description of alienation than that, of feeling inside one's body and removed from it at the same time. If you do, I bet it won't end on McIlvanney's humorous note:  "A voice with a cap on said. `Where's the fire, son?'"

Europe Between the Oceans and Britain Begins, Barry Cunliffe; Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain, Stephen Oppenheimer.  Three stimulating books on the origins of Europe's populations that debunk old theories without drifting off into bloviating self-congratulation.

Gun Work, David J. Schow. A perfect "new" hard-boiled novel in significant ways. It captures the hard edge of post-war pulp without seeming campy or nostalgic on the one hand or veering into smirky self-consciousness or jokey, over-the-top violence on the other. (Events obliged Schow. Gun Work is set in Mexico, the country's explosion in kidnapping last decade permitting a plausible recycling of that old hard-boiled stand-by, the dangerous trip south of the border.)

Bluffing Mr. Churchill, John Lawton. Lawton's Troy novels are a delicious social comedy and social history of England in the mid-twentieth century: "Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago. ‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’”

Tapestry, J. Robert Janes. Tapestry's moral, ethical, and physical environments are the darkest I have read in crime fiction. Kohler and St. Cyr are called on to work in a city so darkened by blackouts that characters must feel their way through the streets at night. Plunder, greed, puritanism, lust, patriotism, violence, and luxury in the face of deprivation slip in and out of focus, the reader never sure if any one is staged to cover for another.

The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks; Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, H.R. McMaster. Some of what these two books taught me: 1) High respect for the skill, tact, wisdom, foresight, and calculation of the good generals: George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway. 2) Hatred of the sloppy invocation of military metaphors in areas of civilian life whose laughable triviality is matched only by the self-seriousness of the morons who invoke them. Every football coach who likens his game to war. Every corporate executive who issues a mission statement. Every middle manager who expects his or her underlings to take that crap seriously. Every business person who invokes The Art of War. 

The Hunter and Other Stories, Dashiell Hammett. Includes twenty stories uncollected or unpublished during Hammett's lifetime, plus a tantalizing fragment of an uncompleted Sam Spade story. E-book editions include three additional pieces of what Hammett hoped would turn into political novels, according to Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and a co-editor of the new volume. Rivett invokes The Maltese Falcon in discussing "The Secret Emperor," but I'm reminded of The Glass Key. Like that novel, which appeared in 1931, "The Secret Emperor" feels like it could have been written decades later, even today.

Criminal Enterprise, Owen Laukkanen. Laukkanen's second novel does some familiar crime-fiction tricks well, and it rings refreshing changes on others. It manages the considerable feat of keeping all its subplots interesting, and its twists are surprising but plausible.

Interface, Joe Gores. If you like Dashiell Hammett and Donald Westlake, you'll like Interface. If don't like Hammett and Westlake, as Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

HHhH, Laurent Binet. Binet's 2010 novel is a thriller; a history lesson; a lesson on the importance of history (which is not the same thing); and a meditation on how we read, write, and experience fiction and history; and it has, as almost any serious book will, good jokes.

California, Kevin Starr. Starr is a passionate, engaging writer and a great lover of California, which he served as state librarian. Yet he is fair-minded in dealing with the violence that has attended the on-going birth of this strange piece of the planet. He is the sort who can give history a good name. He's also savvy enough to tie the state's raucous, dream-filled history to the crime writing that arose there.

Blood's A Rover, James Ellroy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013