All hail Allan Guthrie

First I received a note from that crown prince of Northern Ireland crime, Gerard Brennan of Crime Scene NI, that the first chapter of his novel Piranhas is available online. My only complaint is that the selection makes me want to call Belfast, reach through the phone lines, grab Gerard by his Carlsberg-swilling gullet, and throttle him until he reveals what happens when Liam and Wee Danny face off.

Then I browsed the site that hosts Gerard's excerpt, Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals. Guthrie's an author. Guthrie's an agent. And now I find that Guthrie is an ingenious promoter of good, tough, hard-edged crime fiction. The site offers news, excerpts, interviews and profiles featuring all kinds of authors I know and like (Scott Phillips, Christa Faust, Sandra Ruttan, Vicki Hendricks, Adrian McKinty) and, more to the the point, with those I think I might like just because I trust the company they keep on Guthrie's site.

And then the topper of all toppers: Ken Bruen's 2004 interview, in which he tells Ray Banks that:

"I abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. His 1988 novel Protection just won the European Crime Novel of 2004 in France. His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent."

Oh, man, does that Bruen have good taste in crime fiction. Readers of this blog may know that my admiration for James' dark, funny, gorgeous writing knows no bounds, that I consider him perhaps the best prose stylist ever to have written crime fiction in English. Mr. Bruen, you have made my day.

(Click here for another link between Allan Guthrie and your humble blog keeper.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Savage morning after: Allan Guthrie's Killing Mum

When we left our friends at the end of Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, the prospects for some were uncertain. Guthrie's new novella, Killing Mum, finds a career for one of that book's peripheral characters and looks more closely at the career of another, one work assignment in particular. Here they are, preparing to torch a van to dispose of evidence and hoping to disguise the blaze as joyriders' vandalism:

"When he'd finished, he walked over to watch Jordan's handiwork. Jordan had written FIREMEN on the side of the van and was standing staring at it.

"He noticed the beam of Carlos's torch, stepped back. I'm stuck.

"`Suck,' Carlos said, around the torch.

"No, stuck.

"Carlos took the torch out of his mouth. `Suck,' he said. `Add "suck."'

"Okay. Jordan shook the can, sprayed out the word. `Firemen suck.' Sounds a bit lame.

"`Cock,' Carlos said. `Add "cock."'

"Nice."

Guthrie has moved into darker territory with his latest novel, Slammer, but I'd like to think of Hard Man, Savage Night and Killing Mum as a fictional universe, a ****ed-up, affecting, funny, murderous family saga that does a bit of genre-jumping in the bargain.

Guthrie's Web site links to a purchase page for Killing Mum that quotes reviews of his other work. One blurb seems especially pertinent: “Guthrie’s control of this dark material is sheer wizardry.” Killing Mum contains a lot of twists for a book of about ninety pages, and they're good twists, throwing the plot in unexpected directions without seeming manipulative.

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N.B.: Killing Mum is part of a series of novellas called Crime Express from Five Leaves Publishing. Hat tip to Donna Moore's Big Beat From Badsville blog for heaping well-deserved praise on these slim, inexpensive, tough-as-nails books. And kudos to Five Leaves, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Allan Guthrie's "Hard Man"

When does violence cross the line into so-called "torture porn" and exploitation? Not in Allan Guthrie's novel Hard Man, I don't think.

I don't know the substance of the debate about torture porn and crime fiction, but I know the debate exists or existed, and I know Guthrie's name has come up. So here's why I think that whatever torture porn may be, Guthrie's not guilty of it here.

First, the book does contain a scene of torture that may be unpleasant reading for some, but it does not invite the reader's prurient interest. It is neither gratuitous, frivolous nor out of character. The lengthy narrative of escape from the torture is refreshingly low-key, straightforward in its detailed description of the agonizing lengths to which the characters must go to effect their escape. And those lengths are great, which makes the scene heroic.

And violence in this novel, torture and otherwise, has its consequences. Guthrie told Spinetingler Magazine that:

"I believe that writing's about creating sensory experiences. If a character's eating a hamburger, I want the reader to taste it. So if a character's in pain, I want the reader to feel it. Violence in my books always hurts. And it always has a lasting effect. None of this getting knocked unconscious and waking up two minutes later with a little bump that's completely forgotten about ten seconds later. That annoys me almost as much as gratuitous scenery. I also try to write from the point of view of the victim where possible. But even my aggressor's get hurt. Hit somebody with your bare fist and you're liable to break a finger. In my books, anyway."

I'd say that makes Guthrie a pretty morally serious guy — especially considering how much (dark) humor the book contains.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Guthrie and Weegee

(Cop Killer (left) Weegee; negative, January 16, 1941, print, about 1950, © International Center of Photography)

The cover of Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split is taken from one of the great crime photographs, Weegee's Cop Killer, though the borrowing from Weegee is unacknowledged, as far as I can tell.

The designers hired by Point Blank Press colorized the photo in hot reds and yellows, flipped it, cropped it, and jacked the contrast up to emphasize splashes and ominous blotches on and around the cop killer and the arresting officer.

It's an evocative photograph, eliciting pity for the beaten suspect even as one thinks of the horror of his deed, his desolation highlighted by the facelessness of his custodians. And that makes it a pretty good cover for an Allan Guthrie novel.

(For more on Weegee, click here. For more on Allan Guthrie, click here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bye Bye Baby: Fast, hard, cheap and good

"In the car, Erica said, `I don't know whether to laugh or cry.'"

Allan Guthrie's Bye Bye Baby is fast, hard, twisted and, thanks to a publishing quirk, cheap.

The novella's publication was pushed back to 2013 and, in the interim, Guthrie secured electronic publication rights. That's why you can read this affecting, ingenious kidnapping tale with a twist for $2.99.

Guthrie wrote Bye Bye Baby for Barrington Stoke's series of crime stories for adult reluctant readers. What does this mean for enthusiastic readers? A story that moves quickly, in short chapters of crisp prose, with plenty of plot turns to hold the attention, and characters you can love and others you can hate. And what's wrong with that?

Like Guthrie's full-length novels, Bye Bye Baby is sly, noir as all hell (more noir than some, actually), and it just might bring a tear of pity to your eyes. It's a police procedural filled with incident and back story, and man, what an ending.

***

Click here for a discussion of the challenges and, just maybe, the possibilities involved in publishing novellas and other short crime fiction.

G© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Allan Guthrie: Family guy

I've just spent a long mid-week holiday break playing miniature golf and filling trash bags full of old shingles and insulation. This cut into my reading time, but I shall be back up to speed tomorrow. When I return, I'll have another post about Colin Cotterill's spirit explorations in Curse of the Pogo Stick, which I've just finished, and a remark or two about Allan Guthrie's Savage Night, which took up a nice chunk of my train ride back from the mini-golf and shingle-schlepping.

For now, a couple of thoughts on the Guthrie:

1) The man could write a mean sitcom or screwball comedy if he set his mind to it. I'd like to see him write a script for The New My Three Sons.

2) Page 157 contains the funniest line I have read about that staple of 21st-century crime writing, the changing urban landscape.

3) That line is not as funny as two on Page 160:

"Not that they were in a hurry, but still. Effie had a new respect for butchers."

and

"They'd all sat around drinking. Took awkward sips and smiled sadly at each other. Dad kept saying, `I can't believe he's dead,' till Effie told him to shut up."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Allan Guthrie's black shorts

Allan Guthrie, that sharp noir author, scholar, editor, agent, and impresario, is back with a collection of cheap shorts.

Hilda's Big Day Out offers four gut- and heart-wrenching slabs of noir, including the title story, which is atypical in at least two ways: It has an arguably happy ending, and its narrator is a dog.

Of the remaining tales, "Bye Bye Baby," which gave rise to Guthrie's novella of the same name, may wring tears of pity from even the hardest-hearted reader. Like David Goodis' novel Cassidy's Girl, its noirness inheres not in a tragic ending, but rather in an inconclusive sort of non-ending. Not every tragedy has the easy out of catharsis or death. Sometimes the nightmare just goes on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Up with e-shorts!

I bought Allan Guthrie's novella Bye, Bye Baby last night, and I asked last week when someone was going to put out a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories.

I mention this because I bought the Guthrie as a downloaded e-book, and if electronic books are here to stay, we might as well take advantage of what the medium can do. I don't mean weird technological gimcrackery that in most cases adds up to nothing more than what a simple paperback does at a fraction of the cost, I mean the flexibility to publish narrative forms such as novellas and short stories that might be economically unfeasible as traditional books.

Bye, Bye Baby is about seventy pages; hard to imagine a publisher taking a chance on a traditional book that size (though Five Leaves Publishing Crime Express series does so with, among other novellas, Guthrie's Killing Mum, and Barrington Stoke with his Kill Clock). But lower production and distribution costs might encourage them to do so with books in electronic form.

And where is a reader to turn who loves an author's short fiction and would like it collected in one place, as I would with Phillips or Jean-Hugues Oppel or Dominique Manotti? (Ken Bruen, too, though he's popular enough that some publisher might be able to sell his collected shorts as a traditional book.)

Short-story collections by a single crime author are few and far between, and I suspect uncertainty about their sales prospects helps account for this. So why not sell collections as cheap e-books, or even let readers build their own books electronically out of the short stories they want to read?

What are the barriers to doing things this way? And which crime writers would you like to see come out with collections of short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

E-books on the march in a new blog, at a new press

One sign that e-books have arrived, or at least that they have their seat backs and tray tables in their full upright and locked positions, is a newish (since March) blog devoted to them.

The blog, Allan Guthrie's Criminal-E, offers short interviews with crime writers whose work is available as e-books. In addition to his own work as an author, Guthrie is an agent and an editor. He knows the business side of books, and the discussions on the blog reflect that knowledge. So, in addition to "Sum up your book in 25 words," "How important is a good title?" and James Henderson on his own strengths and weaknesses, you'll get Roger Smith on e-book pricing,  Christa Faust on "reviews" in the Amazon age, Guthrie himself on pricing and self-publishing, and many, many more.

Looks like a good chance for readers to get authors' perspectives on some important questions — and to learn about some good books.

***

Also in the e-world, there's a new outlet for dark fiction. It's called Snubnose Press ("Compact. Powerful. Classic."), it's brought to you by the folks from Spinetingler Magazine, and it's devoted to publishing stories of 20,000 to 60,000 words that "that could, within the broadest definitions of genre possible, be categorized as crime and horror."

***

FLASH: From Bitter Lemon Press, June 30, 2011:

E-books now have their own page on our site. The eBook catalogue has 20 titles and is growing quickly. The books are available on most platforms, Apple, Sony, Nook, etc. and, via our site or directly, on Kindle. Click here for our list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Not crap

Jedidiah Ayres' Hardboiled Wonderland blog offers If it's not Scottish – It's Crap!, an interview with author/agent/editor Allan Guthrie. By coincidence, the happy resolution of a mix-up at my post office brings a bumper crop of books, among them The Good Son by Dundee's own Russel D. McLean.

That novel's lead blurb from Ken Bruen says the novel has all the merits of Jean-Patrick Manchette "with the added bonus of a Scottish sense of wit that is like no other." Not crap, indeed.

Back to Guthrie. Ayres asks good questions, and Guthrie's answers are full of insight, humor and evidence of his knowledge of noir and its history. If he and Megan Abbott ever team-teach a course in noir, I'm going back to college.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Allan Guthrie, funnyman

I recently expressed misgivings about wiseass crime writers: talented authors who can write the hell out of an action scene, who are good at going for the laughs, but who sometimes crack wise when (in my humble opinion) restraint is called for.

I am happy to report that Allan Guthrie is no wiseass. The extended edition of his novella Kill Clock had me laughing out loud and reminded me that the author, often cited for his chilling noir, is not just good at coming up with funny lines, but is a craftsman of the comic. Here's one sample:

"Pearce grabbed the wrist and used Baldie's momentum to pull him forward. His face bounced off the roof of the car with a dull sound like a dropped mug hitting carpet.

"That had to hurt.

"Pearce let go.

"Long time since he'd been behind a wheel. Hadn't had much experience before he went to jail, and since he'd come out, he'd not had the chance.

"First thing, he put on his seatbelt."

That's funny because it's 100 percent deadpan, without the slightest hint that author, narrator, or character know they are up to anything funny. The Guardian recently criticzed a BBC production of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings stories for breaking the commandments of comedy, the first of which is: "Don't let your cast behave as if they are acting in a comedy. Wodehouse depends on all the characters taking their predicaments very seriously."

Guthrie does not need to be told this, not when he has a 5-year boy curse in amazement at protagonist Pearce's three-legged dog, or the boy's 2-year-old sister curse in imitation of her brother. And not when he has the children's mother plead for Pearce's help in terms that might be objectionable if another character applied them to her but are touching and maybe even a little heartbreaking when the she uses them about herself:

"`Doesn't help that I've spent time in psychiatric care.'  

"`Why should that make any difference?'

"`I was committed, Pearce. I'm a nutjob.'

"`Ah.'

"'My head was all over the place when I was a teenager. Didn't used to have my shit together like I have now.'"

I don't know about you, but I root for a character like that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Falling Glass: A review

Falling Glass, the new novel by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Adrian McKinty, is:

• A meditation on aging

• A dream of escape from urban life

• A mini-course on Ireland's Pavees, or travelers, or tinkers

• An expression of love for Ulster

• An expression of disdain for professional `Oirishness'

• A hard look at what economic disaster means to those not at the top of the heap

• A scathing attack on the cynical oligarchy of money, power and protection that crosses Northern Ireland's sectarian lines

• A similarly scathing attack on the cult of the self-made millionaire

• A reminder that politics is personal

• A series of homages to, among others, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, the Coen brothers (don't blame me; it's McKinty's book), Ken Bruen, Ernest Hemingway, The Godfather, Sergio Leone, and Warren Zevon

• A globe-hopping tale of quest that manages the difficult feat of seeming alternately leisurely and fast-paced, as necessary

• The return of Michael Forsythe, though in a supporting role

• Possibly — just possibly — a meditation on the art of telling stories

The hero this time is Killian (just one of his names), an enforcer with brains who has been forced back into the life by Belfast's real estate crash. His job is to find an Irish tycoon's wandering wife, only he winds up being pursued himself, and we find out why the millionaire really wants his wife back. Among the pursuers is a very scary Russian, and it's part of the book's story that, for all his cool savagery, he's not the scariest thing in the novel.

***

Killian is a hard man, violent, a killer when he has to be, yet redeemed for readers by his heart, his brains, and because he is pursued by people worse than he is. He's a bit like Alan Guthrie's Pearce or McKinty's own Michael Forsythe or maybe even Stuart Neville's Gerry Fegan that way.

McKinty and Neville are from Northern Ireland; Guthrie is Scottish. Is that coincidence, or is there a reason crime writers from that part of the world specialize in hard men with a heart? And who's your favorite protagonist of that type?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Detectives Beyond Borders dissects a joke

The wait is over. It's been barely a week since I finished reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but when the book in question is quite possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a week seems long. But my copy of Volume 2 arrived today, and I shall keep you posted as appropriate. The novel's third part, with which Vol. 2 begins, is called "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," so I suspect I'll come up with a post or two to interest the crime readers of intelligence and good taste who visit Detectives Beyond Borders.

I made good use of the inter-Musils interval, reading, among other things, one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Allan Guthrie's funny, violent, touching novella Kill Clock, and a whole bunch of newer writing influenced by pulp, paperback originals, and 1970s and '80s adventure stories.

Along the way, I revisited a previous comment I'd posted about wiseass crime writers, talented authors whose good jokes occasionally obtrude on the story rather than helping it along. Such jokes sometimes seem to me the verbal equivalent of an actor mugging for the camera.

Eric Beetner has an interesting relationship to those guys. I read two of his books while waiting for TMWQ2, the novella Dig Two Graves and The Devil Doesn't Want Me, a novel. Beetner is good at creating entertaining variations on crime themes, such as the prison story and the revenge tale (you might call his takes on the former two, in Dig Two Graves, oral storytelling), the road epic, and the saga of the aging hit man and the hotshot young gun. (The latter works all the more because the young gun is such a little shit.)

I thought some of Beetner's jokes were a bit jokey in the novella, but hell, it's a novella. When he stretched out to novel length, in The Devil Doesn't Want Me, I was pleased to see an occasional rueful tone to some of the jokes, which shows me that the guy has chops and that he knows how to create a range of moods.

And the book is filled with good things: amusing byplay involving FBI agents who never get involved in the main story, and trenchant observations about the new Las Vegas and the old, among them. But a time or two, I think Beetner loved a joke too much to let go once he'd told it. Here's an example: The protagonist, Lars, a middle-aged hit man who keeps body and soul together with yoga, contemplates his superiority to the musclebound thug holding a gun on him:

"Guys like the big brute...smashing Lars' own gun hand into the tile floor cared only about the muscles. Lifting, squatting, pumping. For what? A thick neck like that can't turn to check out a great ass anymore."

That's the kind of touching, surprising, humanizing thought that Allan Guthrie is so good at. But Beetner has Lars continue the thought:

"And why did evolution put a swivel on a neck if not for that?"

That may be funny, but what does it add? What does it say that the preceding lines did not? I say Beetner should have cut the line and saved it for another book. To me that coda to the joke was a bit like being elbowed in the ribs and asked "Get it? Ya get it?" And that was all the more frustrating because the first joke was so good.

Your questions: Am I wrong? And what makes a joke function effectively as part of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

CrimeFest, Day II: The spirit is willing, and the flesh makes a pretty good go as well

My own highlight from Crimefest 2009, Day II? Perhaps it was Jo Nesbø's English translator, Don Bartlett, relieving me of anxieties about how to pronounce Nesbø's name. If "Joe Nesbow" is good enough for the man who translates his books, it's good enough for me.

Or maybe it was L.C. Tyler's professed admiration for Allan Guthrie. Tyler writes comic cozy mysteries; Guthrie's work is anything but cozy. One author's respect for another who writes fiction of a different type is one of those salutary, mind-opening reminders that make events like this a joy.

Another was Leighton Gage's answer that his books begin with plot. If my memory serves me well, he was the only one of eight writers on two panels who gave that answer to the "Plot or character?" question.

Stephen Booth offered the disarming admission that "I didn't want to write about middle-aged alcoholics because other people had done it better" and the warning that too faithful a portrayal of procedure can be deadly in a police procedural.

Ros Schwartz, Dagger-winning translator of Dominique Manotti, offered shocking assessments of the miserable working conditions of literary translators in much of Europe and contrasted these with the far better environment for translators in the Scandinavian countries.

Håkan Nesser, in answer to a question about Nordic authors' reputation for dourness, noted their penchant for social criticism: "If your mission is to criticize society, you can't be very comical." (Editor's note: Your humble blogkeeper is author of an article on humor in Nordic crime fiction, including Nesser's. I believe that the general seriousness of crime fiction from the Nordic countries throws such humor as there is into especially sharp relief.)

Declan Burke, Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall made up a panel on writing about villains. An observation of Mosby's neatly encapsulated the way the line between hero and villain can blur: "Every villain is the hero of his own story."

See the day's complete program here. And Burke discharged his bar debt in a prompt, gentlemanly manner.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Italian scribe Strukul inks UK, U.S. pacts

Italian author/publisher/crime fiction impresario Matteo Strukul, last seen in these parts sitting for a Detectives Beyond Borders interview earlier this year, returns with the good news that his novel La Ballata di Mila (The Ballad of Mila) and its follow-up, Regina Nera (Black Queen), will appear in English translation from Angry Robot's Exhibit A imprint.

As a publisher, Strukul is or will be responsible for Italian translations of writers whose work will be familiar to Detectives Beyond Borders readers, Alan Moore, Jacques Tardi, Allan Guthrie, Brian McGilloway, Russel D. McLean, and Christa Faust among them.

As a writer, Strukul shows his love for revenge comics without degenerating into cartoonishness. He exposes a side of Northeastern Italian life unknown to outsiders and perhaps many insiders, and, in The Ballad of Mila, he has gangsters do things in a bowling alley far worse than eating greasy food and renting disinfected shoes.

Look for The Ballad of Mila in the U.S. next July, in the UK next August.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Weinman doppelganger: A Bouchercon mystery

Dave White mentioned the curious case of the Weinman doppelganger. I, too, experienced this strange phenomenon when chatting with a fellow Bouchercon attendee. As we talked, he suddenly looked over my shoulder and said, "Hi, Sarah!" I turned to see a woman looking back at him, dressed in black and appearing puzzled.

I scrutinized her face, her shortish brown hair, and her rangy, athletic figure, and I smiled knowingly. "That's not Sarah Weinman," I told my friend.

"It's elementary, my dear McFetridge," I continued. "The key is the subtle difference between the pronunciations of Sarah and Sara."

For our perplexed companion was not the well-known proprietress of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, but rather another writer, this one named Sara J. Henry. The case grows still more complicated. Weinman, though living in New York, is from Ottawa. Henry, though living in Vermont, is from Nepean, Ontario, now a part of – Ottawa.

The mystery deepens.

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As I waited to begin the journey that turned into Tuesday's post, a little girl scuttled across the waiting hall at Baltimore's Penn Station, calling, "Mammy, mammy!" But I'd been spending too much time with crime writers, because I at first heard her girlish cries as "Allan Guthrie!"

"I'd be worried about that kid," my travel companion said.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

What's so funny about noir?

While we're on the subject, noir and other dark crime fiction seems often to include humor (Derek Raymond, Allan Guthrie, Ken Bruen, Scalped). Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

My Bouchercon panels: Charles Kelly and Dan J. Marlowe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Strange Loyalties: William McIlvanney in words and a picture

Your humble blog keeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013, Bristol.
Photo courtesy of Ali Karim

. Once again I'm rereading a novel by William McIlvanney, and once again I am struck immediately by how different he is from the legion of crime writers who acknowledge his influence.

This time the novel is Strange Loyalties (1991), third of McIlvanney's three Laidlaw novels and, like its predecessors, Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch, rereleased in trade paperback by Canongate.

A hard-drinking detective or police officer comes slowly to himself after a binge and boy, does his head hurt. You're read that scene a few hundred times, but probably not the way McIlvanney writes it. Here's the opening of Strange Loyalties:

"I woke up with a head like a rodeo. Isn't it painful having fun? Mind you, last night hadn't been about enjoyment, just whisky as anaesthetic. Now it was wearing off, the pain was worse. It always is."

First, McIlvanney comes with a funny, inventive, eye-catching way of saying, "I was drunk, and my head hurt." That's a good way to grab a reader's attention, a good thing to do in a novel's first sentence. Second, the humor is a welcome change from the pain and self-pity with which many another crime writer endows such first-person hangovers.

Third, McIllvanney immediately leavens the fun with somber self-realization that to me, at least, tugs at the heartstrings without getting maudlin.  If you've never read the Laidlaw novels, read that opening again. Don't you want to know the character who thinks those lines? Doesn't that mix make Laidlaw seem more real, more human?

So, who is like unto William McIlvanney? Allan Guthrie probably comes closest in his mix of humor and compassion, but even that top-flight crime writer doesn't do it with the concentration of his fellow Scotsman McIlvanney. Ken Bruen does something like it in Priest, though its characters lean more toward martyrdom and away from humor.

Ian Rankin calls it doubtful that he'd be a crime writer without McIlvanney's influence but, other than that McIlvanney's Laidlaw and Rankin's Rebus both work the streets of a tough Scottish city, I don't see striking similarities between the two. So I'll dump the question in your laps, dear readers: Which crime writers best combine humor and compassion? Which authors, if you want to put the question this way, will make you laugh and cry in the same book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013