The most influential crime writer? — Jean-Patrick Manchette plus a question for readers

A year ago, I asked readers to name their choices for the most influential crime writer ever. Here's another name for the list: Jean-Patrick Manchette.

Manchette reinvigorated noir, inventing what French critics call the néo-polar, or neo-whodunnit, and if all that neo stuff makes you roll your eyes, stop and think for a minute: How many of the old-time hard-boiled writers make your blood run cold the way they presumably did for readers in the 1930s and 1940s? How mean, in other words, are Raymond Chandler's mean streets today?

Certainly Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?

I was reminded of Manchette twice recently. The first reminder came in Duane Swierczynski's novel The Blonde, which names a character, or rather a part of a character, after Manchette. I suspect Swierczynski would not call himself a political writer. Still, he was attracted by Manchette's non-stop, man-on-the-run plots, and something of their energy infuses Swierczynski's own work.

The second arrived this week in the form of a tribute on the encyclopedic Ile noire blog on the thirteenth anniversary of Manchette's death. The article, in French, discusses the rage Manchette felt at political repression in the time after the political and social upheavals of 1968. The author himself coined the term néo-polar, according to one critic quoted in the article, not because he wanted to introduce a new school of French crime writing, but to emphasize that he was parodying the traditions of the genre's classics. The Ile noire article links to a Manchette Web site, also in French, that is as comprehensive as any I have seen. For a beautifully written appreciation, try this piece by James Sallis. (It's in English.)

As for Manchette's influence, how about Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels? And here's an open-ended set of questions for you, readers: If you've read Manchette, what's your take on him? If not, let's revive the old question of who the most influential crime writer is, only with a twist: Who is the most influential crime writer since the end of World War II? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
French crime fiction
Jean-Patrick Manchette

Fatale by Manchette

I learned from the introductory material to Jean-Patrick Manchette's 1977 novel Fatale, newly published in English translation by NYRB Classics, that Manchette translated Donald Westlake, Margaret Millar, Ross Thomas, and Alan Moore's Watchmen into English.

I also learned that Jean Echenoz, who wrote an afterword to the novel, considers it perhaps the darkest of Manchette's works.  This surprised me, because I found comic touches of the kind I did not remember from Three to Kill and The Prone Gunman, the other two Manchette novels available in English. And those comic touches helped me understand why Duane Swierczynski likes Manchette so much. (Swierczynski is quoted on the back cover of Fatale, and he named a character — or part of one — after Manchette in his own novel The Blonde.)

The humor is always gleeful, even when politically pointed. (I continue to be surprised by humor, zest, and good old storytelling from European crime writers of the left. You'd think I'd by used to it by now, but what can I tell you? I've been in America too long.) To wit:

"She thumbed through the Paris papers but failed to find what she was looking for. She turned to the local publications. One of them championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology."

This brief roman noir tells the story of Aimée, a hitwoman who comes to a French town to sniff out the money and stir things up. Not especially cold or distant, she nonetheless finds just one kindred spirit, an old baron off his nut who scandalizes the town while nonetheless remaining part of it.

Manchette's protagonists don't end happily, and this one is no exception. But she does manage some acerbic humor along the way:

"I've been wasting time. I didn't know whom to kill. For a moment I thought of suggesting to Sinistrat's old lady that her wretch of a husband could be done in. Or proposing to Sinistrat and his little Julie that old Lenverguez be bumped off. But it was no good. These people are too dumb."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Graphic Manchette

With hat tips to Pulpetti and Duane Swierczynski comes news that Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, previously available in English translation as Three to Kill, will appear in a graphic-novel version called West Coast Blues. This version, adapted and illustrated by the French cartoonist Jacques Tardi, is to appear this summer as the beginning a series devoted to Tardi and published by Fantagraphics.

Here's what I wrote about Three to Kill and Manchette's other novel available in English, The Prone Gunman:

"Manchette reinvigorated noir, inventing what French critics call the néo-polar, or neo-whodunnit, and if all that neo stuff makes you roll your eyes, stop and think for a minute: How many of the old-time hard-boiled writers make your blood run cold the way they presumably did for readers in the 1930s and 1940s? How mean, in other words, are Raymond Chandler's mean streets today?

"Certainly Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?"

Click on the Jacques Tardi link above, and you'll see why I'm excited about this Fantagraphics release.

Here are some previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts that mentioned Manchette, who figures — or at least part of him does — in Swierczynski's novel The Blonde.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Manchette's The Mad and the Bad: Suspense, anti-consumerism, and nostalgia

Jean-Patrick Manchette wrote his novels at a time when the Situationist movement had gone political. He had first become attracted to the movement, though, when its focus was more artistic and less theoretical, and his novels, at least the ones translated into English, as politically pointed as they are, almost never let the politics get in the way of a good story.  Thus, after a shoot-out in vast department store,

"Julie strove to extricate them. Fortunately other victims came tumbling out, bemoaning their singed perms ..."

That's from The Mad and the Bad, an English translation of Manchette's 1972 novel O dingos, O chateaux! newly published by New York Review Books, and at the worst, it reads as a mildly nostalgic reminder of a time before the triumph of consumerism, corporations, celebrity, and "content" was complete, before a time when multibillion-dollar corporations like Facebook and Apple were considered cool.

But the novel still hits hard for its fugitives-on-the-run theme, for its avoidance of a tidy ending, and for moments like this, when one criminal henchman seeks his colleague and brother shot dead, and thinks this might be a good time to give up:

"Nénesse sighed, and two large tears sprang from his little eyes.  He tossed his weapon aside and waited to be arrested. At that moment the café's owner crossed the terrace in three strides and emptied both barrels of a shotgun into Nénesse's ear."

***

Manchette, who died in 1995 translated into French works by a number of American crime writers, including Donald Westlake and Ross Thomas. I don't know if he had worked on Westlake when he wrote The Man and the Bad, but the novel shares a narrative strategy with Westlake used often: that of, sometime around mid-novel, relating an event already narrated by another character, and thus whose outcome the reader already knows. Manchette also loved Hammett and Chandler, so you know he was righteous.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More Manchette in English

With a hat tip to Spintetingler comes the welcome news that a third novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette will be published in English translation on April 26, 2011.

Fatale is the book, New York Review of Books Classics is the publisher, and Donald Nicholson-Smith is the translator.

I've raved about Manchette's The Prone Gunman and Three to Kill (and about the graphic-novel adaptation of the latter, called West Coast Blues). In one such rave, "The most influential crime writer?", I wrote that:

"Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?"

So I'd call this good news.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The collective will and the collective won't, or should Dominique Manotti say no to nostalgia?

A cover blurb on one of Jean-Patrick Manchette's novels once referred to the author's "post-1968 leftism."  It has taken several years and the work of another politically oriented French crime writer to make me realize that the phrase is more than an ungainly and vacuous neologism.

The novelist in question is Dominique Manotti, whose Escape includes the following:

"There was an initial forging of collective thinking and a collective will."

and

"`That open letter could be the starting point for a collective analysis. We need to read it and discuss it, together and with other left-wing organisations.'" 

The second bit is dialogue, if you can believe that anyone would ever talk, as opposed to write, like that. Sure, that's a character speaking, not the author. But Russel McLean's interview with Manotti suggests that Manotti's own nostalgia and regrets figure in the book. "We were passionate," she tells McLean, "and a large part of France's far left was influenced by the Italians." (Much of the novel's early action, at least, takes place among Italian political refugees in France.)

Having read Manotti's previous work, with its astringent observations about the depravity of the French elite and that elite's horrifying exploitation of migrant workers, and having found nothing in that work approaching the clumsy political speech sprinkled through the opening pages of Escape, I wonder if Manotti is better off sticking to dispassionate analysis and avoiding nostalgic recollection of her own activism.

That's where Jean-Patrick Manchette's "post-1968 leftism" comes in. The three latest of the four novels of his that have been translated into English, published in their original French between 1976 and 1981, have moved well beyond the possibility of talking seriously about collective anything. I don't recall the word struggle occurring in any of the books.

The earliest of Manchette's novels available in English, though the most recently translated, suggests, as does Escape, that nostalgia and politically pointed fiction do not always go well together. The novel is called The Mad and the Bad, and

"at the worst, it reads as a mildly nostalgic reminder of a time before the triumph of consumerism, corporations, celebrity, and "content" was complete, before a time when multibillion-dollar corporations like Facebook and Apple were considered cool."

But Manchette got the nostalgia out of his system, and 3 to Kill (original publication 1976), Fatale (1977), and The Prone Gunman (1981), are three dark, stark noir classics, the last of them in particular chilling for its dissection of how powerful elites can exploit, debase, and discard an individual no longer of use to them, an individual, that is, who has no recourse to collective action or the struggle.

And now, in a collective spirit, I turn the question to you, readers, and ask: Is sharp political crime fiction incompatible with authorial nostalgia?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

West Coast Blues: A classic crime novel goes graphic

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was one of the great crime writers, and his novel Le petit bleu de la côte ouest (translated previously as Three to Kill) may be the essential European crime novel of the last forty years.

Now the book has made its way into graphic-novel form, as West Coast Blues, adapted and illustrated by Jacques Tardi and published by Fantagraphic Books. The story follows with hallucinogenic clarity a young businessman named Georges Gerfaut (anglicized here as "George") through an accidental encounter that leads to: beating, killing, hit men, privation, wandering then salvation in the woods, sex, revenge, voluntary uprooting from his family, clashes with a Latin American torturer on the run — and then back to the same ring road in Paris where he began, wondering, perhaps, whether it was all real and whether it will happen again. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. There is no sad ending, either. The story simply runs out.

The book is slyly funny without being jokey; thrilling without ever seeming manipulative; cool, distant and ironic in its narrative voice; immediate in its depiction of violence.

What do Tardi's illustrations add? Mostly a crowded sense of daily life, an ironic, sense-sharpening departure from the dark, shadowy atmospherics that sometimes nudge noir toward mere style. Tardi's scenes of Gerfaut and his family at a holiday resort are notable here, full of packed beaches, spilled ice cream, traffic jams, and an attempt on George's life.

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

(The new title presumably refers to Gerfaut's perferred music, the cool West Coast jazz that Gerfaut listens to as he unwinds and the tension builds.

Here's what I wrote about Manchette last year in a post called "Who is the most influential crime writer?" Here's a roundup of the year's mystery and crime comics from Brian Lindenmuth. And here's what one current crime writer, a admirer of Manchette's who has paid tribute to him in his own work, has to say.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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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Lisa Simon
Yasmina Khadra
Jean-Claude Izzo
Matt Rees
Matt Beynon Rees
Jean-Patrick Manchette

The golden age of paranoia

Alan Glynn, author of Winterland, looks back at the golden age of paranoia in an article on the Mulholland Books Web site. He traces the era from a morally serious period of high paranoia in the early 1970s, marked by Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor and The Conversation through a period of bloated, jokey weirdness (The X-Files), and on to a more recent revival.

These latter-day incarnations "take their nod from the golden age, and that's a good thing," Glynn writes. "Because at no time over the past thirty or forty years has that '70 sensibility seemed more relevant or, indeed, more necessary."

I was a bit surprised to read of Glynn's attraction to paranoia because, while Winterland impressed me greatly, I thought it more an amateur-gets-in-over-her-head adventure, albeit a violent, thoroughly contemporary one, than a paranoid nightmare. But what do I know? I can't read Glynn's mind — yet.

Glynn proposes an interesting division of post-1970s paranoia into the over-the-top school, whose representatives include James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy, and more direct nods to the golden age (Peter Temple's Truth, Michael Clayton).

I'd have added Jean-Patrick Manchette to the roster of Golden Age paranoiacs and Dominque Manotti to the list of current practitioners, Manchette for how deeply power controls, warps and ruins the individual in his books, and Manotti for how widespread and ruthless the corruption is, and how high it rises, in hers.

What about you? Who are your masters of paranoia in crime and thriller fiction and movies?
© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A deadpan novel by the father of Italian noir

The deadpan description in the opening chapters of Giorgio Scerbanenco's Duca and the Milan Murders (1966) reminded me of Jean-Patrick Manchette. That French author, I once wrote, restored crime writing's ability to shock "with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush."

So I was pleased to read in the Wikipedia article about Scerbanenco that "his style was notable for the realistic way in which [it] conveyed and evoked the helplessness and despair of weak people being cruelly victimized."

One interesting note: While Manchette was a man of the political left, the Ukrainian-born Scerbanenco's "virulent and over-the-top anti-communism ... stemmed from the trauma of losing his father during the Russian revolution," according to the same article. Before New Rightniks claim him as one of their own, though, they should note that

"While denouncing the evils of the rampant consumeristic and greedy way of life taking hold from the 60s onward Scerbanenco always has a warm word for the peaceful, quiet, hard-working Milanese"

A French translation of Duca and the Milan Murders won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for international crime fiction in 1968 (The novel's Italian title, Traditori di tutti, translates as Betrayers of All.) Scerbanenco is considered the father of Italian noir, and Italy's top crime fiction prize is named for him.

None of Scerbanenco's work is in print in English, as far as I know. If they would consider reprints, this book would make a fine addition to Europa Editions or Serpent's Tail's lists alongside such authors as Carlo Lucarelli, Jean-Claude Izzo, Gene Kerrigan and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

Here's a bit about the author and the book. And here's a short excerpt:

"Dr. Duca Lamberti?"

The voice, too, was offensive in its exemplary politeness, its exemplary diction. It was a voice that would have done credit to a teacher of elocution. Duca detested perfection of this sort.

"Yes, I am Duca Lamberti." He stood there blocking the doorway. He did not invite the caller in. The way he dressed seemed to Duca odious. Admittedly, it was spring, but this young man was already going about in a cardigan, no jacket, just this light grey cardigan with dark grey suede cuffs, and—in case anybody should imagine that he could not afford a jacket—he was carrying a pair of light gray driving-gloves, not the cheap kind with no backs, but real gloves, good gloves, with leather backs and intricately crocheted palms. It was impossible to avoid noticing these details. The gloves were very much on show, as though to make it quite plain that their owner possessed a car worthy of such a handsome pair of gloves.

"May I come in?" He was glowing with cordiality, insincere cordiality, insincerely spontaneous.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

French stories of betrayal, paranoia and manipulation

The 1981 French movie Le Professional stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a French agent dispatched to Africa to kill a president, then left in the lurch to be captured and tortured when the political winds shift, and assassination is no longer called for.

Didier Daeninckx's 1984 French crime novel Murder in Memoriam (available in English translation from Melville House) has a son looking for his missing father in a novel that "exposed the hidden crimes of a nation."

In the 1970 and '80s, Jean-Patrick Manchette wrote novels whose protagonists are casually used and discarded by the French government. More recently, Dominique Manotti takes up a similar theme in her novels and stories. (Read James Sallis' appreciation of Manchette.)

Paranoia and manipulation were in the air in the 1970s, but did the French have a special affinity for this sort of story? If so, why? What are you favorite stories of a man or woman used, manipulated, and discarded government, corporate, or military power?
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders

Welcome to my new forum devoted to international crime fiction – "international" in my case meaning outside the United States. The Web is all about openness and freedom of information, so I have no compunction about taking David J. Montgomery's 10 Greatest Detective Novels idea, ringing some changes on it, and coming up with a debate/discussion of my own. He focuses on American writers; I'll take the rest of the world and ask these questions:

– What are your favorite crime novels and stories set in countries other than your own?

– Why do you like these stories?

– Is living in a country a prerequisite for writing a successful crime story set in that country?

– What makes crime stories especially attractive to the armchair traveler?

– Do people even read in armchairs anymore?

Setting has been integral to some of the finest crime fiction through all periods. Think the misty docks and streets of Conan Doyle's London. Think Hammett's San Francisco, Chandler's Los Angeles, Lawrence Block's New York. Or think Georges Simenon's Paris, its suburbs, and the villages where Maigret loves to relax, drink white wine, and play cards. Given the importance of setting, it seems natural that crime stories should prove especially attractive to those of us who like to travel in our minds as well as in trains, planes, cars, buses and boats. Indeed, this is a good time for such readers, with Soho Crime, Bitter Lemon Press and Serpent's Tail, among others, offering much of interest.

I'll begin with some of my favorites, along with a few books I don't much like. Feel free to disagree with me, especially on the latter. Nothing would please me more than to be talked into recognizing virtues I had not seen before in an author – or to be forced to better understand and justify my dislike.

In no particular order, here is some of my favorite non-American crime fiction:

1) Lovely Mover, by Bill James, though several of the other novels from the middle of James' Harpur & Iles series are about as good. The series hits its stride around its seventh book and becomes a kind of grand and cracked portrait of Britain's shifting urban and social landscape, of the murky boundaries between police and criminals, of suburban social climbers who happen to be killers and drug dealers, of the strange ways people build families in changing times. The books are violent, dark, and often very funny. And James just happens to be the best prose stylist who has ever written crime fiction in English.

2) Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong. A clear-eyed view of 1990s Shanghai that meets every traditional requirement for a full-blooded crime novel. The setting is evocative, the protagonist is unusual (though not the strongest feature of the book), the supporting characters are compelling, and the story has a surprise ending that could only have happened in China.

3) Cosi Fan Tutti, by Michael Dibdin, is an exception to my general distaste for novels set in "foreign" countries by writers not from those countries. Such books often degenerate into travelogues. This novel is formally daring, and talk about surprise endings! Dibdin, an Englishman, spent several years teaching in Italy, according to various accounts, and his charmingly named protagonist, Aurelio Zen, offers a kind of Baedeker's guide to official Italian corruption and internecine rivalry, each novel set in a different region: Naples here, the Vatican, Venice, the south in other books. And Rome. Always Rome. "Zen" is a name characteristic of the protagonist's native Venice, but it also has overtones of the detachment with which this Zen moves through the sometimes deadly worlds of Italian officialdom and gangsterdom. Of course, the character's other name, Aurelio, is another clue that he is wise and given to occasional musing, if not outright meditation.

4) "Brown Eyes and Green Hair," a short story by Pentti Kirstila available in "The Oxford Book of Detective Stories (An International Selection)." This delightful, deadpan, at times almost surreal story by the Finnish Kirstila is an exception to the rule that writers from Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and Iceland are morose -- and is the only Kirstila to have been translated into English. Let's raise a fuss and get more of his work translated and published. (Some of his writing is available in German and in some less widespread European languages.)

5) Points and Lines, by Seicho Matsumoto. This Japanese police procedural is a kind of road movie on the rails, a look at people and places in 1960s Japan through the eyes of a police inspector who travels the length and breadth of the country by train as he tracks down clues to a young couple’s death.

6) No Happy Ending, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The protagonist shares a cramped Mexico City office with a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewer engineer. The book begins with a Roman soldier found dead in a bathroom. What more could you ask for? Like Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Taibo's one-eyed hero, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, bumps up against official corruption and violence. Unlike Zen, Shayne attacks it headfirst. He also has a profound sympathy with victims of police and other official and corporate brutality.

7) The Prone Gunman, by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Another author with a distinct political viewpoint. His short, grim novels have a certain formal similarity to Jim Thompson's. But Manchette's protagonists are not fortunate enough to die. Rather, they are brought low, chewed up, and spit out, destroyed or disoriented but still alive, by powerful forces who use them to achieve their own ends before discarding them.

8) Thumbprint and Fever, by Friedrich Glauser. This 1930s Swiss writer, translated and brought back into print by Bitter Lemon Press, offers that rarest of detective protagonists: a man who has hit rock bottom professionally without lapsing into alcohol and self-pity. Sgt. Studer works in small corners of a big world: Villages, prison cells, cramped apartments. An insane asylum. An isolated Moroccan Foreign Legion post. He is mordant and humane in a world of which his creator takes a deadpan view. Some say Glauser influenced his countryman Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Maybe, but Glauser was better.

9) The Amsterdam Cops series, by Janwillem van de Wetering. This Dutch author has been a businessman, a world traveler, a reserve Amsterdam police officer, and a student at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. All, especially the last three, figure prominently in this series, which includes 14 novels and two overlapping short-story collections. Detective twosomes are a nickel a dozen; Van de Wetering offers the only three-headed protagonist I can think of: the grumpy Adjutant Henk Grijpstra, the younger and sometimes vain Sgt. Rinus de Gier, and their unnamed commissaris, or chief, an elderly mentor with sometimes excruciating knee pains who is a sly collaborator and a kind of guru to Grijpstra and de Gier. Start with Hard Rain, in part for the larger role it gives the commissaris. Van de Wetering has an interesting approach to translation: He does his own, and he regards the results as versions, rather than translations, of the original. The one book in the series that I read in Dutch has slightly different chapter divisions from the English version and an opening chapter with more physical description. And the first in the series, An Outsider in Amsterdam, reflects the Dutch language's more frequent use of the present perfect where English would use the simple past. This results in occasional odd sentences such as "I wonder if he has done it."

10/11) Tales From Two Pockets by Karel Capek and The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky. These books of tales are full of sharp observation, wry and wistful humor, and detection of the classic and other kinds. Both just might lay to rest the notion that "literary" crime fiction equals bad crime fiction.

=======

OK, what do these stories have in common, other than that none is set in the United States or in an English village and each offers a vivid sense of place? Damned if I know. Maybe I'll know better once I hear from you.

What about books that didn't make my list? Ruth Rendell's superb The Veiled One seems far more interested in its killer's psyche than in the story's setting. The great Ken Bruen's Brant and Roberts novels are like Ed McBain 87th Precinct gang whacked out on beer and cocaine. Their violent, good-hearted, hilarious characters clang and crash together in stories that are all action, all character, without much focus on the setting. By all means, read them. (Bust, on the other hand, Bruen's excellent collaboration with Jason Starr, could qualify for this list with an asterisk, as an Irish writer's view of New York.)

Two books I did not care for helped form my thoughts on international crime fiction. The one Magdalen Nabb "Marshal Guarnaccia" story that I read got the details of its Florence-area setting convincingly right, but the story could have happened anywhere. John Burdett's Bangkok 8, on the other hand, was all local color, all weird exotica, all too much like a travelogue, albeit an especially weird one, for my tastes.

A last note: I've omitted Murder Must Advertise, the one Dorothy Sayers novel that I've read, though it is set in a country where I've never lived. Yet I might include Peter Lovesey's fine The Last Detective, which takes place in the same country. The reason is simple: In crime fiction, the past is not a foreign country. Sayers, and perhaps Christie, Chesterton and all the rest, created worlds so familiar to crime-fiction readers that they are no longer foreign.

Thanks, and keep those posts coming,

Peter

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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

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

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

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

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

=====

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

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

What's your favorite fiction set at the beach?

I'll mark the arrival of August's dog days with the opening of Marco Vichi's Death in August, set in Florence, 1963:

"Inspector Bordelli entered his office at eight o’clock in the morning after an almost sleepless night, spent tossing and turning between sweat-soaked sheets. These were the first days of August, hot and muggy, without a breath of wind. And the nights were even more humid and unhealthy. But at least the city was deserted, the cars few and far between, the silence almost total. The beaches, on the other hand, were noisy and full of peeling bodies. Every umbrella had its transistor radio, every child a little bucket."

That got me thinking of my favorite fictional renderings of beachside holidays. Two come to mind: West Coast Blues, Jacques Tardi's graphic-novel adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel Three to Kill (Le petit bleu de la côte ouest in the original French), and the greatest of them all, Jacques Tati's movie comedy Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

What are you favorite fictional depictions of life at the beach?

***

 The novel's translator from Italian into English is Stephen Sartarelli, known best to crime fiction readers for translating Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano. So I confess to smiling when I read the following exchange in Vichi's book. Those who love Salvo's sidekick and nemesis, Catarella, will know why:

"‘You sent for me, Inspector?’ 

"The intonation was typically Sardinian: bouncy, proud, almost aggressive.

"‘Are you Piras?’

"‘In person.’" (Highlighting mine)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The new Barcelona Review is up . . .

. . . here. There's no Ken Bruen short story, as there was in the previous issue, but there is a review of Jean-Patrick Manchette's cool 1981 crime classic, The Prone Gunman.

Noir Con 2008, Part II — No boundaries?

OK, maybe some boundaries, though no one at NoirCon 2008 seemed to be able to figure out precisely what noir is and isn't. Happily, no one seemed to worry much about this, and the confusion gave rise to some pregnant thoughts on Day Two, Year Two of this fine Philadelphia crime-fiction convention.

And why should I worry about what is international crime fiction and what isn't at a conference with a French name ("Noir") devoted to an American art form that honored an Irish author (Ken Bruen) and a publisher (Dennis McMillan) whose offerings have included seminal Dutch and Australian crime writers?

Highlights from Day Two:

1) Jason Starr's observation toward the end of his Friday panel discussion with Ken Bruen that "The French have a much wider definition of noir" than do Americans. Could he have meant that the French critics who coined the term as applied to film and fiction in the middle of the last century emphasized atmosphere more than today's writers do?

I recall a television interview with the director Jean-Pierre Melville and the star Alain Delon included as a DVD extra with one of Melville's movies. In today's terms, Delon was a laughable parody of cool, literally staring into space and blowing smoke while Melville talked about the movie. From the viewpoint of, say, any time after maybe the early '70s, that looks more kitsch than noir.

Maybe he meant that French writers have taken noir in directions more political than American crime writers have explored (Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Claude Izzo, Didier Daeninckx)?

2) Bruen's declaration during the same discussion that, after having written a few "straight" novels, "I really wanted to write a crime novel, but I wanted to see if I could write it the way the American hard-boiled school writes."

3) The award for the publisher Dennis McMillan, whose offerings have included books from Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik and Arthur W. Upfield.

4) News from Akashic Books that another novel from Juan de Recacoechea, author of American Visa, is being translated into English as we speak.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Books to Die For at Bouchercon

Bouchercon is not all about debauchery, gin, and back-scratching. It's sometimes easy to forget that the conference is, at root, a gathering of people who love books and reading.

So, while Ali Karim naturally had his fellow diners spitting up pizza through their noses at last night's dinner, we also talked about crime writers and books we loved. Sara Gran got big thumbs up, as did Stuart Neville, John Connolly, Adrian McKinty, and (yes) R.J. Ellory, among others.

Speaking of Neville, Connolly, McKinty, et al., I have just picked up Books to Die For, and I like it already. BtDF is a collection of essays by 120(!) crime writers about the crime novels that mean most to them.

The opening pages alone will fuel many discussions: a chronological list of the subject authors, from Poe and Dickens to Perihan Mağden and Mark Gimenez. See what I mean? This is not just a bunch of tributes to Chandler, Hammett, and Christie, though they make the list, too. I opened the book at random and came upon James Sallis writing about Jean-Patrick Manchette's 3 to Kill, for example. So, the early guess is Books to Die For will be a treasure house worth dipping into for years.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Heresy at the comics shop

I'm starting to feel more at home when I visit comics stores these days, by which I mean that I can comfortably swap artists' and writers' last names with the proprietors and clerks, and I often know who we're talking about.

But I committed a heresy today when checking out with my purchases of the two hardcover collections you see here. One thing I like about these two books, I said to the woman working the cash register, is that they're nothing but story: no extra crap.

I understand that extra material in hardcover comics collections and trade paperbacks may interest hardcore comicheads, but, as I wrote after reading the "definitive edition" of the fine Queen and Country espionage/soap opera comic, the third omnibus of which collects four fewer issues than do the first two omnibuses:

"The modern comic-book industry sells and resells the same stories, publishing `special editions' and bundling books into collections and collections into mega-collections, adding scripts, sketches and other extras at each step to flesh out the page count and entice potential buyers who have already read the stories elsewhere."

But that didn't matter because the clerk still gave me the sort of frozen smile I'd have got if I'd broken wind at a formal dinner. I got a kick out of her discomfort, but maybe you should be careful about what you say when buying comics.

Back to the books I bought before I farted in the temple: If You Steal by the one-named Norwegian cartoonist Jason, whose Left Bank Gang, which I read a few years ago, brings Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce together in Paris as anthropomorphic animals who plan a bank heist (I dare to try to resist that premise), and the first volume of Jacques Tardi 's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Crime fiction readers may know Tardi for his graphic-novel adaptations of Jean-Patrick Manchette's noir classics. I'll report back when I've read them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Thankful for Black Friday

Since I once read that the term Black Friday to designate the masochistic shopping crush in which all those other people are engaged at this moment originated in Philadelphia, I see no harm in bringing back this post from 2010 about Black Friday, by Philadelphia's own David Goodis.

TODAY ONLY: Stay home and read this book instead of going to the mall, and derive 70% more pleasure from your reading!!!

====================== 

I read David Goodis's 1954 novel Black Friday on Thanksgiving Day, and I can see why the French love this guy. The book's bleak, uncertain ending reminds me strongly of Jean-Patrick Manchette.

I also got a kick out of its mention of my newspaper and out of its references to Dizzy Gillespie and the painters Corot and Courbet.

Here's a routine bit of description whose tone is, however, indicative of Goodis' bleakness:

"The front of the cellar* was divided into two sections, one for coal, the other for old things that didn't matter too much."

And here's a tiny excerpt from Black Friday read at Goodis' graveside.

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

* I know of no Goodis story in which cellars do not play a part: Black Friday, Down There, "Black Pudding." That has to say something about Goodis. Here’s your humble blogkeeper reading from “Black Pudding.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Variation on a Swedish crime theme, plus a Bouchercon hosanna

There may be something to this Scandinavian crime fiction hoopla. I've just read Anders Roslund & Börge Hellström and Agnete Friis & Lene Kaaberbøl in preparation for a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2011 next month, and readers of this blog will know that I've been impressed.

Most recently I noticed that even as they build the tension in Three Seconds, Roslund and Hellström shoot the novel through with social concerns and tell their story from multiple points of view. Each of these is characteristic of Nordic crime writing, though their sympathy for individuals crushed by a system prepared to dispose of them when they are  longer useful makes R&H distant cousins of Jean-Patrick Manchette's as well. So, even though Three Seconds does not read like much of the other Swedish crime fiction that comes immediately to mind, it shares with it certain thematic interests.

***

I'll take time between books to send Bouchercon bouquets to Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalik, in charge of programming for this year's convention. They should be thanked on principle for their hard work on this and other cons over the years, but they've done two especially nice things this time: They got panel notifications out early, and they scheduled multiple panels on similar themes. This will increase chances that convention goers get to attend at least one session on their topics of special interest.

Thanks, ladies, and may every one of Bouchercon's  1,600 attendees buy you at least one drink.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011