Passport to crime

Euro Crime brings the welcome news of Passport to Crime, a collection of twenty-six stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's monthly Passport to Crime feature. (I recommended that feature here in October.)

I read some of these stories when they appeared in the magazine, and I recommend Luis Adrian Betancourt's "Guilty" and Theo Capel's "The Red Mercedes" especially. Boris Akunin, Rubem Fonseca and A.C. Baantjer are among the authors represented.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

A German passport to crime: Gunter Gerlach

The subject of Germany and its lack of a deep crime-fiction tradition has come up here and elsewhere, with speculation tying the lack to the country's dreadful past. ("It is probably due to the long tradition of authoritarian states and totalitarian social conditions that we have only been able to talk about a phenomenon of the `German crime novel' since around 1962," according to this article on a Goethe Institute Web page.)

Passport to Crime, last year's volume of short stories collected from the monthly feature of the same name in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, includes the excellent "Wedding in Voerde," by Gunter Gerlach, born in Leipzig and living in Hamburg. An introductory note says none of Gerlach's thirteen novels is available in English.

If "Wedding in Voerde" is any indication, that's a loss to readers of English. The story, deadpan and slapstick at the same time, relates the familiar tale of two robbers freed from prison who set out to get their share of the loot from the accomplice who avoided capture. But nothing goes quite right. Their car breaks down. One of them is constantly burning himself, falling off stolen bicycles and running into trees.

When the pair finally find the accomplice, on his wedding day, neither the accomplice nor his bride acts as anyone expects. An air of guileless confusion pervades the tale until Ullrich, the accident-prone thief, brings the end of the pair's quest within reach -- unexpectedly, of course. It's no wonder that the article cited above says that "Writers such as Jakob Arjouni, Gunter Gerlach, Roger M. Fiedler, Jörg Juretzka or Norbert Klugmann (and) Peter Matthews clinically play with stereotypes."

The story is comic, with the barest hints, rapid as musical grace notes, suggesting darker possibilities. "Wedding in Voerde" won the Friedrich Glauser prize for short fiction in 2005, according to the story's introduction. Gerlach merits mention with the great Glauser.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Gunter Gerlach
German crime fiction

A passport to Africa

Daliso Chaponda's "Heroic Proportions," another story from the Passport to Crime collection, begins with a dictator dead on a toilet and an investigator whose job is to ferret out the killer from among the ambitious political pretenders who rush forward to claim credit. Does this sound like a joke? That's no surprise; Chaponda, born in Malawi and now, if I am tracking his tangled history correctly, living in the United Kingdom after being forced to leave Canada once his visa ran out, is a stand-up comic.

The story takes advantage of its setting with matter-of-fact observations on the aftermath of looting that followed the dictator's death -- not the sort of thing one finds in most crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Daliso Chaponda
African crime fiction

Passport to crime

I've neglected to mention a regular source of international short crime fiction: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's "Passport to Crime" section.

A book that takes death seriously

(R.J. Ellory picked from the
crowd at convivial al-fresco
dinner, Bouchercon 2008)

Lurking behind this week's question about comic crime fiction was the risk that authors run of appearing not to take death and murder seriously.

R.J. Ellory is unlikely to run such a risk. I don't know that I've read any crime novel that takes death more seriously than does Ellory's A Quiet Belief in Angels. The deaths mount: Nine (so far) girls murdered in rural Georgia. The protagonist's wife. His mother. A neighbor's daughter. The neighbor's apparent suicide in expiation of guilt over the killings.

Protagonist Joseph Vaughan is haunted from a young age by an unnatural guilt over the killings without, however, taking the easy way out of losing his mind. Rather, they become a driving force in his life, pushed aside by circumstances, but always flaring up again.

Redemption? I'll tell you tomorrow.

***

R.J. Ellory will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Detectives Beyond Borders top eighteen (or nineteen), part I

What’s so great about the decimal number system? Who says base ten rules? And do the Simpsons keep top-eight lists because they have eight fingers rather than our ten?

I can no more trim my list of 2007’s top crime reading to ten than I can restrict it to novels or to fiction, for that matter. So, here's part one of a list of novels, stories, plays and histories that made my crime-fiction reading interesting in 2007.

Nice Try by Shane Maloney – At least as funny as the other novels in this Australian writer’s Murray Whelan series but, it seems to me, more intricately (and tightly) plotted.

Fast One by Paul Cain – This novel by the most enigmatic of the American pulpsters is fast, witty, hard and, perhaps most impressive for a book published in 1932, not at all dated in its language.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer – A group entry of the first four books in Colfer's series about a young criminal genius, plus Half Moon Investigations, about a 12-year-old private eye. The books are funny, smart, and decidedly not just for young-adult readers.

"Bloody Windsor" by Gwendoline Butler and “An Urban Legend Puzzle” by Norizuki Rintaro – These two stories, the first from The Oxford Book of Detective Stories: An International Selection, the second from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's Passport to Crime collection, make the list because they surprised me with little acts of authorial magic. Butler sets the scene forcefully at the start and thereby avoids the need to clutter the rest of the story with detail of its eighteenth-century setting. Norizuki, part of the "New Traditionalism" movement in Japanese crime writing, has written a story true to the old tradition of the puzzle mystery yet thoroughly modern in setting and feel.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand by Fred Vargas – Funny and written with a deep sympathy for its characters. This and the French author's other three novels published to date in English translation give quirkiness a good name.

Snobbery With Violence: English Crime Stories And Their Audience – Colin Watson’s highly opinionated social history of English crime fiction will make you laugh just as I suspect it made its original audience squirm in 1971. And you may be surprised by what Watson says about George Orwell.

Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland – This debut, winner of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for best first crime novel, does a number of things well. It’s a glimpse into a fascinating, exotic, though thoroughly contemporary world, it’s a convincing and well-plotted amateur-sleuth tale, and it’s funny, with a sympathy for its characters something like that Fred Vargas has for hers.

How about you, gentle readers? If you can still remember 2007, tell me about your favorite crime reading from that year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Martin Limón, or crime goes to war

The opening pages of The Wandering Ghost, fifth of Martin Limón's military crime novels set in 1970s South Korea, offers this:

"If the coddled staff at 8th Army headquarters looked down on their snooty noses at the 2nd Infantry Division, the combat soldiers up here at Division returned the animosity tenfold. Anybody stationed in Seoul, they believed, lived in the lap of luxury and would be no more useful in a firefight than a hand grenade with a soldered pin."

That answers one question about what makes the U.S. military a good setting for a crime story: There are opportunities for conflict one could not dream of in civilian life. Limón himself answered another such question on a panel at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis.

What other unexpected settings are fertile ground for crime novels, and why?

***

Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011

Marty, write to your moderator. He's worried about you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: Off-stage antics at my panels

Up early to prepare, moderated two panels, had an appointment or two, then it somehow was late afternoon and I had neglected to eat all day.

To come, highlights of the panels I moderated Saturday:

CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER? with Eoin Colfer, Chris Ewan, Thomas Kaufman and, for most of the hour, Colin Cotterill.

NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER, with Lisa Brackmann, R.J. Ellory, Anne Zouroudi, David Hewson, and Martin Limón.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Canned fruit cocktail: The key to telling detail in crime fiction

At Bouchercon 2009, Martin Limón said the years between the Korean War and South Korea's more recent economic and social success offered "tremendous conflict of gangs, the black marketeers ... In the interim there was a lot of room for crime."

I've thought about that remark while reading The Wandering Ghost, fifth of Limón's novels about Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, a pair of U.S. Army investigators in South Korea in the 1960s and '70s, especially when I read these bits:

"Small rooms open, no doors. Jam-packed with black-market merchandise, cardboard cases of canned fruit cocktail imported from Hawaii. In the next room, cases of crystallized orange drink were piled almost to the ceiling. The next held boxes of bottled maraschino cherries and about a jillion packets of nondairy creamer."

and

"The entire facility reeked of damp canvas and decayed mothballs. A cement-floored walkway was lined by square plywood bins, each bin filled to overflowing with steel pots, web gear, helmet liners, wool field trousers, fur-lined parkas, ear-flapped winter headgear, rubber boots, inflatable cold-weather footgear, ammo pouches, and everything the well-dressed combat soldier needs to operate in the country once known as Frozen Chosun."

The sheer profusion gives a convincing idea of the staggering amount of stuff it takes for a wealthy country to provision a modern army, and of the temptation to crime that must come with it. You can keep your submachine guns and briefcase-size nuclear devices for cotton-headed thriller fantasies. If I want a convincing mystery, rich with criminal possibility, I'll take a warehouse full of crystallized orange drink, nondairy creamer, and canned fruit cocktail by any day.

***

A quibble: Sueño refers to the "sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out." The term sexual harassment might not yet have been current enough in the early 1970s for anyone to use it as casually as Sueño does.

***

News flash: The Associated Press reported Tuesday that "As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates."

I suspect Martin Limón would not be surprised.

***

Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón, real war, and fictional crime

Martin Limón's novels have a Cold War setting (Korea in the 1970s), but they began appearing around the time the United States resumed large-scale combat involvement for the first time since the Vietnam War.

Jade Lady Burning, Limón's first novel about U.S. Army investigators George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, appeared in 1992, which means he may have been writing it during the Persian Gulf war of 1990 and 1991. Two more books appeared by 1998, and the series resumed in 2005, by which time the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were underway.

Limón's novels give a rich picture of U.S. troops' daily (and nightly) life. Have American readers grown more interested in such matters since they've been reading and seeing war news every day for almost ten years? If so, was this is a factor in Limón's decision to write his books and his publishers' to issue them? Perhaps I'll find out late next week.

 And now, what are your favorite crime stories with military settings? Why  is the military a good setting for crime writing? (Limón weighed on this subject at Bouchercon 2009). If you don't think war and crime fiction mix, why not?

***

Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

David Hewson's Roman stories

I've posted often about authors who set novels in countries other than their own. What do they miss because of their outsider status? What do they gain?

David Hewson sets books in contemporary Rome but, in The Fallen Angels, ninth and newest in his series about the young Roman police officer Nic Costa, he makes use of the historical period that has most shaped the way the city looks today: the Baroque era.

Hewson chose for his taking-off point the hair-raising tale of Beatrice Cenci, whose life, legend, and horrific death offer enough material for a hundred painters, a million tear-jerkers, and scores of Romantic dreamers. I worried for a while that Hewson would content himself with simple, pat parallels between Beatrice's case in 1599, and that of young Mina Gabriel, whose family lives in a reduced state on a street named for the Cenci.  

But Hewson is up to more than that.   Costa, his colleagues, and receptive readers will learn salutary lessons about the dangers and the necessity of stories. And those readers just might pick up some tips about good places to eat around the Campo dei Fiori and what to order when they get there.

***

David Hewson will be part of the “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Martin Limón on cleanliness and Korea

Bouchercon starts Wednesday night. While writing a list of questions for my panelists (and checking it a lot more than twice), I found these cultural observations from Martin Limón. The first is from his novel The Wandering Ghost. The second is from Buddha's Money:

"`She's very clean,' the landlady told us, `for an American.'"

and

"If anyone in the West thinks of them at all, it is as rice farmers or merchants or tae kwon do instructors. But Koreans have been sailors and fishermen since before history began."

One does not normally think of Korea as a seafaring nation, so that second passage gets me curious about the country's history. Who says crime fiction can't be a spur to learning?

***

Martin Limón will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

McBain around the world

I speculated idly four years ago that Ed McBain might be the most influential crime writer ever. I thought of that post again last month when preparing for Bouchercon 2011.

I'd read David Hewson's The Fallen Angel, then gone back to earlier books in the series and was surprised to see the nine books referred to as "the Costa series," after the young Roman police officer Nic Costa. The Fallen Angel is very much an ensemble piece starring Costa but also his colleagues on the Questura. "Almost like an Ed McBain novel," I said during my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon, of which Hewson was a member. Yes, Hewson acknowledged, McBain was very much on his mind when he wrote the book.

Ken Bruen has one of his characters not just read McBain novels but try to write one, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson pays tribute as well. Bill Crider's books work in mentions of McBain.  Anyone else?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Crimefest 2012: Author says she'll give up sin

(Photos by your
humble blogkeeper)

Anne Zouroudi, Detectives Beyond Borders' favorite surprise of 2011, writes a series in which one of the seven deadly sins (and its consequences) features prominently in each book. Naturally she gets asked what she'll do for Book Eight.

(Little Shambles, York))

Zouroudi was part of my "Passport to Murder" panel at Bouchercon 2011, and I suggested that if she wanted to use Jewish tradition, she could write about the 613 mitzvot, which would leave Sue "L is for Long-Running Series" Grafton in the dust. (Yes, Grafton was also at the just-completed Crimefest in balmy Bristol.)

But Zouroudi told a Crimefest questioner that she'll likely take up the easier theme of the Ten Commandments next, which means more adultery, murder, covetousness, and dishonoring of parents for her protagonist, Hermes Diaktoros (the same name as the messenger of the Olympian gods) to negotiate.

It will be interesting to see what Zouroudi gets up to with graven images.

*

In other news — and excellent news it is — Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground is on its way to America from Seventh Street Books (the name is a tribute to the site of the Edgar Allan Poe house in Philadelphia.)

The book is hard-hitting and funny and very human, and it paints a plausible picture of what it must really be like for ordinary folks to live through Northern Ireland's Troubles. Highly recommended to Irish Americans and non-Irish Americans (NIAs) alike.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon 2011 panels announced

When Bouchercon 2010's organizers gave me two panels to moderate, I wrote: "Any more panels, and I'll be able to furnish a rec room."

This year I furnish that room in Scandinavian modern, with plenty of shelves for interesting objects from almost everywhere. I'm moderating three panels at Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis next month. Here's my lineup:

• Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m.: "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" with Gianrico Carofiglio, Agnete Friis & Lene Kaaberbøl, and Anders Roslund & Börge Hellström. This one is going to be fun.

• Saturday, Sept. 17, 11:30 a.m.-12:30, it’s “CRANKY STREETS: WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” wherein I shepherd Eoin Colfer, Colin Cotterill, Chris Ewan, and Thomas Kaufman through a discussion of fictional killing, real humor, and the interesting ways they mix.

• Then it’s up to my hotel room to change into a fresh aloha shirt before I pop back at 1 p.m. for “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER,” with old Bouchercon friends Lisa Brackmann and R.J. Ellory, plus Anne Zouroudi, David Hewson, and Martin Limón.

So there it is: Writers from Agnete to Zouroudi, with an equally wide range of settings and styles and, for me, an exciting mix of old favorites, authors new to me, and even a surprising take on Shakespeare.

Here's the complete lineup of panels.  It's not too lated to sigh up, and if you happen to be in St. Louis, Sept. 15-18, stop in and say hi.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Off to Crimefest: Anne Zouroudi's languid island crime

I'm off to Crimefest 2013  in Bristol this week. While I pack my passport and toothbrush, I'm revisiting a few posts about some of the authors whom I'll join there. I might not have read Anne Zouroudi's Messenger of Athens had she not been on one of my panels at Bouchercon in 2011, but let me tell you: I'm glad Zouroudi made it to Bouchercon that year. She is a master of slow, languid pace, of lives stoically lived, and of wrongs righted without sentimentality. What a sense of phsyical and human place. For today's Crimefest blog post, give a big, fat γειά σου to Anne Zouroudi.

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

Anne Zouroudi reminds me of Pierre Magnan.  In Magnan's novels, I wrote:

"Consequences unfold slowly, if at all, and characters accept them stoically or with good-humored resignation or silent suffering or secret relief."

Magnan set his novels in rural France; Zouroudi sets The Messenger of Athens on a small Greek island. Her languid storytelling suggests a languid pace of rural life, with dark secrets emerging only slowly, and everyone getting the chance to relate events as he or she saw them.

Into this slow boil comes an investigator from Athens by the name of Hermes Diaktoros (the same name as the messenger of the Olympian gods), sent to investigate a death the locals insist was a suicide. The ancient Hermes was supernaturally strong and wore winged shoes; this one's epithet is "the fat man" and, though he stirs things up in ways some residents don't like, he's content to adopt the leisurely local pace, albeit with the occasional sly joke at which only he smiles.

I'll see how the mystery unfolds. In the meantime, I like this protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Japanese “New Traditionalism,” plus the traditional question for readers

I’ve just read another intriguing story in the Passport to Crime collection, assembled by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine from the magazine’s feature of the same name. The story, “An Urban Legend Puzzle” by Norizuki Rintaro, much-honored in Japan, is billed as an homage to Ellery Queen and an example of a “New Traditionalist” movement in Japanese crime writing “in which puzzle construction is key.”

It’s a beautifully paced story, the father-and-son, police inspector-and-mystery writer team playing off one another, their successive accounts and theories of a murder at a student party building toward the theory that proves correct. That's apparently the way it was done in the Ellery Queen stories, which I may just have to investigate now that I've read one of their descendants. More broadly, the crime tale whose action consists in characters telling a story goes back before Ellery Queen to Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. This site proposes yet another plausible influence on “An Urban Legend Puzzle”: Seicho Matsumoto.

I found the blend of venerable technique and thoroughly modern characters (cell phones, drugs, stress) bracing, and if that’s what “New Traditionalism” means, I want to read more of it. And here’s your question, readers: What crime stories can you think of, thoroughly modern stories, not deliberate nostalgia pieces, that nonetheless hark back in some way to older crime fiction?
====================

Competition update: A reader from the Isle of Wight is the first winner of Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast. You can win a copy, too, simply by telling me which Norwegian politician's name became a synonym for traitor thanks to his collaboration in the Nazi occupation of Norway. Read more about The Redbreast — and find a clue to the competition question — here. (Geographical restrictions apply. Winners must have postal addresses in the UK, Europe, the Commonwealth or Canada.)

Send your answers to detectivesbeyondborders("@" symbol)earthlink.net.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Norizuki Rintaro
Japanese crime fiction
Asia crime fiction

Martin Limón, or How do authors' voices change over time?

I read two of Martin Limón's novels for my “PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel at Bouchercon 2011, of which Limón was a member. Now I'm reading his first book, Jade Lady Burning, and I've noticed (or thought that I noticed) some slight shifts in tone between it and the later books.

All the books feature George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, a pair of free-wheeling U.S. Army investigators in Korea in the 1970s. But this book seems a bit more explicit about the two protagonists' sexual adventures with Seoul's "business girls" (though well short of X-rated). Its language is a bit saltier than I remember from the later books, and its attitude toward Korean business practices and the Americans who investigate them a bit more, er, jaded.

I have no idea what significance this has, but it does raise this question: How do crime-fiction series change? I've asked this question before, but this time I don't mean obvious devices, such as aging the protagonist or getting him or her married or divorced. This time I'll focus on authors and narrators rather than on characters, and I'll ask How do crime writers' narrative voices change over time in a long-running series? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A return trip to Lisa Brackmann's Chinese half-world

Lisa Brackmann's second novel will take its protagonist to Mexico, but that book is not due until spring 2012, so for now I'll think of Brackmann as an old China hand. Her first book, Rock, Paper, Tiger, is set there; she's a frequent visitor to Shanghai (where she finds Starbucks a welcome refuge); and, if I recall correctly, she'll return to China for her third novel.

Here's some of what I wrote last year about her first:

"Rock, Paper, Tiger offers some of the most unexpected views you're likely to get of China short of visiting and hanging out with its squatters, scene-makers, disaffected artists, and others who struggle to stay one step ahead of the country's ruthless capitalistic socialistic-with-Chinese-characteristics wrecking ball."

Everyone know that China is the new economic giant, the titan of state-sponsored capitalism, and so on. Everyone knows, too, about the country's party apparatchiks and new entrepreneurs. But what of the folks who are neither of the old China nor eager members of the new? That's the world Brackmann writes about, and that's the world I'll quiz her about next week, when she makes her second appearance on a Bouchercon panel moderated by your humble blogkeeper.

***

Lisa Brackmann will be part of my “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

When authors leave home

My third panel at Bouchercon 2011 will consist of three British and two American authors who set their mysteries abroad. This brings to mind some questions from the early days here at Detectives Beyond Borders, so I'll ask them again:  What are the advantages of writing about a country other than one's own? What are the disadvantages? What will a visitor or short-term resident see that a native might miss? And vice-versa?

***

Lisa Brackmann, R.J. Ellory, Anne Zouroudi, David Hewson and Martin Limón will be part of “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER,” with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011