The return of Pufferfish

Pufferfish is coming back in a new book, and I couldn't be happier, because that means a return of one of the more entertaining and original crime-fiction protagonists of the 1990s.

David Owen's prickly Tasmanian police inspector, Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, previously appeared in four novels:
Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995) and The Devil Taker (1997). The new book, to be published in December, is called No Weather for a Burial.

Here's a bit of what I wrote about Pufferfish back in the early days of Detectives Beyond Borders. It should give you an idea of why I'm glad the series will resume:

"I want to be Inspector Franz Heineken of the Tasmania Police Force, protagonist of David Owen's 1990s series and proud bearer of the nickname Pufferfish (`An ugly, poisonous scavenger known to bloat in times of distress,' according to one description). OK, I want to be everything but the `ugly' part.

"Pufferfish knows his boss is an oily, backstabbing careerist. Pufferfish recognizes that colleagues are vindictive and possibly bent. In X and Y, the third of the four books in the series, Pufferfish has been shot at and set up to take the fall for a drug bust gone wrong. But he's not bitter, and he's not haunted. John Rebus and Matt Scudder would sidle away from this guy at a bar. He's too psychologically healthy.

"And that's what makes him such a standout protagonist. He works in a nest of vipers, but he's an amiable zoo guide, telling the reader about the snakes' habits, rather than worrying all the time about being swallowed up by them. His attitude of amusement leavens the contempt and anger enough to set him apart from the legions of police-procedural protagonists in similar situations. At the same time, he can survive very well among the reptiles, and he's not afraid to tell his boss where to get off, only in language a good deal coarser than that."

Here's a link to my previous posts (scroll down) about the series. Here's the entry on Owen at the Australian Crime Fiction Database, including reviews of the first four books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pufferfish's personality

I want to be Inspector Franz Heineken of the Tasmania Police Force, protagonist of David Owen's 1990s series and proud bearer of the nickname Pufferfish ("An ugly, poisonous scavenger known to bloat in times of distress," according to one description). OK, I want to be everything but the "ugly" part.

Pufferfish knows his boss is an oily, backstabbing careerist. Pufferfish recognizes that colleagues are vindictive and possibly bent. In X and Y, the third of the four books in the series, Pufferfish has been shot at and set up to take the fall for a drug bust gone wrong. But he's not bitter, and he's not haunted. John Rebus and Matt Scudder would sidle away from this guy at a bar. He's too psychologically healthy.

And that's what makes him such a standout protagonist. He works in a nest of vipers, but he's an amiable zoo guide, telling the reader about the snakes' habits, rather than worrying all the time about being swallowed up by them. His attitude of amusement leavens the contempt and anger enough to set him apart from the legions of police-procedural protagonists in similar situations. At the same time, he can survive very well among the reptiles, and he's not afraid to tell his boss where to get off, only in language a good deal coarser than that.

And his sense of humor ... I've been reading Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan novels, and Maloney's a wild man compared to Owen when it comes to jokes. A Murray Whelan joke can stretch near a page in length, pushing the reader to the brink of impatience before whomping him or her with the payoff. A Pufferfish joke is more likely to be a wisecrack slipped gently into the dialogue.

Heineken, under police guard, trying to persuade his minder join him for a fishing trip: "Don't you eat fish and chips?"

Heineken, on a colleague who wishes him no good: Of all the eyes that look at me, it's Boston's that talk. They're flat, without light and they wish to hell that I were well and truly dead. A-ha. Well, well.

As a bonus, X and Y functions very nicely as a thriller, as a hunted-man story, and as a mystery. It's shame Owen did not take the series beyond the four novels.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Pufferfish: Return of the world's prickliest detective

David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken, the prickly detective inspector in Hobart, capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, is back, his prickliness mellowed into wry, sardonic observation and acceptance that just rarely flare into open rebellion. In compensation, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder is a terrific mystery and a tragedy and a comedy at the same time, with amusing and affecting allusions and references to George Eliot thrown in.

As always, the wit is here. as in the description of a polo club as

"a strange but beguiling rather than tacky mixture of showy wealth and understated environmentally conscious good taste."

or

"Another little session of silence, which seems to bemuse Brody Hearn somewhat. It;s calling thinking, son."

As a bonus, the novel answers my one complaint about Devil Taker (1997), the fourth Pufferfish novel and the last before the character returned in 2009. Owen is also a naturalist who has written several book on endangered species in Tasmania, where he lives, and I thought Devil Taker let that interest crowd out the crime.

13-Point-Plan, by contrast, introduces interesting information about the animal and plant life of Tasmania unobtrusively and always in ways relevant to the plot. Readers might be amused that his description of Tasmanian devils, related in an utterly straightforward way, is very close to the fictional Tasmanian devil that many of us know.

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

I've liked Pufferfish for years, since I read the character's explanation of the moniker thus: "The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severely provoked." Read my previous Detective Beyond Borders posts about Pufferfish (click the link, and scroll down.)

And should you happen to be near Hobart this Thursday, July 21, visit Fullers Bookshop for the novel's launch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Pufferfish's attitude

I've just spent another pleasant 260 or so pages with David Owen's Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, who proudly calls himself Pufferfish. This time it was Pig's Head, the first of the four Pufferfish novels Owen wrote in the mid-1990s. The scene was again (mainly) Tasmania and, as in The Devil Taker, the fourth in the series, the plot is complex yet plausible.

Pufferfish's personality vies with a compelling tale of police corruption and a grisly killing for the reader's attention. Here's Heineken, the story's first-person narrator as well as its protagonist, on an out-of-state police chief whose first goal, Heineken suspects, is to protect his own rear end:

"(H)e's a class-A manipulator, a wielder of power, an enjoyer of authority. ... He looks inordinately clever -- based on a very quick brain -- and violently incapable of being wrong."

Owen's unusual word combinations -- "enjoyer of authority", "violently incapable of being wrong" -- lend a menacing edge to what in a less gifted writer's hands might be a stock character: the scheming boss. The character is a bit player, but those few short words make him memorable.

I said Heineken's personality vies with the corruption plot for the reader's attention. In fact, they complement one another nicely. Sure, Heineken's clashes with authority are a nice character quirk, but they also add an edge. Each shifty-eyed suit upon whom Pufferfish vents his contempt could be a dangerous man, a drug trafficker, a killer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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No Weather for a Burial: The Return of Pufferfish

The crime-fiction hero who proves that his species can live alone, chafe at one's bosses, be haunted by dark memories and deprived of a wife (or fiancée), and still be in full, brimming psychological health, is back.

He's David Owen's Franz Heineken, known to some as Pufferfish, scourge of Tasmania's criminals and back in a new book after four of the more entertaining crime novels of the 1990s.

A declaration that "There's nothing like a bit of long service leave to put the pips back in a Detective Inspector's core" opens both the new book, No Weather for a Burial, and Heineken's meditation on why he has not retired after a long vacation (three months for Heineken, since 1997 and the previous Pufferfish book for Owen).

The answer, he tells us, lies in the nickname Pufferfish,

"which they gave me soon after I cut my teeth as a dour young migrant from Rotterdam, an unhurried outsider of few words, hard to get to know, prickly, feeder off detritus in murky shallows, ability to inflate and even explode under severe provocation. Not the best CV if you want to get along with your new vrienden of the Tasmanian Police Force, but effective attributes for the job at hand. Outthinking crims. Outwaiting them. Being a dirty bastard when necessary. Being a cop."

That's a damn sight better than looking in the mirror when he gets up in the morning and describing what he sees, and I'm looking forward to more amused irony in the pages that follow.

***

Read my discussions of the first four Pufferfish novels: Pig's Head, A Second Hand, X and Y and The Devil Taker.

No Weather for a Burial is published by Forty Degrees South Publishing in Tasmania. I'm unsure if the first four books are in print, but you might find copies on ABE, the Book Depository or BuyAustralianBooks.com. The effort will be worthwhile.

An omnibus of the first four books is expected in 2012, according to this article, which also includes surprising thoughts from Peter Temple about prizes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

David Owen's Pufferfish and other long-interrupted crime-fiction series

No Weather for a Burial, David Owen's long-awaited fifth novel about Detective Inspector Franz Heineken of Tasmania, known to some as Pufferfish, is now history.

It packs a bit of mystery into its 150 or so pages, a fair piece of suspense into a climactic confrontation, and a nice twist that brings the reader back to a mystery he or she might have forgotten.

There are brief, loving descriptions of Tasmania's natural life, a longtime interest of the author, who also writes about natural history. And there is the Pufferfish prickliness, both from the man himself and from his blunt assistant, Detective Rafe Treadway:

"Jay Ho's Sandy Beach Road property ... hides behind a thick and leaning three-metre high sandstone wall, probably built by convicts in the dwindling years of transportation. But the electronic gate gives a hint of something other than wealth. Down here at forty-two degrees south very few individuals feel the need to lock themselves away from the great unwashed."

"`What a knob,' Rafe says, buttoning down his driverside window and pushing the buzzer on the intercom."

Though the settings are vastly different — one contemporary urban and rural Tasmania, the other 1960s and early '70s suburban England — readers of Colin Watson's Flaxborough Chronicles series might enjoy Owen's gently and sometimes not so gently mocking humor.

***

David Owen went from 1997 to 2009 between the fourth and fifth Pufferfish books. Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) went twenty-three years between his sixteenth and seventeenth Parker novels. What other crime writers have gone many years between books in a series?

(Read about the 1990s Pufferfish novels here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Grab bag: Pufferfish, TV, good writing

Another reason to like David Owen's Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken:

"`So, Rafe,' Walter says when we're all seated. `Do you want to talk to the Bellyard affair?'

"And that's another thing that gets my goat, Walter's shameless use of corporate speak. I hope he asks me to talk to Rory Stillrock, because I'll reply I can't, the poor bastard's dead."

That's an amusing line with a righteous target. I should add, too, that while crime fiction offers plenty of acerbic protagonists and plenty of introspective protagonists and quite a number of funny protagonists, Pufferfish is among the few who are all three. The Pufferfish novels are: Pig's Head (1994), X and Y (1995), A Second Hand (1995), The Devil Taker (1997), No Weather For a Burial (2010), and the new How the Dead See.

*

In one episode of The Thick of It, a civil servant catches a government minister in a lie, the minister tries to deflect the accusation, and the following exchange ensues:

"Are you inferring that I—"

"Implying."

Misuse of infer for imply has long been a common mistake, and correcting it can get a copy editor in trouble. I loved the exchange.

*

As good as the actors are on The Thick of It, the show has me thinking about writing.

Discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders and on Adrian McKinty's blog, which introduced me to show, has elicited comparisons with celebrated television comedies of recent years, including Seinfeld.

What made Seinfeld the show that it was? Look at the post-Seinfeld television careers of some of that show's principals. Jason Alexander, who played George, and Michael Richards, who played Kramer, each starred in a show shunned by viewers and panned by critics as among the worst ever. Series co-creator Larry David, on the other hand, went on to make the excellent Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Conclusion? Writing matters. Maybe that's why another Seinfeld cast member, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. chose a show with a distinguished writing team behind it for her latest TV series: Veep, created by Armando Iannucci, who also created The Thick of It.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The return of the return of Pufferfish

David Owen is back with a sixth novel about Tasmanian Detective Inspector Franz Heineken, known to readers as:

"The nickname's Pufferfish. A prickly, toxic bastard, ability to inflate and even explode when severly provoked."

This one comes with a big, fat review blurb from me; click here then scroll down for my previous posts about Owen and his prickly protagonist. Click here for  Crime Factory: Issue Ten, which includes an interview with David Owen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

How do authors build up a series character over time?

I've just finished A Second Hand, David Owen's second of four novels about Franz Heineken, the entertaining, gruff and thorough Tasmania police inspector known to himself and one special colleague as "Pufferfish." (I'd read Books 3 and 4 before I read 1 and 2.)

Comments on the novel will likely follow, but for now, a remark on a small piece of character-assembly, and a question for readers of this blog. Heineken, the first-person narrator of the novels as well as their protagonist, tells us in Pig's Head, the first in the series, that he got his start as a constable in the Netherlands. Why, asks Heineken in that book, would a then-young police officer pull up stakes and make his way to distant Australia? "Not now, not now," he says in answer to his own rhetorical question.

In A Second Hand, he tells us why, and it's a dramatic story, to say the least. Did Owen have this harsh biographical detail in mind when he wrote the first novel? Or was the "Not now, not now" a challenge for the author, a way of forcing himself to come up in the second book with an explanation interesting enough to meet the tease in the first?

I have no idea, but I pose this question to you: Think of a character who plays a significant part in more than one novel you've read. What details did the author add in the later book or books to deepen the character, to make him or her more complex or just to keep the character from going stale? Is it a surprising biographical detail, as in A Second Hand? Perhaps it's something like the side-splittingly funny supporting roles Bill James gives to Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur's daughters in the middle and later books of his Harpur and Iles series. Maybe it's a dramatic life event. It can be anything that answers this question:

How does the character grow or change in ways that keep him or her interesting and alive?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Authors on characters, extra-textual sexuality, and a cavalcade of questions

I can’t remember where I first read about Otto Penzler’s project of commissioning crime authors to write profiles of their series characters, but you'll find the details at Publishing News Online.

Penzler conceived the project to raise money for his Mysterious Bookshop in New York, asking authors to write 5,000-word profiles of their characters, then publishing them as pamphlets that he gave away to customers who bought books at the store. He then published hardcover copies in editions of 100, had the authors sign them, and sold them for sixty dollars each. The latest is that Little, Brown in the U.S., Quercus in the U.K. and Hayakawa in Japan will publish collections of twenty profiles. These are to include Michael Connelly on Hieronymus Bosch, Laura Lippman on Tess Monaghan and Robert B. Parker on Spenser, according to Publishing News.

Without having read any of the profiles, I have mixed feelings about such a project. On the one hand, shouldn’t an author’s novels and stories say all that needs to be said about a character? (For a forceful enunciation of this viewpoint, see Dave’s Fiction Warehouse on J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Dumbledore is gay. Dumbledore is apparently a character in the Harry Potter books.) On the other, perhaps the profiles will themselves read as new works. Maybe authors will talk about how they came to create their protagonists, for instance, which could be interesting. Donald Westlake likes to tell how his comic caper series about John Dortmunder grew out of a story Westlake was trying to write about the ultra-grim Parker. Something like that would be worth reading.

So, readers, here are your questions: Are you eager to know about your characters’ biographies beyond what you read in novels and stories? Would you buy a book of such biographies? And, most important, whom would you like to read about? My candidate would be David Owen’s acerbic, eccentric Tasmanian police inspector, Franz “Pufferfish” Heineken, about whom you can learn more here (scroll down after clicking).

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Can a setting be too familiar?

Has this ever happened to you? Have you been driven nuts by an author's mistakes with a setting you know well? Distracted by topographical detail when you would rather have been enjoying the story? Have you reached the conclusion that perhaps it's better to read stories set in unfamiliar areas?

A discussion at Yahoo's Oz Mystery Readers group raises the question. A reader from Tasmania said she found David Owen's Pufferfish novels distracting because he didn't get the local ambiance quite right. Another reader responded that she loved the Pufferfish novels but was driven "bats" by some aspects of Garry Disher's settings, which she knew better. And I mentioned having been distracted by an unnecessarily detailed description of a car ride through some Philadelphia streets that I knew. In this case, the author did not get the setting wrong. Indeed, he got it too distractingly right.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

David Owen's thorough but unobtrusive research

"What would also have been easy enough to take, but not to find, were the O-BP eggs."

"The what?"

"Sorry. Orange-bellied parrot. You'd know that it's one of the rarest birds in the world. There might be one-hundred and fifty, two hundred at most."

A passage like that won't knock your socks off. But it does convey important and interesting information with concision and even a bit of humor. It’s from The Devil Taker, the fourth and last novel in David Owen's sadly missed series about Tasmania's prickliest police inspector, Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken.

Owen proved himself a master of straight-faced and acerbic humor in X and Y. In The Devil Taker, he shows he is good at conveying information about oceanography, boating and wildlife without slowing the narrative or flaunting his research. No information dumps here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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"Stiff," by Shane Maloney

We have a result in the race to determine which crime fiction I read next. Late returns give Shane Maloney's Stiff the edge in tight balloting over David Owen's A Second Hand and Chourmo, the second novel in Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy.

All three, each in its own way, get off to starts that make me want to read more. Owen's Pufferfish is even blunter on A Second Hand's first page than in the other three novels in the series, and Chourmo's opening chapters are full of yearning and tragedy that make me feel funny discussing the book in the same post as its more lighthearted Australian counterparts. I'll surely discuss both these novels later.

But for now, it's more of Maloney's Murray Whelan, the weary but hilarious political operative and beleageured member of Australia's Labour Party. The clinchers were probably the thick, heavy lout who storms into Whelan's office demanding political action against a tattoo artist who misspelled the lout's girlfriend's name in an elaborate design on his chest, which causes her to spurn his (the lout's) marriage proposal, and this, about a sexy female political activist:

Naturally, in keeping with their advocacy role, the folks at the League went in for the customary amount of third-worldish polemic. Ayisha, for instance, tended to go about in a red keffiyeh, sounding like Vanessa Redgrave.

Much more later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Australian crime novelists and humor

I don't want to get weighty and sociological, but it certainly seems as if Australian crime writers are more willing than Americans or even the British to suffuse a crime novel with humor. I've just finished Shane Maloney's Something Fishy. Recently I read The Big Ask by the same author, and I'll soon begin X and Y, part of David Owen's Pufferfish series. I even noted that Garry Disher's Kickback, for all its debts to Richard Stark's Parker novels, has moments of humor that a Parker book would never have.

I can't think of any American counterparts off the top of my head, not the excellent and sometimes hysterical Janet Evanovich; her Stephanie Plum novels seem more like picaresque romance novels to me -- comedies that happen to have something to do with crime, as opposed to crime novels written with humor. And not Parnell Hall. I tried one of his novels, but the yuk-yuk, aren't-I-droll? first chapter left me cold.

Among British crime writers, Ian Rankin can write with wit and sly humor in a short story, but he turns grim and weighty when it comes to novels. Bill James can be howlingly funny, but his are not primarily humorous novels. The Long Firm? Well, maybe. And cozies and academic mysteries, with their built-in drolleries, don't count. I'm talking about a full-bore, hard-boiled, action-packed detective story that just happens to be funny from beginning to end.

I'm not the first to speculate about American unease over humorous crime writing. At least one critic wrote that the 1940s writer Norbert Davis was cursed with a sense of humor. That, the critic said, may have accounted for the relative scarcity of his publications in Black Mask, the premier pulp magazine of the time -- just six stories, if I recall correctly.

I'd be especially interested in having Australian readers weigh in on this. I'm not sure Australians are naturally funnier than anyone else. But they certainly seem more willing to stretch that humor out over a few hundred pages. Or maybe Australian readers are responsible for this state of affairs. God bless them for being more willing than readers elsewhere to accept humorous crime novels!

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Detectives Beyond Borders makes the news in Australia

I've never been to Tasmania, but I made it into this week's Saturday Mercury newspaper of Hobart, capital of that hospitable Australian island. 

The occasion is a profile of David Owen, a Tasmania-based crime writer whose novels featuring Franz "Pufferfish" Heineken I have enjoyed for years.  The writer, Sally Glaetzer, overstates my radio experience, but she does a hell of a job with the article, very much better than what newspapers generally do when they deign to notice crime writers. I thought I knew Owen and his work fairly well, but Glaetzer's piece told me things I had not known before, about his political activity in South Africa, for instance.

Here's the article. Here's my review of Owen's most recent novel, 13-Point Plan for a Perfect Murder.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016