Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
Updated: 16 sec ago
Detectives Beyond Borders
"We have also watched a venerated liberation movement slide rapidly off the high moral ground to wallow in greed, arms-deal kickbacks, fraud, corrupt land deals, you name it, without being of much help to a huge population of poor people for whom life hasn't changed. But I rant now. It's best to leave these things for funny asides between one's characters."Naturally I asked for examples. Yesterday's excerpt was one. Here's the rest of Mike's letter:
© Peter Rozovsky 2008"As crime has become a major problem in South Africa, and the state has neither the will nor the means to protect the citizenry, the private security industry has grown in leaps and bounds. Cop stations even have armed-response contracts with private security companies. An off-shoot of this has been vigilante groups, especially in the black sectors of society. Richard Kunzmann brought this phenomenon into his latest novel, Dead-End Road. In this scene Harry (his cop protagonist) gets told about a vigilante group called the Abasindisi that operates in the rural areas. The conversation plays about between Harry and one of his contacts in the townships, Makhe.
"`[…] you have a uniform, you have a gun. You are a symbol of violence that is state-sanctioned,' [said Makhe].
"`Yes?’
"`So any man that wants to protect his home when the state won’t do it has to create that same symbol for himself. He must be feared as a police officer is feared. Perhaps the Abasindisi’s methods involve what you might call crimes, but then the threat of violence you cops use to earn respect on the streets might also be considered criminal, only you can hide behind the barricades of laws and bureaucracy. You warp the process of justice to protect each other. No, English, [Harry is an English-speaking South African] these men, they exist because our state has forgotten us, because you cops only have your own interests at heart, and because not much has changed for us poor, apartheid or not. We are still left to fend for ourselves.’""The new crime writers have also turned their attention to the industrial giants. One of these is the diamond-mining concern, De Beers, which has long been accused of nefarious practices in their bid to control the diamond market. In his 2007 novel about blood diamonds, The Fence, Andrew Gray thinly disguised De Beers behind the name of his fictional Brano. In this extract the head of security at Brano, known only as The General, briefs an operative, Jan Klein, using the euphemistic double-speak that hides a language of violence:
"`I have said that Brano is a commercially-driven organisation, Jan Klein. This means, as you will soon discover, that we are also, necessarily, incentive-driven, conferring greater autonomy on employees, encouraging initiative and innovation, creativity but without prejudice, as it were.'"He was smiling now as he used the legal term. `Without prejudice to the important notion of accountability.”’
"In my own novel, Payback, I was handed an arms scandal on a plate. An investigative journal, Noseweek, had discovered that despite a cabinet order to destroy an ammunition surplus, some officials had decided to make use of this surplus to run a small arms trade on the side. They were dealing with a company called Industrial Spreewald Lubben and had netted themselves some R12 million. In the extract a government agent, Mo, explains to two former arms dealers, Mace and Pylon, how it’s done.
"`What they’re then doing, the Krauts,’ [Mo] explained, `is selling it on to the United States. Guys there can’t get enough of our surplus for practicing and hunting. Mostly 5.56mm and 7.62mm. We got maybe a billion rounds supposed to be destroyed or dismantled. Which is a waste when you consider there’re people willing to pay for it.’ He drew on the Montecristo, blew the smoke out in a plume.
"Pylon said, `Makes you wonder what the boers [Afrikaners] were thinking producing all those rounds. Like they were heading for a major war.’"`Silly buggers,’ said Mo. `On the other hand what we’ve got here is what we call unofficially The Opportunity. Not something the minister wants to hear about, but then not something he’s inclined to stop either supposing he has heard about it. Which he must’ve. Income is income.’ He flicked off a stub of ash, glanced from Pylon to Mace. `Welcome to The Opportunity. We’re happy to do business with you.’
"`Again,’ Mace said.
"Mo chuckled. ‘` suppose you could say again, in a manner of speaking. I suppose should you look at it in a certain light the cause is the same: the upliftment of the people. Fair trade. Guns ‘n ammo for houses.’ He pulled out the shopping list Pylon had hand-delivered earlier in the week. `I can get these,’ he said, tapping it with the damp end of his cigar, `any time you want, as the man said.’"
I like Deon Meyer's sentences. I'm barely fifteen pages into his 1996 South African police procedural Dead Before Dying, and there's been much to enjoy so far, notably the laying of ground for an intra-police force rivalry that cracks with potential for action, violence and all kinds of tension. But mostly I like the way Meyer and his translator, Madeleine van Biljon, put their words together.Here, protagonist Mat Joubert has walked into a squad meeting where he and his colleagues are to meet their new supervisor:
"Benny Griessel greeted Mat Joubert. Captain Gerbrand Vos greeted Mat Joubert. The rest carried on with their speculations. Joubert went to sit in a corner."Meetings are a routine part of police life, or at least of police procedurals, and Meyer echoes that routine in the repetition of Joubert's full name and in the identical syntax of the first two sentences. Eleven words. That's a pretty economical way of showing what other authors might have taken many more words to tell.
And now, a bit more on Deon Meyer from an expert: Mike Nicol of Crime Beat (South Africa):
© Peter Rozovsky 2008In his latest novel Blood Safari – due out in the US next year – Deon Meyer takes some pot shots at the Afrikaners (effectively, the apartheid government was drawn almost solely from their ranks). As Meyer’s an insider, the criticism is particularly trenchant. His first-person narrator is a man known simply as Lemmer, and Lemmer has various laws. Thus:
"Lemmer’s Law of Rich Afrikaners: If a Rich Afrikaner can show off he will.‘The first thing a Rich Afrikaner buys is bigger boobs for his wife. The second thing a Rich Afrikaner buys is an expensive pair of dark glasses (with brand name prominently displayed), which he only removes when it is totally dark. It serves to create the first barrier between himself and the poor. “I can see you, but you can’t see me any more.” The third thing the Rich Afrikaner buys is a double-storey house in the Tuscan style. (And the fourth is a vanity number plate for his car, with his name or the number of his rugby jersey.) How much longer will it be before we outgrow our inherent feeling of inferiority? Why can’t we be subtle when Mammon smiles on us? Like our rich English-speaking compatriots whose nose-in-te-air snootiness so offends me, but who at least bear their wealth in style. I stood in the dark and speculated about Carel-the-owner. […]
"The Rich Afrikaner does not use bodyguards, only home security – high fences, expensive alarms, panic buttons, and neighbourhood security companies with armed response."
Noir at the Bar is proud to present Sandra Ruttan, author of What Burns Within, The Frailty of Flesh and Suspicious Circumstances.
“The Frailty of Flesh tore me asunder. Rarely has a novel of such art and skill reduced me to a wreck. It moved me in ways I didn’t even know I felt. It’s a kick in the head that is underwrit with sheer compassion.”
"[Ruttan] is talented in the way that a natural musician is talented, making all the notes seem effortless. Characters that feel very real, and a wonderful sense of timing, Ruttan brings it all and leaves it on the page."
"The next stage in ensemble procedurals is here, and Sandra Ruttan is in its vanguard."
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
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“The Frailty of Flesh tore me asunder. Rarely has a novel of such art and skill reduced me to a wreck. It moved me in ways I didn’t even know I felt. It’s a kick in the head that is underwrit with sheer compassion.”
– Ken Bruen
"[Ruttan] is talented in the way that a natural musician is talented, making all the notes seem effortless. Characters that feel very real, and a wonderful sense of timing, Ruttan brings it all and leaves it on the page."
– Jon Jordan, Crime Spree Magazine
"The next stage in ensemble procedurals is here, and Sandra Ruttan is in its vanguard."
– Peter Rozovsky, Detectives Beyond Borders
======================================
Where: Tritone
1508 South Street
Philadelphia, PA
215–545–0475
1508 South Street
Philadelphia, PA
215–545–0475
http://www.tritonebar.com/
When: Sunday, Dec.7, 6:00 p.m.
"Noir at the Bar: A Philadelphia Tradition Since 2008"
When: Sunday, Dec.7, 6:00 p.m.
"Noir at the Bar: A Philadelphia Tradition Since 2008"
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
I get a special kick out of that authorial magic that updates an old genre while remaining chillingly true to its time-honored form. In Jacques Chessex's The Vampire of Ropraz, nominally a crime novel, since it is published by Bitter Lemon Press, the genre is horror.Chessex's little feat of alchemy is to be just a bit more explicit – all right, sometimes more than a bit – about hidden horrors and forbidden appetites than, say, Bram Stoker, while preserving the same sense of foreboding and isolation:
"Ropraz in the Haut-Jorat, canton of Vaud, Switzerland, 1903. A land of wolves and neglect in the early twentieth century. ... Dwellings often scattered over wastelands hemmed in by dark trees, cramped villages with squat houses. Ideas have no currency, tradition is a dead weight, and modern hygiene is unknown. ... You have to take care when employing a vagabond for the harvest, or to dig potatoes. He is the outsider, the snoop, the thief. ... In the remote countryside a young girl is a lodestar for lunacy ... Sexual privation, as it will come to be called, is added to skulking fear and evil fancies. ... But I was forgetting the astounding beauty of the place. ... "During the harsh winter of 1903, three women in the Swiss village of Ropraz are dug up from their graves, sexually assaulted, and horribly mutilated, and the search for suspects, narrated in spare prose, turns up fresh secrets and perversions. A suspect is arrested, released, then jailed again. In prison he receives visits from a mysterious woman in white, who bribes the suspect's jailers and slips in for assignations far more explicit that Victorian horror writing would have allowed. The man may or may not be the dreaded Vampire of Ropraz, but the visits trigger new violence on his part.
His ultimate fate, after he escapes, joins the French Foreign Legion, and dies amid the mud and rain of trench warfare, is a grimly humorous comment on the notion of buried secrets.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Kerrie of Oz Mystery Readers and Mysteries in Paradise puts me in the way of two entertaining interviews with Adrian Hyland, author of Diamond Dove (called Moonlight Downs in the U.S.).Hyland and his debut novel have long been favorites here at Detectives Beyond Borders, and I also reviewed the book for my newspaper. I thought I knew everything about author and novel. I was wrong.
The first interview is courtesy of Barbara Fister, who asked students in her international crime-fiction class to submit questions for Hyland. The result yielded some lively and surprising answers, of which my favorite is Hyland's disarmingly straightforward explanation for why he wrote in the voice of a young half-Aboriginal, half-white woman:"I originally wrote the story from the perspective of a young whitefeller coming up from down south, discovering his roots, etc. However, whatever I did to it, it seemed too autobiographical – a roman a clef – and nothing could be more boring (especially to me) than me."Fister also links to Hyland's conversation with Stuart MacBride in Shots Ezine, a discussion made especially enjoyable by MacBride's freewheeling interviewing style. The chat includes, among other things, an amusing riposte from the Australian Hyland to the Scotsman MacBride on the subject of dialect and slang.
MacBride's fiction has a harder edge than Hyland's, which makes this funny, enlightening interview a productive exercise in boundary-crossing. Don't miss this entertaining and instructive opportunity to watch a couple of writers sitting around talking.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
First I received a note from that crown prince of Northern Ireland crime, Gerard Brennan of Crime Scene NI, that the first chapter of his novel Piranhas is available online. My only complaint is that the selection makes me want to call Belfast, reach through the phone lines, grab Gerard by his Carlsberg-swilling gullet, and throttle him until he reveals what happens when Liam and Wee Danny face off.
Then I browsed the site that hosts Gerard's excerpt, Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals. Guthrie's an author. Guthrie's an agent. And now I find that Guthrie is an ingenious promoter of good, tough, hard-edged crime fiction. The site offers news, excerpts, interviews and profiles featuring all kinds of authors I know and like (Scott Phillips, Christa Faust, Sandra Ruttan, Vicki Hendricks, Adrian McKinty) and, more to the the point, with those I think I might like just because I trust the company they keep on Guthrie's site.
And then the topper of all toppers: Ken Bruen's 2004 interview, in which he tells Ray Banks that:
(Click here for another link between Allan Guthrie and your humble blog keeper.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Then I browsed the site that hosts Gerard's excerpt, Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals. Guthrie's an author. Guthrie's an agent. And now I find that Guthrie is an ingenious promoter of good, tough, hard-edged crime fiction. The site offers news, excerpts, interviews and profiles featuring all kinds of authors I know and like (Scott Phillips, Christa Faust, Sandra Ruttan, Vicki Hendricks, Adrian McKinty) and, more to the the point, with those I think I might like just because I trust the company they keep on Guthrie's site.
And then the topper of all toppers: Ken Bruen's 2004 interview, in which he tells Ray Banks that:
"I abandoned British crime years ago except for Bill James, who I love. His 1988 novel Protection just won the European Crime Novel of 2004 in France. His Iles and Harpur series is magnificent."Oh, man, does that Bruen have good taste in crime fiction. Readers of this blog may know that my admiration for James' dark, funny, gorgeous writing knows no bounds, that I consider him perhaps the best prose stylist ever to have written crime fiction in English. Mr. Bruen, you have made my day.
(Click here for another link between Allan Guthrie and your humble blog keeper.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
The existentialism part is thanks to an essay Ali Karim posted on his new Existentialist Man blog. His main concern is crime fiction and the capacity it affords for moral introspection. This fits nicely with my recent reading of Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs, whose protagonist cannot escape from the consequences of his own acts.
The politics comes by way of Mike Nicol, whose recent guest post here at Detectives Beyond Borders about South African crime writing reflects on the country's tumultuous recent history and that history's effect on crime fiction:
"Initially serial killers – or to put it in a broader perspective, crimes of deviancy – were the subjects of choice for both English and Afrikaans writers. Perhaps in this there was a desire to steer away from the political issues dominating a nation in transition, although this attitude is changing. Social and political concerns are back on the agenda, and the bad guys are now as likely to be politicians, business moguls, and figures of authority as perverts, drug dealers, serial killers and gangsters."Crime fiction, then, can offer windows on the self and on the nation-state.
So, when I become king of the world, no one will be allowed to say a crime story "transcends its genre" unless he or she can also explain why an author capable of transcending the genre chose to write within it.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
A back-cover blurb to The Thief and the Dogs calls Naguib Mahfouz "not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains." He was a Jim Thompson and a David Goodis, too, in this 1961 tale of a wronged man released from jail, bent on revenge, and bound for destruction.Parts of the story will be familiar to fans of American hard-boiled and noir; Said Mahran's beloved wife has left him while he was in prison, for example, and married one of his old criminal colleagues. But other aspects must have resonated especially with Egyptian readers, helping explain, perhaps, why the brave and admirable Mahfouz ran afoul both of the Egyptian government and of Islamic fundamentalists during his long career.
One target of Mahran's widening circle of revenge and obsession, for example, is a one-time preacher of theft from the rich as a political act who has now himself become rich. At the time of the novel's writing, Egypt was still under the rule of a youngish colonel who was turning strongly toward socialism. A revolutionary-turned-fat cat may well have struck a chord with readers, the protagonist's impotent rage and humiliation at such a figure even more so.
God, too, plays a strong supporting role, a presence unthinkable in most American crime writing. Mahran seeks shelter and food in the home of a sheikh to whom his father had taken him when Mahran was a boy. The sheikh is merciful, but god is a haunting and all-pervasive presence in every answer he offers to the increasingly desperate Mahran. I don't know what Mahfouz's own religious beliefs were, but he took seriously the roles of god and religion in his characters' lives.
(A tip of the tarboosh to Adrian McKinty for pointing me toward this book.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Among the pleasures of John Lawton's Second Violin are its literary references, cleverer and more elaborate than most such.
One example concerns co-protagonist Frederick Troy's search for murder suspects amid a group of British bluebloods early in the Second World War, one of whom is identified as a descendant of Frederick, fifth earl of Ickenham.
Readers of P.G. Wodehouse will recognize the allusion to Uncle Freddy, bane of poor Pongo Twistleton's existence in "Uncle Freddy Flits By," a figure in several other stories, and just possibly Wodehouse's funniest creation.
Lawton picks up the Wodehouse theme in Troy's interrogation of the next blueblood on the list:
One example concerns co-protagonist Frederick Troy's search for murder suspects amid a group of British bluebloods early in the Second World War, one of whom is identified as a descendant of Frederick, fifth earl of Ickenham.
Readers of P.G. Wodehouse will recognize the allusion to Uncle Freddy, bane of poor Pongo Twistleton's existence in "Uncle Freddy Flits By," a figure in several other stories, and just possibly Wodehouse's funniest creation.
Lawton picks up the Wodehouse theme in Troy's interrogation of the next blueblood on the list:
"`The evening [diary] entry is blank.'
"`I stayed on. A rare opportunity for a quiet evening with a good book. Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Ask me anything you like about the plot.'"
Clever? Yes, but something more as well. The first blueblood is an incarnation of evil, which makes the invocation of Uncle Fred grotesquely humorous, or humorously grotesque. The real topper comes in Troy's interview with the second blueblood, though.
The light, Wodehouse-like tone of his banter with Troy is a deliberate contrast to Troy's previous encounter. The tone is almost enough to persuade the reader that this second figure, one Geoffrey Trench, M.P., is not the devil Lawton has led us to expect – almost, that is, until he lets slip a remark reasonable in its tone, evil in its implication, and goes on to suggest that his poisonous attitude is common among Conservative members of parliament and even prime ministers.
The juxtaposition of light (or low) comedy and dark tragedy is characteristic of Lawton's satirical method, effective in its shock value. In this instance, it might also be a reference to Wodehouse's own complicated war.
Now, tell me about your favorite literary references in crime fiction. Let me know, if you like, how and why these references work.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
The light, Wodehouse-like tone of his banter with Troy is a deliberate contrast to Troy's previous encounter. The tone is almost enough to persuade the reader that this second figure, one Geoffrey Trench, M.P., is not the devil Lawton has led us to expect – almost, that is, until he lets slip a remark reasonable in its tone, evil in its implication, and goes on to suggest that his poisonous attitude is common among Conservative members of parliament and even prime ministers.
The juxtaposition of light (or low) comedy and dark tragedy is characteristic of Lawton's satirical method, effective in its shock value. In this instance, it might also be a reference to Wodehouse's own complicated war.
Now, tell me about your favorite literary references in crime fiction. Let me know, if you like, how and why these references work.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
For a moment I thought that after fifty-eight years, critics had found a new touchstone for discussing the elusiveness of truth. I'd read several references on blogs to Amara Lakhous' novel Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, and not one had invoked Rashomon. I needed to verify my impression, though, so I did a quick online search. Sure enough, two American newspapers, cautiously and safely erudite, reliably behind the times in that way that American newspaper have, compared the novel to Akira Kurosawa's movie. I am unsure whether this is testament more to the movie's power or the critics' laziness.In the book, an obstreperous tenant of a Roman apartment block has been murdered, another tenant has disappeared, and, one at a time, ten neighbors and a police officer tell their stories, comment about one another, and speculate about whether the missing man is guilty of the killing. The neighbors include immigrants, internal and external, and their mutual misperceptions form the book's comedy and its mystery as well. Some of the stories are heartbreaking, though the comedy predominates.
The mystery inheres in the clashing interpretations the tenants offer based on circumstantial evidence and on their own imaginations, backgrounds and prejudices. And the mystery only intensifies after the vanished man's fate is revealed.
Lakhous was born in Algiers and, according to his publisher, recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on “Living Islam as a Minority.” I'd suspect, though, that of his novel's immigrant characters, he has special affection for Johan van Marten, a young Dutchman who wants to make a movie about the apartment building and its residents. Van Marten offers a simple and highly amusing solution to a linguistic puzzle that others had misinterpreted, and Lakhous also has him give voice to one of the great sports metaphors in all crime fiction.
Sport also figures in the book's most amusing example of Italians' suspicions of migrants from elsewhere in their own country:
"Sandro told me that Naples fans can't stand the Olympic Stadium because of the banners of the Roma fans, which display a special welcome. For example, last year during the Roma-Naples game there was a banner that said `Welcome, Naples fans, welcome to Italy!'"© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Like many another movie adaptation, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen makes alterations to its source, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Some of the changes may have been well-intended extrapolations from the story. Among these were adding Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray to the cast of fictional Victorian adventurers.
At least one change, though, seems to have been a taming, not to say censoring, of the comic. Moore explained in an interview that Allan Quatermain's attachment to the narcotic drug taduki might have rendered him vulnerable to opium addiction had the taduki supply dried up. Thus the comic has a soon-to-be fellow league member finding a sick and withered Quatermain half-dead in a Cairo opium den. In the movie, Sean Connery's robust Quatermain makes a rather more dashing entrance. Whether this change is due to Connery's role as an executive producer is a matter for speculation.
In another notable change, the movie has a male British functionary act as agent in recruiting members for the league. Moore had given that key task to a female character, the league's first member, Mina Murray. Moore's Murray is more prickly and more fully rounded a character than her screen counterpart. The comic also has an especially evil character refer to Murray as a "smelly lesbian," an edgy reference absent from the movie.
What's your take on these changes? What other notable book-to-movie changes can you think of? Feel free to speculate about the thinking behind those changes.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
At least one change, though, seems to have been a taming, not to say censoring, of the comic. Moore explained in an interview that Allan Quatermain's attachment to the narcotic drug taduki might have rendered him vulnerable to opium addiction had the taduki supply dried up. Thus the comic has a soon-to-be fellow league member finding a sick and withered Quatermain half-dead in a Cairo opium den. In the movie, Sean Connery's robust Quatermain makes a rather more dashing entrance. Whether this change is due to Connery's role as an executive producer is a matter for speculation.
In another notable change, the movie has a male British functionary act as agent in recruiting members for the league. Moore had given that key task to a female character, the league's first member, Mina Murray. Moore's Murray is more prickly and more fully rounded a character than her screen counterpart. The comic also has an especially evil character refer to Murray as a "smelly lesbian," an edgy reference absent from the movie.
What's your take on these changes? What other notable book-to-movie changes can you think of? Feel free to speculate about the thinking behind those changes.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Despite the vibrancy of thriller and crime fiction elsewhere, not much has happened in SA crime fiction over the last five decades. Until recently that is. This isn’t exactly surprising as the cops have been more or less an invading army in the eyes of most of the citizenry since forever. Certainly, come the apartheid state in the late 1940s no self-respecting writer was going to set up with a cop as the main protagonist of a series. It was akin to sleeping with the enemy.So to get round this, in the late 1950s, a young woman named June Drummond (and she’s still writing crime fiction) found a way to enter the genre with a novel called The Black Unicorn that used an amateur sleuth to solve the mystery. Hers was the first crime novel in English, although some four years earlier, a popular magazine, Drum, that had a vibrant readership in the townships, ran a series of short stories featuring a character called the Chief. The author, Arthur Maimane, was hugely influenced by the US pulps and the stories were derivative but highly entertaining. Unfortunately they’ve never been collected although there is one to be found in the Crime Beat archives.
In Afrikaans crime fiction also took decades to reach maturity. During the 1950s there’d been cheaply printed novels featuring steak-loving, hat-wearing detectives investigating single murders. Often these stories were set in small towns and tended more towards pulp fiction than noir. After that Afrikaans crime fiction all but disappeared during the height of the apartheid era.
In English the thriller side of the genre was taken up by, most notably, Wilbur Smith and Geoffrey Jenkins, during the 1960s but it was not until the end of that decade that a major figure emerged – James McClure with a novel called The Steam Pig. This book introduced two cops, Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi. They would feature in a series that spanned the 1970s, disappeared for the 1980s, and finally ended with a prequel in 1993, The Song Dog. McClure’s twosome have gone some way to setting a convention for SA writers: the clever underling Zondi, the unsubtle Tromp with his built-in racism. In fact the books were highly satiric yet only one was banned, The Sunday Hangman. McClure died two years ago, after spending most of his life in the UK in Oxford.
McClure’s absence during the 1980s was filled by a different sort of crime thriller, a series written by Wessel Ebersohn, featuring a prison psychologist, Yudel Gordon, as the protagonist. Ebersohn published five Gordon novels up to 1991. The 1990s, however, were to see a number of changes, not least the change in the country to a democracy with the 1994 general election that ended the apartheid state. Overnight, well, almost overnight, the cops became the good guys and our literature started taking on a different perspective. But it takes some time for a country to mature and give itself permission to write and read escapist books, especially as we’d been used to writing and reading as an act of protest.
For the current crime thriller writers, the 1990s were significant because of a man called Deon Meyer. His novels first appeared in Afrikaans and made it to the top of Afrikaans best-seller lists. Meyer not only revolutionised Afrikaans literature but he was well translated into English and these books opened the genre to new voices. All the same it took a number of years – six in fact – before Meyer was joined on his lonely platform. In 2005 Richard Kunzmann published the first of his Harry Mason and Jacob Tshabalala series, Bloody Harvests, and Andrew Brown won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for his Coldstream Lullaby – proving that a krimi could out-write the literary reputations. Also new Afrikaans figures appeared: Francois Bloemhof, Piet Steyn, Quintus van der Merwe, and Dirk Jordaan among them.
As for the sort of topics that have engaged these writers, well, initially serial killers – or to put it in a broader perspective, crimes of deviancy – were the subjects of choice for both English and Afrikaans writers. Perhaps in this there was a desire to steer away from the political issues dominating a nation in transition although this attitude is changing. Social and political concerns are back on the agenda and the bad guys are now as likely to be politicians, business moguls, and figures of authority as perverts, drug dealers, serial killers and gangsters.
Recent titles include Margie Orford’s Like Clockwork and Blood Rose, Richard Kunzmann’s Salamander Cotton and Dead-End Road, Angela Makholwa’s Red Ink, and Jassy Mackenzie’s Random Violence.
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Meet Mike Nicol and his mates from Crime Beat here. For more information, reviews and interviews with SA crime novelists, check out the Crime Beat blog, which includes a who's who of South African crime writing.
Reliable online book shops selling SA crime fiction are: Kalahari.net, Loot.co.za and Exclusive Books.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
The English title is rather dynamic, I'd say, and I'd like to know what you think of it, especially if you've read one or more volumes in the trilogy, which also includes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. The title is evocative, promising action and letting us know who will be the center of that action. What other titles are similarly evocative? In what other ways do crime titles appeal to readers? Through atmosphere? By appealing to series loyalty? You tell me!
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
I've heard two folk songs recently that share something of the darker, Thompson/Goodis/Woolrich strain of noir and hard-boiled, yet remain two of the happiest, toe-tappingest, jolliest ballads you'd ever want to hear. This seeming contradiction captures the appeal of a certain school of crime story, and I invite your thoughts on the matter when you're done with this post.
The narrator of "Nancy Whisky" (known in some versions as "The Carlton Weaver") celebrates his "seven long years" in the thrall of the bottle, personified as a woman with "a playful twinkle in her eye." In some versions, such as this one by Shane MacGowan and the Popes, the singer "ran out of money, so I did steal."
In that way that folk songs and stories have, the song exists in multiple versions. In some, the narrator repents of his errant ways. In others, he pines away for his lost "Nancy Whisky." In still others, such as the version by Philadelphia's own Patrick's Head, the ending is more ambiguous: "As I awoke to strike my first (Or "slake my thirst"?) / As I went crawling from my bed / I fell down flat and could not stagger / Nancy had me by the legs," trailing off into the repeated, celebratory chorus: "Whisky, whisky, Nancy Whisky / Whisky, whisky, Nancy-o."
And how about the verse "I bought her, I drank her, I had another / Ran out of money so I did steal / She ran me ragged, lovely Nancy / Seven years, a rolling wheel"? If that's not a Bonnie and Clyde or The Big O or a Barry Gifford story waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Of course, since "Nancy Whisky," though Scottish, is beloved of Irish bands, perhaps Big O author Declan Burke liked the song in his youth. Comment from said Mr. Burke is welcome.
The narrator of "Nancy Whisky" (known in some versions as "The Carlton Weaver") celebrates his "seven long years" in the thrall of the bottle, personified as a woman with "a playful twinkle in her eye." In some versions, such as this one by Shane MacGowan and the Popes, the singer "ran out of money, so I did steal."
In that way that folk songs and stories have, the song exists in multiple versions. In some, the narrator repents of his errant ways. In others, he pines away for his lost "Nancy Whisky." In still others, such as the version by Philadelphia's own Patrick's Head, the ending is more ambiguous: "As I awoke to strike my first (Or "slake my thirst"?) / As I went crawling from my bed / I fell down flat and could not stagger / Nancy had me by the legs," trailing off into the repeated, celebratory chorus: "Whisky, whisky, Nancy Whisky / Whisky, whisky, Nancy-o."
And how about the verse "I bought her, I drank her, I had another / Ran out of money so I did steal / She ran me ragged, lovely Nancy / Seven years, a rolling wheel"? If that's not a Bonnie and Clyde or The Big O or a Barry Gifford story waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Of course, since "Nancy Whisky," though Scottish, is beloved of Irish bands, perhaps Big O author Declan Burke liked the song in his youth. Comment from said Mr. Burke is welcome.
================
The amazing "Weila, Weila, Waila," with its sing-song chorus and horrific subject matter, invites comparison with a form of literature darker and more violent than crime fiction: nursery rhymes. Have a listen here.
"And there was an old woman and she lived in the woods
A weila weila waila
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Down by the River Saile
"She had a baby three months old
A weila weila waila
She had a baby three months old
Down by the River Saile ... "
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
The indefatigable Karen, hosting the Carnival for the second time, flings bouquets toward some Australian female crime writers and the people who support them and highlights a couple of fine Australian sites, crime fiction and otherwise. She also points the way to what look like intriguing sources of information on crime fiction from Southern Africa and New Zealand, both of which are probably a good deal warmer than Philadelphia at the moment.
As always, stop by Carnival Queen Barbara Fister's archive for a review of all twenty-six carnivals.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Remember that line about making the familiar strange? There's a witty example in Watchmen in which Jon Osterman has returned from the accident that dematerialized him and become Dr. Manhattan, able to dematerialize himself and others.The trope of a man gaining super powers from an accident and becoming a costumed crime fighter will be familiar to anyone who has read a Marvel comic. In author Alan Moore's world, however, the transition is not direct. It takes image consultants, government handlers, cooperative media and a credible public to create Dr. Manhattan, a notion that amuses Osterman/Manhattan's wife to no end.
"I mean," she says, smiling widely, "you wear an old double-breasted suit for that photo session, and next thing, everybody's talking about its fashion significance! Can you imagine?"Can you imagine? Next thing, people will be taking seriously what U.S. presidents, presidents-elect and their wives wear.
======================
P.S. Alan Moore is British, so I'm not becoming cool or changing my focus or succumbing to hype for the upcoming Watchmen movie. Moore fits right in here at Detectives Beyond Borders.© Peter Rozovsky 2008
I'm feeling like a benevolent superhero these days, one whose power consists in his ability to take on the interests of anyone he visits.Thus a recent visit with a comics-loving friend introduced me to some fine crime-fiction titles: Scalped, The Punisher and, just yesterday, that stunning, multi-layered, symphonic, operatic piece of storytelling known as Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons.
The comic maven's partner and co-host loves Ian Rankin and is fascinated by music in crime fiction, a frequent and well-commented-upon topic of discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders, so our talk naturally turned to those subjects. This led to some thoughts and questions that I'll pass on to you:
Music has been a part of crime fiction at least since Sherlock Holmes started scratching at his violin and of crime movies at least since the 1950s (think moody saxophones and lonely skylines). I have an idea, though, that it was baby-boomer authors who really popularized music references in crime fiction, often to rock and roll, in a big way. Why is this the case? And was Ian Rankin any kind of an innovator in his use of music in general and rock and roll in particular, or might it just seem that way because his Rebus novels are so popular?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's Scalped did this for me most recently. Novels by Megan Abbott and Declan Burke had done so earlier. Each of the three works had this effect for different reasons, primarily (though not exclusively) setting and artwork in the first case, character in the second and action in the third.
What about you? What relatively recent crime writing has found new ways to deliver that nasty kick of a Hammett, a Chandler, a (Paul) Cain, a Jonathan Latimer, a Goodis or a Jim Thompson? How did it do so?
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P.S. I was remiss yesterday in not thanking Brian Lindenmuth for bringing Scalped to my attention and letting me read his bound collection of the first five issues.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
I've spent two days surrounded by more comics than at any other time since I was 10 or 11 years old. And guess what? Some of this stuff is pretty good....
As I was saying before I was distracted by an evening of wholesome family fun, Duane Swierczynski and Michel Lacombe's The Punisher opens with a disquisition on spearing a human being:
"Harpooning a man isn't as easy as you think. ... You've got to catch bone. ... Otherwise the hook will just rip away. ... So you aim for the ribs. ... Avoiding the heart. ... Especially if you want your catch ... to make it back to shore."
Makes you want to keep reading, doesn't it? And that's what a good prologue ought to do. Oh, and the first three panels are wordless. Lacombe's art carries the action alone and does so as simply, dramatically and economically as one could imagine: nothing but a rope unfurling against an aquamarine sky.
===============
Jason Aaron's Scalped both updates and remains staunchly faithful to noir. Updates? The story takes place on an Indian reservation, a category of setting largely if not entirely unexplored in noir. Faithful? The protagonist is named Dashiell Red Horse, and the tribute to Dashiell Hammett has not a trace of the cute or the nostalgic about it. This is dark stuff: violent, full of the hardest kinds of choices between bad and worse, and all richly abetted by R.M. Guera's dark art work, redolent of night, blood and arid plains.
===============
Part III of my Great Comics Adventure was a visit to Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, a vast repository of American cultural artifacts from the dawning of the mass-media era. That era started earlier than one might think, but that's material for another post. For now, I noted with interest the occasionally dark shadows amid the garish colors and sharp, stiff lines on comic-book covers as early as the 1930s. Noir influence found its way into comic book early on.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
John Lawton is a big-picture guy, as you may have gathered from my discussion of Second Violin or from overviews of Lawton's earlier novels about wartime and postwar England.But a big picture is built of details, and Lawton deploys several to canny, devastating satirical effect. My favorite so far concerns the spunky, adorably bluff tailor Billy Jacks, who was, however, born with a different name. Here, he and the novel's upper-class co-protagonist Rod Troy are stating their names upon arrival at an internment camp for enemy aliens:
"And I'm Rod Troy ... of Hampstead."That these two emblematic English characters – upper-class toff and plucky cockney – have been deprived of their freedom by their own government ought to make readers squirm. That the latter reveals his "alien" origin in the most earthy and emblematically English speech imaginable is funny, of course, but also the most moving declaration of national character I can think of in any recent fiction.
"It helps," said Drax, "and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin. ... Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to ... not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree."
Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.
"In that case," he said, perfectly willing to play the game, "I'm Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you'll find more than a few of us are."
Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod's, beaming at him as though he'd found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, "Billy Jacks, Stepney Green."
Kornfeld said, "It won't hurt, you know. And we're all in the same boat."
Billy shot a surly glance in Rod's direction, looked back at Kornfeld.
"OK, OK, whatever `Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where's me bleedin' tea?"
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Tony Chavira sends notice of an online P.I./noir comedy comic strip on which he's been collaborating for the last few months. Click here for the adventures of the suave, confident, powerful and inept Tuna Carpaccio P.I.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
John Lawton has said he resists being marketed as a crime writer, and he said so again Tuesday evening at Partners & Crime in New York. Lest you write him off as a genre basher and a literary snob, however, consider this list of his favorite writers: Loren D. Estleman, Elmore Leonard and Robert B. Parker.
And consider his reply when I asked about the occasional wisecrack amid the grim subject matter of his novel Second Violin: "I think Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) raised the bar of what you can get away with combining serious" with humorous.
This novel, sixth in Lawton's series about wartime and postwar London, is a prequel to the first five. This time the story begins in 1938, and Lawton's usual protagonist, the here-young police officer Frederick Troy, does not appear until page 124. Why a prequel and why Troy's late appearance? Lawton says that "I love time machines" and that he loved the chance to explore a different, earlier time in the lives of his country and his main character: "If you can write the same books fifty times over, you'd be Robert B. Parker." (And remember, Lawton is no genre snob. He likes Parker's work and says he regards the novels as variants, if not repetitions.)
And consider Lawton's reason for writing the novel: Britain's wartime roundups of aliens born in enemy or potentially enemy nations. This even though many had been in Britain for decades or were refugees, many Jewish, from the very countries with which Britain was at war. To paraphrase Lawton's opinion of the policy gently, he believes it was not Churchill's finest hour.
Beginning the action in 1938 lets Lawton unfold slowly the awful experiences of those refugees who made their way from Hell and Austria to Britain, only to be shunted off to internment.
More to come, including discussion of the murders, of which there has been one so far about halfway into the novel, almost an afterthought amid the book's tragic and absurd historical sweep.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
And consider his reply when I asked about the occasional wisecrack amid the grim subject matter of his novel Second Violin: "I think Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) raised the bar of what you can get away with combining serious" with humorous.
This novel, sixth in Lawton's series about wartime and postwar London, is a prequel to the first five. This time the story begins in 1938, and Lawton's usual protagonist, the here-young police officer Frederick Troy, does not appear until page 124. Why a prequel and why Troy's late appearance? Lawton says that "I love time machines" and that he loved the chance to explore a different, earlier time in the lives of his country and his main character: "If you can write the same books fifty times over, you'd be Robert B. Parker." (And remember, Lawton is no genre snob. He likes Parker's work and says he regards the novels as variants, if not repetitions.)
And consider Lawton's reason for writing the novel: Britain's wartime roundups of aliens born in enemy or potentially enemy nations. This even though many had been in Britain for decades or were refugees, many Jewish, from the very countries with which Britain was at war. To paraphrase Lawton's opinion of the policy gently, he believes it was not Churchill's finest hour.
Beginning the action in 1938 lets Lawton unfold slowly the awful experiences of those refugees who made their way from Hell and Austria to Britain, only to be shunted off to internment.
More to come, including discussion of the murders, of which there has been one so far about halfway into the novel, almost an afterthought amid the book's tragic and absurd historical sweep.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Some highlights: The Billingham/Waites interview opens with each author introducing the other and then a discussion of both authors' backgrounds as stand-up comedians, and Barclay talks about the surprising benefits of having one of his novels published in Germany before it came out in the English-speaking world.
I've heard Billingham, and the man is a formidable toastmaster. I can well believe that he could sustain the patter long enough to keep a crowd laughing and buying drinks. What other authors have done stand-up comedy?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Here are some of the observations on post-Troubles Irish politics that Garbhan Downey gives his characters in Yours Confidentially:– "In the old days, our methods of winning (and wiping people out) were, admittedly, quite crude – but they were effective. But we've supposedly stopped all that now and are in the business of learning real politics – craft, guile and deceit – as perfected by our Southern neighbors over the last century or so."
– "Word is that the Loyalist Action group – or whatever they call themselves now they've scrubbed off their ACAB tattoos – were very annoyed that Bent had studiously avoided dealing with them over the road. ... One of my dodgy loyalist friends informed me that Vic was so annoyed at Bent's proposed route that he was considering gifting the MP his own little portion of mountain bogland, free gratis. But he was overruled on the grounds that we all love one another again (at least as long as the checques keep coming in)."
– "The problem with the South at the moment is that for the first time in almost two decades there's a fear sneaking back into the economy. They're so worried about losing their new-found wealth that they're cutting back on everything. And they certainly won't want to waste their savings on a prospect as volatile and thankless as the North."
– "But given that we've got equality, of a sort, our constituents are soon going to realise that the prospects for both communities are equally bad. Now that the focus is off their own petty squabbles, they are going to discover just how hard it is to compete in a world where plasma TVs can be produced for a tenner apiece in China and where call-centre workers in India will do the job for a fifth of what people are paid here. And our Get Out of Jail card, which was effectively `Give us extra or we'll blow up your Stock Exchange', is no longer valid. The question for our new masters is: will we still all be happy to sing off the same hymn sheet when the collection boxes are empty?"
==============================
What other crime novels have commented so acidly on politics, recent history, and current affairs?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Garbhan Downey is a kind of literary archaeologist in addition to being a pretty funny writer. Last month I wrote about his 2005 story collection Off Broadway, in which, among other things, he dusted off and revitalized Damon Runyon. Earlier, I'd written about the strong moral slant of the comedy in his novel Running Mates, a moral interest that smacks more than a little of classical and Shakespearean comedy.Downey's book Yours Confidentially, published earlier this year, is not only cast in another old literary form, that of the novel written in letters, but it also captures something of the moralizing spirit of 18th-century classics of the form. I'm no scholar of the epistolary novel, but I do know that such classics as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and such burlesques as Henry Fielding's Shamela are characterized by introspection, moralizing and, in the burlesques, satire.
Here, Downey's subject is, as always, the hilarious world of post-Troubles Northern Irish politics, and the mood is, as always, high comedy. Once I've got a bit of sleep, I may return with some samples. But what most impresses me so far is the earnestness and introspection some of the letters. Take this, from the randy Catholic politician Shay Gallagher to the randy Protestant politician Sue McEwan, who is also his fiancée, after opponents begin leaking stories and rumors about Shay's pre-engagement romantic life:
"I am terribly, terribly sorry about all this and the embarrassment it causes you and Danielle – and even your mother. By way of excuse, all I can say is that up until Uncle Shay died six years ago, I never imagined that I'd spend my life as anything but a private citizen. And I behaves as such."Quite apart from the high jinks and shenanigans revealed slowly in the other letters, I find that sentiment touchingly open and worth of an eighteenth-century rake with a good heart. I was tempted to guess that Downey concentrated on literature in university, but he has captured the spirit of several types of story too well to have actually studied them. There is nothing of the deadening hand of the A-grade English major here.
Here's your question: Garbhan Downey has captured the forms and moods of Shakespearean comedy and 18th-century English epistolary novels. Elsewhere, I find echoes of the Odyssey and of Dante in Adrian McKinty 's Michael Forsythe novels. What other contemporary crime writers have recast or found inspiration in old literary forms?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Author Sandra Ruttan makes effective use of one of the most grating locutions in recent English: "You don't get it." That expression embodies many pernicious qualities and practices: snobbery, condescension, sloganeering, infuriating obstinacy, pig-headed stupidity, substitution of put-down for argument, and often sneering political correctness as well.
The character whom Ruttan has utter the expression is a panicked, driven, victimized, vindictive. scheming, manipulative, dangerous sort, just the kind who would shake her head and say, "You don't get it." And she says it at her most panicked, dangerous and manipulative moment. The expression captures the essence of the character, and the character captures the essence of the expression. Ruttan gets it.
What other authors make effective use of grating expressions in this way?
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Odds are that many people reading this post nourish a lingering fondness for Hill Street Blues, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels or both. McBain's novels and, later, Steven Bochco's TV series pioneered the ensemble approach to the police procedural, with liberal doses of the characters' personal lives thrown into the mix on an unprecedented scale.But be honest. As momentous as both are in the history of crime fiction, don't they feel a bit if not dated, then at least like products of times different from today? Don't the domestic vignettes, as memorable as they are (Steve Carella's tender relationship with his deaf wife, Teddy, in the books; Furillo and Davenport's pillow talk on the show) seem somewhat grafted onto rather than organically integrated into the stories?
The next stage in ensemble procedurals is here, and Sandra Ruttan is in its vanguard. What Burns Within offers three protagonists and a host of significant secondary characters. These characters' personal problems, while not extravagantly and theatrically complicated, are intense, and they are present at all times, whether the officers are investigating arsons, murders or a string of child abductions, or dealing with vicious office politics. Equally, the cases are on the characters' minds even in those moments that Bochco or McBain might have reserved for homely domestic vignettes.
The strands of investigation – into child abductions, rapes, arsons and murders – intersect and overlap while somehow managing to pick up speed toward a violent climax. The density and complexity build when one of the officers becomes a victim. And Ruttan manages to keep the suspense going even during the denouement, when things are supposed to be winding down.
There's a lot going on in this novel, and I may post more about it later. For now, I'll say that the book takes up at least two especially sensitive crimes, rape and child abduction, and deals with each in ways that are surprising and that subvert easy judgments. And I'll add that I can think of no other crime novel so dense with incident and yet so fast-moving. Highly recommended.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Henry Chang's second novel for Soho Crime is all atmosphere – meteorological, economic, social and human – with plot strands gradually weaving their way into the story until one realizes that many of the details that constitute that atmosphere turn out to be plot elements.To find out what I mean, you'll have to read the book. For now, know that the novel's opening is worthy of any number of 1950s films noirs. So is the rest of the book, for that matter. The New York of The Naked City contained eight million stories; Year of the Dog makes a valiant run at that number, giving us protagonist Jack Yu, who can't keep away from his old Chinatown precinct, a dying bookie who comments wryly on his own romantic dreams, the hairdresser, cruelly exploited by human traffickers, who tried to help him.
We come to know a boyhood friend of Jack's who dies in gang violence and a mysteriously named Triad official sent from Hong Kong to check on criminal operations in New York, and that's just a start. Chang not only introduces us to Chinatown's newer Fukiense arrivals, with their wide ideological separation from the neighborhood's longer-established residents, but he portrays dangerous criminal rivalries among these relative newcomers. And, of course, the Chinese characters interact, sometimes uneasily or violently, with black, Hispanic and white characters. This is, after all New York.
So effectively has the atmosphere been set that when the climactic confrontation happens, inevitable in general plan, an accident in its details, it seems at once cathartic and fated.
As dark crime novels often do, Year of the Dog has a touch of grim humor. Here, that touch is more wryly comic than most. Sai Go, the dying bookie, thinks of how he might like to spend his final months:
"He had a vision of himself in Thailand somewhere, a sunny tropical vista with brown-skinned girls to ease his remaining days. Spend the nights drinking Singha beer and feasting on satays, chow kueh teow noodles, and tom yum soup.© Peter Rozovsky 2008
"When he thought better of it, he felt he could just as easily go to Fat Lily's or Angelina's for brown-skinned girls, and to Penang or Jaya Village for Thai beer, roti and hainam chicken. For the sunny vista he could take a bus south on the interstate, or take the train with the skylight roof to Florida somewhere for a few weeks. Somewhere sunny and not too far. A cruise to one of the islands What would he do with a shipload of lo fang strangers? He could just as well be alone in Manhattan, if he only turned off his cell phones and stayed out of the OTB and Chinatown."
Sandra Ruttan, one of that long list of folks I was pleased to meet at Bouchercon 2008, holds forth at her publisher's Web site on the process and occasional difficulty of naming characters and choosing titles for her novels.You can help her with the first of those difficulties. Sandra and her publisher, Dorchester, are running a contest, and if you win, Sandra will name a character in her next book for you. Details at the publisher's link above, and good luck to you in the contest if I don't win.
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Meet authors Cordelia Frances Biddle and Dave Zeltserman this Sunday, Nov. 9 at 1 p.m. for the Robin’s Book Store Crime Fiction Book Club's Sunday brunch. It happens at Les Bons Temps, 114 S. 12th Street, Philadelphia.
My favorite blurb details for the two authors: "Cordelia Frances Biddle is a member of one of Philadelphia's oldest families, and this series uses many of her actual ancestors as characters."
and, for Zeltserman's Small Crimes:
"Crooked cop Joe Denton gets out of prison early after disfiguring the local district attorney, which doesn't help his popularity."
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Halloween, the Day of the Dead and the World Series have passed, but you can relive the memories of the first two at the latest installment of the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. Your host for this, the twenty-fifth Carnival, is that top-shelf blogosphere library, In Reference to Murder.
Host B.V. Lawson gets mischievous while remaining highly useful. Thus, you'll find the worst Halloween costumes of all time and a picture of a baleful Pop-Tart cheek by crust with handy information for writers. You'll find an introduction to some of the events planned for Edgar Allan Poe's bicentennial year of 2009 and a whole lot of Halloween-related goodies that will stay fresh long after that odd-looking but harmless light-brown flecking has coated your leftover Mars bars.
Host B.V. Lawson gets mischievous while remaining highly useful. Thus, you'll find the worst Halloween costumes of all time and a picture of a baleful Pop-Tart cheek by crust with handy information for writers. You'll find an introduction to some of the events planned for Edgar Allan Poe's bicentennial year of 2009 and a whole lot of Halloween-related goodies that will stay fresh long after that odd-looking but harmless light-brown flecking has coated your leftover Mars bars.
My favorite may be a link to a discussion of conspiracy theories and why we love them that includes this credo: "I believe in stupidity, randomness and chaos. That's what causes most of the misery in the world."
As usual, you can browse previous Carnivals, including the eighth, hosted by your humble blogkeeper, thanks to Carnival Queen Barbara Fister's handy archive. And what about the title of this post? Visit the carnival and look at the pictures to find out.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Genres can be useful things. What else would authors subvert, transcend or have fun with? But genre labels can also scare readers off, even those of us who spring to the defense of genre fiction – as long as it's in our genre.
Jonathan Maberry has won awards for horror writing (though he said at last night's fifth Noir at the Bar reading that that genre is dead in the United States – "We call them `supernatural thrillers.'"). Whatever the label, no crime-fiction reader ought to be scared off. For one thing, Maberry says he's loved crime writing from a young age, and he hangs out with crime writers in Philadelphia's Liars Club. For another, his new novel, Patient Zero, is not horror, but a bio-terrorism thriller. For a third, based on the selections Maberry read last night, the book will contain much to delight crime readers.
Maberry's protagonist, Joe Ledger, a former soldier and a Baltimore police officer, can crack as wise as the best fictional PIs, even when enlisted by a secretive government agency to help battle a grave security threat. Indeed, Maberry said after the reading that John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee was one of his models, both as a wisecracker and as a protagonist with intellectual interests.
Maberry says the novel will also invoke terrorism and feature international and corporate villains in addition to its threat to all life. Much of this is new territory for a hero who talks like a Travis McGee or a Philip Marlowe or an Elvis Cole. And I'm going to explore that territory because the genre-mixing sounds like fun.
Maberry says: "I wrote the book that I would like to read," a deceptively simple thought and a liberating sentiment. Think of the book as a mat laid at the doorstep of thrillerdom with the friendly words: "Welcome, crime readers."
Patient Zero will be published by St. Martin's Press in March.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Jonathan Maberry has won awards for horror writing (though he said at last night's fifth Noir at the Bar reading that that genre is dead in the United States – "We call them `supernatural thrillers.'"). Whatever the label, no crime-fiction reader ought to be scared off. For one thing, Maberry says he's loved crime writing from a young age, and he hangs out with crime writers in Philadelphia's Liars Club. For another, his new novel, Patient Zero, is not horror, but a bio-terrorism thriller. For a third, based on the selections Maberry read last night, the book will contain much to delight crime readers.
Maberry's protagonist, Joe Ledger, a former soldier and a Baltimore police officer, can crack as wise as the best fictional PIs, even when enlisted by a secretive government agency to help battle a grave security threat. Indeed, Maberry said after the reading that John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee was one of his models, both as a wisecracker and as a protagonist with intellectual interests.
Maberry says the novel will also invoke terrorism and feature international and corporate villains in addition to its threat to all life. Much of this is new territory for a hero who talks like a Travis McGee or a Philip Marlowe or an Elvis Cole. And I'm going to explore that territory because the genre-mixing sounds like fun.
Maberry says: "I wrote the book that I would like to read," a deceptively simple thought and a liberating sentiment. Think of the book as a mat laid at the doorstep of thrillerdom with the friendly words: "Welcome, crime readers."
Patient Zero will be published by St. Martin's Press in March.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Paul Davis, last heard from in these parts when he called my attention to Ian Fleming's 1958 interview with Raymond Chandler, weighs in this time with links to an article from Science Daily about James Bond's evil adversaries and to an earlier piece of his own.
Are Fleming's Dr. No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and Goldfinger really over the top in a world that has given us Al Capone, Martin Borman and Osama bin Laden? "And how about Manuel Noriega?" Paul writes. "Here was an island military dictator and major drug smuggler who wore red bikini underwear to ward off evil spirits. Top that, Mr. Goldfinger!"
Paul adds in a follow-up note that the BBC is rebroadcasting Alex Jennings reading You Only Live Twice and keeping each installment available for seven days. You can also catch most of Casino Royale – as I am doing at this moment. And this reading of the book, I will say, makes Le Chiffre's motivation rather clearer than does the recent movie remake with Daniel Craig. It's simple, fiendish, ingenious and ingeniously human.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Are Fleming's Dr. No, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and Goldfinger really over the top in a world that has given us Al Capone, Martin Borman and Osama bin Laden? "And how about Manuel Noriega?" Paul writes. "Here was an island military dictator and major drug smuggler who wore red bikini underwear to ward off evil spirits. Top that, Mr. Goldfinger!"
Paul adds in a follow-up note that the BBC is rebroadcasting Alex Jennings reading You Only Live Twice and keeping each installment available for seven days. You can also catch most of Casino Royale – as I am doing at this moment. And this reading of the book, I will say, makes Le Chiffre's motivation rather clearer than does the recent movie remake with Daniel Craig. It's simple, fiendish, ingenious and ingeniously human.© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Fruitful intercultural exchange is happening at Christa Faust's Deadlier Than the Male and the German crime-fiction blog Internationale Krimis. It started when Faust travelled to Germany to promote Hardcore Angel, the German translation of her novel Money Shot, and found a surprising attitude to the kind of crime fiction she loves :"(I)n Germany hardboiled pulp (vintage or modern) is basically considered lowbrow trash on the level of supermarket romance. I had several interviewers ask me about how it feels not to be taken seriously, and I honestly didn’t get what they meant at first. ... (T)he Germans have this idea that crime fiction ought to be much more literary and `serious.' Apparently this means no explicit sex or violence, just lots of depressed, angst-ridden (male, of course) detectives brooding and contemplating the meaning of life."Bernd Kochanowski of Internationale Krimis replied with a nuanced picture of fragmented German crime-fiction traditions that encompass both "pulpy" and "high end" and make sweeping references to "the Germans" problematic. One difficulty, he wrote, is that some German critics fought hard to get crime writing taken seriously and are unprepared to accept pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction. He also takes up the discussion, in German, on his own blog.
Follow the exchange for an incisive view of crime fiction's audience in one major country, for Faust's take on her own work, and for a tale of literary culture shock.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Friedrich Glauser was one of the best and most distinctive crime writers ever: low-key, compassionate, witty, deadpan. Publishing this great Swiss author's work in English is Bitter Lemon Press' highest accomplishment and one that warrants the gratitude of crime readers everywhere. Now you can win one of his books and see what the fuss is about, if you haven't done so already.
Here's part of what I wrote about The Spoke, the fifth and, alas, final of Glauser's five novels about the stolid, humorous, empathetic Sgt. Studer to be translated:
Here's part of what I wrote about The Spoke, the fifth and, alas, final of Glauser's five novels about the stolid, humorous, empathetic Sgt. Studer to be translated:
"The delightful, sometimes low humor from the other four Studer books is here, as is the tender, almost heartbreaking empathy with downtrodden characters that was especially strong in The Chinaman and In Matto's Realm. The scorn for the predator/villains is especially righteous in this novel, and the denouement is especially merry. Troubled though he may have been, I suspect that Friedrich Glauser must always have been capable of a wry grin."
Be the first to answer a skill-testing question correctly, and you'll win a copy of The Spoke.
It appears that my original question was phrased ambiguously (Oh, hell, who am I kidding? It was a bad question.) So, with apologies to several of you who sent in answers, here is a new question:
The German Crime Writers’ Association, or Das Syndikat, awards one of the top prizes for German-language crime fiction. Name this prize.
Send your answer to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net. Be sure to include a postal address.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
It appears that my original question was phrased ambiguously (Oh, hell, who am I kidding? It was a bad question.) So, with apologies to several of you who sent in answers, here is a new question:
The German Crime Writers’ Association, or Das Syndikat, awards one of the top prizes for German-language crime fiction. Name this prize.
Send your answer to detectivesbeyondborders (at) earthlink (dot) net. Be sure to include a postal address.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
Everyone from Crime Scene NI and Crime Always Pays to a couple of hacks named John Connolly and James Ellroy has been heaping hosannas on Stuart Neville's upcoming debut novel. That novel is The Ghosts of Belfast, and now you can read its first two chapters online.
The chapters make chilling and evocative use of both parts of the novel's title, which makes Neville the second Northern Ireland crime writer I've read recently to explore the dramatic possibilities of ghosts.
The first, oddly enough, is Garbhan Downey in a story from his Off Broadway collection – oddly, because it's hard to imagine two moods more different than Downey's and Neville's. (Don't be fooled by Neville's cheerful mien in the photo above. The man can write haunted, and the man can write driven, and he doesn't take many words to do it.)
What is a ghost but a troubling manifestation of the past? That two such different writers chose ghosts as a vehicle to explore Northern Ireland's recent past is a clue to the dramatic riches that past contains. I know that Northern Irish crime fiction has been gathering steam for twelve or fifteen years, but I get the feeling that the boom is starting now.
The chapters make chilling and evocative use of both parts of the novel's title, which makes Neville the second Northern Ireland crime writer I've read recently to explore the dramatic possibilities of ghosts.
The first, oddly enough, is Garbhan Downey in a story from his Off Broadway collection – oddly, because it's hard to imagine two moods more different than Downey's and Neville's. (Don't be fooled by Neville's cheerful mien in the photo above. The man can write haunted, and the man can write driven, and he doesn't take many words to do it.)
What is a ghost but a troubling manifestation of the past? That two such different writers chose ghosts as a vehicle to explore Northern Ireland's recent past is a clue to the dramatic riches that past contains. I know that Northern Irish crime fiction has been gathering steam for twelve or fifteen years, but I get the feeling that the boom is starting now.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008
I have a full review coming elsewhere of The Draining Lake, so for now I'll restrict myself to a mordant observation that Arnaldur Indriðason makes in the book about his native Iceland.
Arnaldur lamented a few weeks ago at Bouchercon that "The biggest difficulty for an Icelandic crime writer is that we don't have much crime in the country." In The Draining Lake he has his narrator muse that the novel's three main police officers
"were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attachés who weren't trade attachés, without foreign embassies of the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely removed from the battle zones of the world."That passage comprehends both wistfulness an