Dan J. Marlowe plus an urban hideout

I've been reading much Dan J. Marlowe on this vacation. Among other things, the man's career spanned the transition from the nervous 1950s to the more permissive 1960s, and Marlowe negotiated the shift better than he might have.  I'll be back with a full report, but in the meantime, here'a vintage hideout perfect for laying low in the heart of New York compact yet bustling state capital!!!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

It looks like the formation of a new galaxy, but it's just neighborhood fireworks

 © Peter Rozovsky 2014

A few thoughts about a writer named Macdonald

What might a reader of crime fiction find interesting in Dwight Macdonald's 1960 essay Masscult and Midcult and the essays collected with it in this 2011 New York Review of Books edition?

For one, while he appears to have considered "the detective story" Masscult, Macdonald discriminated between good and bad and made clear the basis of his judgment:

"The difference appears if we compare two famous writers of detective stories, Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. It is impossible to find any personal note in Mr. Gardner’s enormous output ... His prose style varies between the incompetent and the nonexistent; for the most part, there is just no style, either good or bad.   Like Mr. Gardner, Mr. Poe was a money-writer. (That he didn’t make any is irrelevant.) The difference, aside from the fact that he was a good writer, is that, even when he was turning out hack work, he had an extraordinary ability to use the journalistic forms of his day to express his own peculiar personality, and indeed, as Marie Bonaparte has shown in her fascinating study, to relieve his neurotic anxieties. (It is simply impossible to imagine Mr. Gardner afflicted with anything as individual as a neurosis."

He's willing, that is, to accord respect to "detective stories." (That's what he calls them. The term crime fiction was not in wide use in 1960, which leads to the question of then and why it became popular. Did crime writers begin writing stories about characters other than detectives? Did crime fiction sound more respectable than detective stories to the producers and marketers of the stuff? ) Anyhow, here's Macdonald, from a harsh assessment of Ernest Hemingway that, nonetheless, acknowledges his stylistic influence:

"The list of Hemingwayesque writers includes James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara, and a school of detective fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It also includes Hemingway."

That last sentence is just one example of the wit that makes Macdonald so much fun to read.

He was also a cultural prophet in some ways, alert to current trends and able to make intelligent guesses based on them.  He notes, for example

 "the recent discovery —since 1945 —that there is not One Big Audience but rather a number of smaller, more specialized audiences that may still be commercially profitable. (I take it for granted that the less differentiated the audience, the less chance there is of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle of the lowest common denominator applies.) ... The mass audience is divisible, we have discovered— and the more it is divided, the better. Even television, the most senseless and routinized expression of Masscult (except for the movie newsreels), might be improved by this approach. One possibility is pay-TV, whose modest concept is that only those who subscribe could get the program, like a magazine; but, also like a magazine, the editors would decide what goes in, not the advertisers."

Had he lived on into the age of cable television, Macdonald would not likely have lamented, as some did, the decline of the television networks as unifying forces in American life. Since the book's subtitled is "Essays Against the American Grain," though, I suspect he'd have been skeptical of the frequent claims in recent years that this is a golden age of television. But what would he have thought of the incredible stylistic fragmentation of rock and roll music, a form for which he had nothing but disdain?

As for the Internet, I suspect he'd lament the unprecedented speed with which it can turn folk art forms, for which he has kind words, into Midcult and even Masscult, of which his opinion is less kind.

Finally, a remark that put me in mind of sportscasters' increasing tendency in recent years, a tendency that has begun to seep into newspapers, to call millionaire athletes by their first names:

 "Since in a mass society people are related not to each other but to some abstract organizing principle, they are often in a state of exhaustion, for this lack of contact is unnatural. ... But people feel a need to be related to other people. The simplest way of bridging this distance, or rather of pretending to bridge it, is by emphasizing the personality of the artist."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More on the great Dan J. Marlowe

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper; has
nothing to do with Dan J. Marlowe)

Last week I called Dan J. Marlowe's first novel, Doorway to Death, "loaded with sex and adverbs," and for a while there I thought Marlowe, who published the book in 1959, was simply using the hard-boiled syntax that might have come naturally him from reading crime writing of the 1930s and '40s.  Then I started coming across examples like these:

"He sighed, stretched lengthily..."

"He stripped the bed, walked stiffleggedly to the bathroom.."

"Inside the panelled doors he rushed softfootedly past the drowsing drinkers..."

"Manuel’s dark eyes lingered fascinatedly..."

“`Come in, come in!' Lieutenant Dameron barked irritatedly..."

"Resignedly he dried his face and took down the electric razor."

and I began to suspect that Marlowe was having fun, bidding a fond farewell to the adverb-laden hard-boiled prose of his younger days, deliberately taking it over the top. A sentence from the great Name of the Game Is Death confirmed the impression:

"I backed out tanglefootedly under Mrs. Newman’s bright-eyed inspection."

to which I smiled not just amazedly, but also appreciatingly.  In any case, by the time Strongarm appeared in 1963, the extravagant-adverb count was way down, from Doorway to Death's 73 words ending in -dly to 43.

But Marlowe was more than just adverbs and odd word choices (“'You’re in trouble, Jerry!' she accused her husband.")  If you like Richard Stark's Parker, you might like Marlowe. If you like Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you might like Marlowe. If you like revenge stories and you want to see how a master wrote them, you might like Marlowe. If you like man-on-the-run stories, you might like Marlowe. If you  like your sex scenes with a bit of an edge, you might like Marlowe. A blog post by Ed Gorman sums up nicely Marlowe's ability to evoke so many of the great hard-boiled crime writers.

I haven't read one important chunk of Marlowe's oeuvre: the "Drake" novels, follow-ups to The Name of the Game Is Death and One Endless Hour that transformed their hero into an international secret agent. But based on what I have read, Marlowe is the great semi-forgotten name in American hard-boiled crime writing.

*

Chaarles Kelly has written introductory notes for reprints of several of Marlowe's novels and also a full-length biography, Gunshots in Another Room, that relates what must be one of the odder lives of any great crime writer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What a free-King book deal!

Dana King is pleased to announce that his four novels will be available free on Kindle from June 25 – 29.

Detectives Beyond Borders is pleased to announce that the books are worth reading and that he does not at all regret having paid for them.  King writes hard-hitting, funny crime with a real sense of place and, now and then, a clever spin on an old crime fiction trope.

He is also an eloquent speaker about P.I. fiction and the importance of the Chandlerian hero; his talk on that subject was an unexpected highlight of Bouchercon 2013 in Albany. Here's a bit from a scene with a detective and a Russian mobster in Grind Joint.

"`I talk when I want. Who knows? In five minutes, maybe not want to. Better ask quick before I change my mind, police man. Someone tell me once I am volatile. I like that word. I am volatile."  

"You are peckerhead, Doc thought, kept it to himself."

Make this a Shamus Award-nominated Dana King summer!

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

(Dan J.) Marlowe plus more noir shots

I resume my reading of hard-boiled American crime fiction from the weird, twisted 1950's with Doorway to Death by the great Dan J. Marlowe. The book is loaded with sex and adverbs, it's the first crime novel I've ever read whose protagonist is a hotel bell captain, and it's a terrific piece of hard-boiled crime writing. More to come.

First, though, just a few more noir shots from your humble blogkeeper's new camera. I call the first one The Ladies' Room From Shanghai. And no, I did not shoot it where you think I did.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Fletcher Flora, or Why American P.I. fiction from the 1950s is like Late Roman art

American P.I.  fiction
from the late 1950s.

American P.I. fiction from the late 1950s—and I know you'll agree with me on this—is like Late Antique art. Each grew out of a tradition that established enduring standards of perfection (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in one case, Classical Greek and Roman art in the other). The weight of each tradition, part of the past yet still exerting powerful influence in the present, drove some of its inheritors into self-consciousness and bizarre exaggeration as they tried to create something new while at the same time remaining faithful to what had gone before.

Late Antique art

Fletcher Flora's 1958 novel Leave Her to Hell is as self-conscious as all get-out. Here are just a few examples from the first three chapters:

"The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut . You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal. But half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid."

 *

"Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy."

*

"I woke up at seven in the morning, which is a nasty habit of mine that endures through indiscretions and hangovers and intermittent periods of irregular living."

In the last two examples, especially, Flora has his hard-boiled P.I. narrator/protagonist question standard scenes of P.I. fiction (the description of the beautiful female client, the narrator/protagonist's description of himself) even as he lives those scenes. I'll save the rest for a dissertation, but for now, suffice it to say that a novel that questions itself and its conventions on every page (so far) is a compelling but hardly restful experience.. Here's the novel's opening:

"A woman wanted to see me about a job. Her name, she said, was Faith Salem. She lived, she said, in a certain apartment in a certain apartment building ... "

Now, let's go see what the rest of the book is like. In the meantime, what crime writers, novels, or stories have reminded you of a period or a genre from another art form?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More shots with the new camera

Still playing with my camera. Here's some of what I've shot:

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Milton K. Ozaki, plus a few more night shots

My street, tinkered with so it looks contemporaneous with the
paperback originals I've been reading from the 1950s and '60s.
(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Milton K. Ozaki is the only crime writer I know of who was also a reporter, a hair dresser, and, according to at least one source, a tax lawyer, as well.  A private note from a prominent student of American crime fiction recently called Ozaki "possibly the most bizarre writer of the '50s pulps."

Ozaki's entertaining 1954 novel Dressed to Kill got me thinking more than I have before about the role formula played in what readers and publishers expected — and circumstances demanded — of writers in the paperback original and pulp eras, from the 1930s through the 1960s.   

The Lit Brothers Building, Philadelphia.

Ozaki, for example, seems to have been particularly fascinated by grapes, making of them a stock device to which he could turn when in need of a vivid or odd metaphor, as in:

"The bright yellow of the Caddy made it stand out like a banana in a bowl of grapes."

or

"His pale eyes, excited by the anticipated kill, had the translucent quality of seedless grapes, yet seemed more shiny, as if oiled by hate."

From my newspaper's office
looking across Market Street,
Philadelphia.

Have you ever compared anyone's eyes to a seedless grape? Neither have I.  Ozaki probably hit on phrases and situations readers liked, and made a game of seeing how far he could stretch the metaphors without snapping them entirely. My preliminary assessment, based on just the one novel, is that Ozaki sits somewhere between the hyperventilating extravagance of Robert Leslie Bellem and the calmer atmospherics of, say, Helen Nielsen.

Bill Crider notes the extravagance and the occasional repetition in Ozaki's work, which I'm guessing are results of having to turn out so much work so fast. At the same time, I especially like this observation of Crider's, which fills me with respect for talented writers who worked under difficult conditions:

"You can almost see the improvement happening in Ozaki’s steady progression up the ladder of paperback publishers. He started at the bottom with Phantom and Handi-Books, moved to Graphic, then to Ace, and finally to Gold Medal."

And now I'm off to learn more about the pulps and hacks who wrote for them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What I shot with my new camera

I haven't read much the past two days because I've been too busy getting acquainted with my new camera, with results such as these.

Two of them could fake it as moody noir pictures. The third is just cute, though that pigeon looks alert to whatever perils a big city has to offer..

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Five Detectives Beyond Borders-approved soccer books

If you want a skeptical view of FIFA, world soccer's governing body, on the eve of the sport's quadrennial World Cup but can't stand the pubic-hair jokes, manic shimmying, and celebrity pandering of John Oliver, try Soccer in Sun and Shadow (published in the appropriate countries as Football in Sun and Shadow) by Eduardo Galeano.

Galeano writes with a palpable yearning for the days when soccer was a wide-open game, of the joy with which Hungarians, Brazilians, and his own Uruguyan compatriots once played the sport.  He excoriates FIFA's shameful banning of Hungarian players who supported that country's doomed uprising against its Soviet-imposed government in 1956. And he structures the book in extremely short, thematically organized essays, which makes it exceedingly easy reading for non-experts. (I'm only the most casual of soccer fans, and I've made just one visit to South America.)

(I will give Oliver points for including in his anti-FIFA rant a reference to Qatar, the host — for now — of the 2022 World Cup, as a slave state. For some reason, the Gulf states' treatment of dark-skinned peoples seems not to get much play in the American media. I'd hate to think said media are afraid of offending anyone.)

In the meantime, here are four more recommendations from the Detectives Beyond Borders soccer/football/fútbol desk of books that will take you miles from the moronic wasteland of American late-night television:

1. Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, by David Winner. Odd theories and insightful observations that tie the Dutch school of "total football" tactics to the country's geography.
2. Red or Dead, by David Peace. A moving, stylistically demanding, immensely satisfying novel about former Liverpool soccer manager Bill Shankly and his love for his adopted team and city.
3. Across the Line, by Garbhan Downey. A riotous slapstick comedy about the lengths to which rival former paramilitary men in Northern Ireland will go to best one another in a soccer competition.
4. Off Side, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Even more satisfying as an ode to the back streets of Barcelona than it is as a mystery.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Helen Nielsen

DOWN AT THE EDGE of Mexican town, where the pavement gave out and the yellow dust drifted ankle-deep over the hard-packed adobe, a radio was moaning a dreamy beat into the night. It was the kind of music that needs two people, but only one was listening ...

— Obit Delayed, Helen Nielsen

That's the opening of the first novel I'm reading by Helen Nielsen, and I hope you'll agree that it demonstrates the woman had chops.

Nielsen wrote around eighteen books from the 1950s through the 1970s as well as television scripts. She had studied commercial art and, according to one account, worked as a draftsman during World War II contributed to the designs of B-36 and P-80 aircraft.

What I like in Obit Delayed are the intelligence and wit Nielsen brings to what otherwise might be routine bits of mystery business. Here's one nice mix of wit and pulpy raciness:

"Now that Mitch noticed, the man did have a newly wedded look— but he didn’t fit. He was too common, too Mr. Average Man. Not that a man couldn’t look like a grocery clerk and still be a murderer, but how, Mitch wondered, could he be married to a number like the blonde?"

And then there's this description of a man who, from a young age, did not maintain himself in top physical shape: "Even in so old a photo Frank Wales showed sighs of an impending bay window."  That is the most creative synonym I've ever seen for "spare tire," and it makes me want to read more by the mysterious Helen Nielsen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Howard Engel's Memory Book, or What happens when a writer loses his ability to read?

(The graphically brilliant
and thematically relevant cover
of the Canadian edition of
Memory Book)

The Crime Writers of Canada announced the winners of the Arthur Ellis Awards this week, an honor my landsman Howard Shrier has won twice in the past. This year's awards inaugurated a Grand Master category, and the first winner is the author of what must be one of the most unusual crime novels ever published. In honor of the award here's a post I put up some years ago about Memory Book, by grandmaster Howard Engel.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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

This was the first crime novel I can remember that comes with an afterword by a neurologist. That neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writes of his acquaintance with Howard Engel, which came about because of Engel's alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer loses the ability to read but not to write -- a difficult affliction to bear for a novelist.

Sacks tells us about some of the surprising ways Engel overcame this condition and resumed his writing career. The first product of this resumption was Memory Book, the eleventh novel featuring private eye Benny Cooperman, and the first in which Benny must, like his creator, overcome alexia sine agraphia. (Engel's condition was the result of a mild stroke. Cooperman's was the result of -- but you'll have to read the book to find out.)

Confined to a rehabilitation hospital as he is, Cooperman must, like Alan Grant in Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, solve a mystery from his sick bed. Cooperman is alive to the world of the hospital, to the personalities of his fellow patients, his nurses and his doctors.

The mystery Cooperman must solve is how he wound up in the condition in which he finds himself. This leads him back into the case that had brought him from his home town of Grantham, Ontario, to Toronto, where he was hospitalized. He must solve these dual mysteries as he struggles with neurological conditions that leave him constantly tired and unable to retain names and words. His discoveries of his own slowly returning cognitive abilities as he chases down the people who put him where he is add an intriguing dimension highly unusual in crime novels to say the least. Handicapped detectives have been around for almost a hundred years, if not longer, but I don't know of any others who have shared an affliction with their creator.

I also found myself wondering if Engel's cognitive struggles accounted for my one quibble with the novel's style. In at least two places, long stretches of dialogue are uninterrupted by reaction on Cooperman's part. In at least one of these, the lack of reaction was obtrusive. Is this a quirk of Engel's style unrelated to his condition? I'll tell you after I've read more of his books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Howard Engel
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Of Cops and Robbers: Now, THIS is the way to integrate reality into a crime novel

This new thriller by Mike Nicol is both tangled and straightforward, so chilling and so entertaining, that I don't know where to start.  Perhaps its most impressive accomplishment is that it offers a rich and credible account of what South African government and society are really like behind the headlines, both before and after 1994.

It can't be easy for an author, especially in popular genres such as crime and thriller writing, to work real events into the story without turning the book into a Movie of the Week. Nicol gets around this by choosing events less likely to be familiar, at least to readers outside South Africa. The novel never mentions Nelson Mandela, for instance, though one of his highest-profile colleagues figures in a subplot.

And he endows real events with the magic and imagination of fiction, whether they be the overseas assassination of an anti-apartheid activist, or the Miss Landmine Angola beauty pageant.  He knows, in other words, that his job is to tell an entertaining story.  That's a hell of a lot more effective than didactic, statistic-spouting chapter headings.

What should an author keep in mind when making real events parts of a novel? What crime novelist are best at it, other than James Ellroy?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

On American characters and British (or South African) usage

If you read the previous Detectives Beyond Borders post, you know I nearly exhausted myself coming up with superlatives for Mike Nicol's novel Black Heart. "If you like your thrillers drum-head tight, sharply observed, with a keen satirical edge, thoroughly entertaining even as they offer serious commentary on the countries of their setting," I wrote, "you want to read Mike Nicol."

I loved the whole book, in fact, except for three words:

"‘We’re not doing a runner, Vee.'"

The trouble with doing a runner is that the speaker is American, and so is the character to whom he is speaking, and doing a runner is simply not American English. The Oxford Dictionaries and Merriam Webster Web sites define it as British, and my experience with the word suggests this is correct (though the expression has spread to Australia and Nicol's South Africa, among others).

If you're American or Canadian, would one American character's use of doing a runner to another bother you? If you're South African or British, would "skipping town" or "taking off" have made you scratch your head? How faithful must an author be to language his characters would use in real life?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Black Heart, or Why you should spend your pennies on a book by Mike Nicol

Oh, man, did I like Mike Nicol's 2011 Cape Town thriller Black Heart. Here are a few of the reasons:

1) It is quite literally impossible at times to say who--the protagonists or the principal villain--is chasing whom. That's because each is chasing the other, and has good reasons for doing so.

2) And that's leaving aside the secondary villains--or are they secondary good guys?

3) The main good guys, a pair of security-company owners named Mace Bishop and Pylon Buso, are very clearly good, yet they have done dreadful things.

4) The principal villain, one of the more memorable in recent crime fiction, is evil beyond all doubt, yet she is given a chilling back story rooted in South Africa's recent past:

"Mace had watched her taken away to the Membesh camp. Nights of rape ahead of her as the big boys had their way. The big boys now MPs, government men, oligarchs. Was hardly a wonder he and Pylon went off to run guns. The camps weren’t a picnic."

One could discuss that passage at some length. For now, suffice it to say that Nicol avoids the easy temptation of making her horrible past an easy pop-psychological excuse for her evil present. Oh, and has any villain ever had a better name, with a more resonant first syllable, than Sheemina February?

5) The Hammett-like terseness that bursts into occasional rueful Chandlerian acid, as in this observation about Sheemina February's building:

"a cliff of expensive caves owned by film stars, rich business machers, trust babies, highflying models with too much money too soon."

6) The reference to "Government men, all the old strugglistas" who "get fatter by the minute with their deals and schemes." Strugglistas is my word of the week.

7) The humor:

"‘That’s your name? I call you Dancing Rabbit?’" 

 "‘That’s what I answer to. Also Veronica.'"

8) The humor at the tensest moments, as here, when Mace and Pylon confront Dancing Rabbit and her husband who, it turns out, are Native American casino entrepreneurs eager to swing a deal in South Africa:

“‘Maybe you should have told us. Sort of thing puts you in a different category for us … `In our books,’ said Pylon, ‘you were rich and famous coming here for a good time. Just needed the edge taken off the street life. No big deal.’” 

“‘Still not,’ said Dancing Rabbit. ‘In our experience people say they’re going to scalp you, they’re generally blustering.’  

 “‘Not here,’ said Mace. ‘People here say that’s their intention, most often it is exactly.’”

9) A comic set piece that does extra duty as local color and entertaining lesson in how vernaculars mix in a multi-ethnic country:

 "He rapped his knuckles on the lid. ‘Ja, hell man, this old biddy, this’ – he shook his head – ‘I’d say, hell man, I’d say, ja,’ – he folded his arms – ‘I’d say the way it is with your car, ag man, short and sweet like a beet, the fucking fucker’s fucked, ek se. Finish ’n klaar. Know what I mean. End of story.’"

In short, if you like your thrillers drum-head tight, sharply observed, with a keen satirical edge, thoroughly entertaining even as they offer serious commentary on the countries of their setting, you want to read Mike Nicol.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Theodore Tinsley's multivalent pulp patter

I was ready to prepare a post on Mike Nicol's tight-as-a-drumhead South African thriller Black Heart when I came upon this bit of patter, action, and narration from "Park Avenue Item" (1932) by Theodore A. Tinsley, a Black Mask writer whom I did not know about until this week, but am glad I know now:

"`If you wanta slip me the dough—I'm his babe.'"

"She was his babe—and he left two days ago—he must have come back and left all over again according to the Swede in the cellar. What the hell were they all lying about?

"Tracy looked keenly at her eyes, the nervous hands, the pale lips with the sagging flesh-lines at their corners.

"He said, coolly: `Nix. This is Johnny's dough. I'll hold it for him. I'm not staking his babe to a trip through Switzerland.'"

"She grinned at that. Her right fingertips jerked suddenly to her left forearm with a slow rotary movement of which she was entirely unconscious."

"She said, sneeringly: `You're a pretty wise jasper, at that. Only I don't sleigh-ride. Morph's my dish, dearie.'"

First I was dizzy with the heady fizz of the slang. Then the pathos hit me, and the harshness, before a return to the hard glitter of the slang, with the final line. I'd call that a nice summation of the pleasures to be derived from pulp writing. Good job, Ted Tinsley.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Detectives Beyond Borders discovers a Black Mask writer

One of the catcher's
masks looked like this.

Good fun in New York yesterday at a party HarperCollins threw for book bloggers in conjunction with BookExpo America (BEA) 2014.

I didn't meet any other bloggers, but I did renew acquaintances with James Hayman, an author who was part of a panel at Bouchercon 2013 that struck me with its commonsense stance on e-books and electronic publishing.  A chat I had with Hayman's editor could eventually lead to posts on editors and book promotion and ways to keep midlist authors from leaping out of high windows. The sliders and little hot dogs and other hors d'oeuvres were just fine, too, and the wine flowed like water.

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of Nosh Corp., and the bash happened at the NoshAmerica Building in Midtown Manhattan, in a room normally occupied by the sports division of Nosh News. The decor was all photos and exhibits, including a display of baseball catcher's masks from the 1880s through the 1950s, including one that looked like the famous helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship burial,  but with a turban on it.

I made a pre-party stop at Mysterious Bookshop, where I bought a fat volume of stories by Theodore A, Tinsley, a Black Mask author new to me, about Jerry Tracy, celebrity reporter, a character also new to me. The book grabbed me from the first line:

"Jerry Tracy opened a ground glass door and stepped into the dingy little Broadway office maintained for him by the Planet, New York's goofiest Tab."

The first few stories have all the wisecracking I've come to expect from detective pulps of the early 1930s, and little or none of the dated prose style I sometimes find obtrusive in such stories. And the story "South Wind" includes a brand of heartstring-tugging tragedy and humanity rare in any crime fiction, much less the kind that features speakeasies, hard-drinking reporters, and hard-boiled dames.

Tinsley wasn't Dashiell Hammett; no one was, and no one ever will be. But my early reading suggests he ought to be at least right up there with Frederick Nebel and Raoul Whitfield.

Finally, I also bought the complete stories of Paul Cain, one Black Masker who might well be up there with Hammett if he'd written more.  I have a good deal of this material elsewhere, but the volume has an illuminating introduction that's especially good in its assessment of Cain's critical reception as compared to Hammett's.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Dash and flash

(Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper)

One of the few pieces of fiction I've written is a flash-fiction tribute to Dashiell Hammett three years ago. It's still Hammett's birthday on the West Coast, so here's the story again. Happy birthday, Dash.
========================

Down the Shore

by Peter Rozovsky

Sally took the Lavender Room and left the Leather ‘n’ Spice Suite for me. I thanked her for that much; a guy’s got a reputation to keep.

Sally was all right. Sure, she’d cooed over the scented candles and chintz-covered throw pillows. But she drew the line at the teddy bears – five on the parlor settee, seven on a second-floor notions table, and one that scared the hell out of her when it fell on her head from the top of an ivory-inlaid cabinet in the breakfast nook.

That’s why I suspected her when I found a bear with its guts ripped out the next morning. She just looked at me funny as we headed out for an iced coffee before hitting the beach.

*

Two more teddy bears disappeared that evening, though one turned up under the porch swing soaking in a puddle of spilled mint tea. The glass pitcher that had held the tea lay on its side, next to a knocked-over white rattan table.

Diane shook her head as she mopped up the mess, muttering that some guests lack the simple good manners to come forward when they have an accident. But no one can stay grumpy for long and still run a successful bed and breakfast. “I’m no escapee or anything,” she said, laughing. She slapped the puddle with her mop. “I won’t rip their heads off.”

*

“Let me do your neck,” Sally said.

*

I winced as we sat in the Mexican coffee shop reading our newspapers the next morning. “Did you see— Damn!” I threw the paper down and rubbed my left forearm hard. “Itching. We stayed out too long yesterday. Pass the Gold Bond, will you?”

A skinny guy with a faded green baseball cap and a laughing gull tattooed on his left temple stared at the little white clouds as I slapped the powder over my arms.

*

I recognized the tattoo when I saw it again late that night. Its owner lay face down on the bed and breakfast’s porch, his hands cuffed behind him and a police sergeant kneeling none too gently on his back.

“It was the bears,” the sergeant’s boss said. “This guy’s been a small-time heister for years. He heard a load of heroin was coming down the Shore in one of them teddies, and somehow he got it into his head that this was the town.” He nudged the perp thoughtfully in the ribs with his boot. “It gets pretty shitty for a guy like him in the winters here, and this was his chance to get away. I don’t know what we can charge him with; B&E and cruelty to animals, maybe.” He bent down and hauled the skinny perp up by the arm pits. “Come on, Grizzly Adams. We don’t have much of a downtown, but we’re taking you there.”

*

If the dope was in Cape Friendly, the skinny guy never found it. Maybe he’d be no worse off than he was before. But maybe whoever had paid for the heroin would make an example of him. Either way, I didn’t envy the skinny guy with the laughing-gull tattoo.

They’d taken him away when Sally came down the stairs. Her mouth made a silent O. “What happened? What is all—” She waved her arm out over the guts of a dozen toy bears.

"It’s nothing, baby, just the stuffing that dreams are made of. Now, let’s go to bed. Your suite or mine?”

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Happy birthday, Hammett

The greatest crime writer of all time, Dashiell Hammett (left), was born 120 years ago today. (Yes, the greatest, notwithstanding the Times of London's bizarre ranking a few years ago, which had Hammett 13th and Ian Rankin ninth, possibly because Rankin, unlike Hammett, had a serving British prime minister ready to write an appreciation to accompany the list.)

Hammett is probably best known for his five novels and for the movies made from two of them: The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, but I'll celebrate his birthday with a post about one of his short stories. And here all my posts about the real greatest crime writer ever. Click the link, then scroll down.)

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"And I praise the dead who have already died, more than the living who are still alive."

— Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) 4:2

In these troubled times, when uncertainty walks to and fro in the land and up and down in it (and when outside commitments again cut into my reading and blogging time), I seek consolation in scripture, and I open those books from which everything that followed derives.

Take the beginning of "The Big Knock-Over":

"I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy's dive.

"Paddy — an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain — showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:

"`Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send 'em over for life in the end.'"

What does that passage give us? Lean, smart, tough-guy prose, of course, the best that anyone has written in crime fiction, but also deadpan, almost surreal humor: What is someone named Paddy doing with a nickname like "the Mex," and vice versa?  I'd also argue that Hammett's granting Paddy a personality and a prominent role in the scene, and thereby contributing to the illusion of a coherent, believable world and not just a cops-and-robbers story, is a dim, distant forerunner of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's similar accomplishment. Far-fetched? It's not the most outrageous claim ever made on behalf of a foundational text.

Then there's the nickname itself. Strip "The Big Knock-Over" of everything but its monikers, and it's still better than most crime fiction that went before and came after: Itchy Maker. Bluepoint Vance. The Dis-and-Dat Kid. Spider Girrucci. Alphabet Shorty McCoy. Bull McGonickle, "still pale from fifteen years in Joliet." Toby the Lugs, "Bull's running mate."  L.A. Slim, "from Denver, sockless and underwearless as usual, with a thousand-dollar bill sewed in the each shoulder of his  coat." Big Flora. The Motsa Kid.

That's at least as good as all the begats and lists of warriors in those other foundation texts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Mike Nicol on South African crime writing

I've been back on the South African crime fiction bandwagon in recent days, with James McClure, Mike Nicol, and Diale Tlholwe, all of whom who have reminded me how exciting South African crime fiction can be. What better time to bring back Nicol's guest post about South African crime fiction? Matters have changed since I first put up the post; several of the authors he mentions have published new books, and at least one has died. Most notably, perhaps, that excellent Cape Town thriller writer, Roger Smith, has come into the picture. As a further update, here's a list of twenty top South African crime novels, from the Crime Beat Web site. But Nicol's essay remains a valuable introduction to and outline of one of the world's most interesting and vibrant crime-fiction scenes. Thanks again, Mike.

(Since soccer's World Cup begins in a couple of weeks, here's an illustration to bring back memories of South Africa 2010. Anyone remember what that instrument at the upper right is?)

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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 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 [in 2006] , 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.

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

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 South African crime fiction are: Kalahari.net, Loot.co.za and Exclusive Books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

More highlights from Diale Tlholwe's Counting the Coffins

A few more things to know about Diale Tlholwe's novel Counting the Coffins, discussed in this space yesterday:

1) The protagonist, Thabang Maje, and his bosses, Thekiso and Ditoro, work in the Bedlam Building in Johannesburg.

2) An anonymous bar, away from where "the trendy congregate to congratulate themselves with expensive drinks," is on Nugget Street.

3) Maje tells of meeting another character "at one of those debauched parties that were held every day under the pretext of celebrating our new democracy."

4) A variation on the theme:

"`Nothing is certain or permanent in this world, especially in this country.'

“`Even our new democratic system?'

“`Especially that,' Thekiso said firmly and rose to leave."

5) This exchange, which could serve as the novel's thematic statement:

“`What are you then, now?' Tau Ditoro asked just as suddenly as he had appeared at my side.

“`What do you mean?'

“`A true believer or a sceptic?'

“`A true believer.'

“`In what?'

“`In scepticism.'

“`The only true faith!' he bellowed as he bundled me into the car ..."

6) Followed shortly thereafter, however, by:

"`Too much scepticism can be bad for your eyesight.'"

"Yes," you'll be saying to yourself about now, "this book looks worth reading." And you'll be right.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Diale Tlholwe, an exciting new (to me) South African crime novelist

Diale Tlholwe reminds me of his late, great countryman James McClure.  Like McClure, South Africa's greatest crime writer, Tlholwe writes with an amused, detached narrative voice that makes his social observations all the sharper.

McClure wrote during South Africa's apartheid era. Tlholwe sets his books amid the hangover after the euphoria of apartheid's overthrow, thus observations such as the following, from his second novel, Counting the Coffins:

“`Oh, Jacky. He used to be a journalist too. Now he is a spokesperson for some high official.'

“`Which one? The official, I mean.'

“`There’s been so many of them. Jacky is always moving around, advocating one cause today and another the next. He is a typical new South African. Right now, I think it’s small-business enterprise. After the mall mess he was in public works. Anyway, the same people are usually involved in all these things in different ways – public, private and everything in between.'”

or this, in which the protagonist, an investigator named Thabang Maje, indulges in high spirits on the job:

“`Evening, ladies and gents of the majority, as we used to say a million dark years ago just before looting and burning down your houses. I’m . . . I’m Lebogang.' For some reason my mind was back at the blazing season of my school days when we would terrify ineffectual people like these whom we suspected were fence-sitters in the liberation struggle.” 

That's funny and sad and scary at the same time, I'd say, enough by itself to make the novel worth reading.  The book so far also reminds me of the best of Northern Ireland crime fiction, in its invocations of ghosts that remain, however, very much alive.

I still have about half the book left to read, but Counting the Coffins bids fair to be my most exciting crime fiction discovery this year. I'll also look forward to reading Tlholwe's Ancient Rites.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Back to South Africa in James McClure's shorts

Detectives Beyond Borders has long been a fan of James McClure's Kramer and Zondi novels, which pair a white Afrikaner police lieutenant and his Zulu assistant in apartheid-era South Africa, and do not spare the reader the harsh words that swirl around, about, and between the two. (Read all Detectives Beyond Borders' McClure posts; click the link, then scroll down.)

So I was especially excited to hear from the good folks at Crime Beat (South Africa), about God It Was Fun, a collection of McClure's short stories and scripts. These include the screenplay for a film adaptation of his novel The Steam Pig, a production "halted in circumstances that remain a mystery to this day," according to a short, informative biographical introduction by McClure's children.

It has been a while since I've read South African crime fiction, a body of work I've called second only to Ireland's in international crime writing, and it's good to be back.

*

Want to join me in exploring South African crime fiction? Here's a Crime Beat list of twenty top South African crime novels. I might have chosen different books by Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, but it's an exciting list, including a few authors new to me, one of whose novels I have just bought.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

An ordinary not decent movie, or what's the secret to making a criminal a compelling protagonist?

To paraphrase Prince Rogers Nelson, this week I've been been watching violent comic crime movies as if it were 1999.

Here's what's wrong with Ordinary Decent Criminal, originally scheduled for release that year but withheld until 2000:

1) Kevin Spacey's character, Michael Lynch, is far too cuddly to be believable as a criminal.
2) The movie contained no surprise not telegraphed from five miles off.
3) The climactic art heist wants to be seen as madcap and zany, but isn't.
4) The movie is all concept and no story. Crook lives with two women, is a good family man, and likes to taunt the cops. And that's it. One knows from the start that Lynch won't be killed, won't be caught, and will get the girls.

Anything offensive about the movie? Maybe this: It lacks the guts to show Lynch committing any truly despicable acts. Doing so would have forced it to work harder to make him a compelling character.   That the real Dublin gangster on whom Lynch was at least partly based is said to have been a torturer and a bully who shook down hot dog vendors may make the movie a sin against truth as well as against fiction.

So here's a question for you readers: How does a novel, story, or movie make a criminal protagonist compelling without slipping into the opposite extremes of torture porn or excessive cuteness?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014