“Brazilian Crime Fiction: Vibrant, Original, and Multifaceted” (by Clifford E. Landers)

Posted on September 25, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Professor Clifford E. Landers’s July 10th post for this site left me wanting to know more about Brazilian crime fiction; he covers additional aspects of the subject here, with examples of how several different subgenres of the mystery have developed in South America’s largest country. . . . —Janet Hutchings

In a previous blog I talked in general terms about the rich mother lode of crime fiction coming out of Brazil. Today I deal with some of the motifs found in the Brazilian policial, as crime fiction is known, and point out a few works that exemplify the genre. (Unless otherwise noted, the titles mentioned are available in English.)

Despite the name, the policial is not restricted to the role of the police in solving (or not) a crime. And while the police procedural is part of the genre, it is less prevalent than in its American counterpart. One acclaimed example is the forthcoming novel Crimes of August by the venerable Rubem Fonseca, to appear in 2014 from Tagus Press. (Full disclosure: I am its translator.) Here the protagonist is police inspector Alberto Mattos, who becomes obsessed with solving a brutal murder in the highest echelons of Rio society. In the process of investigating the possible involvement of powerful political figures, he himself becomes the target of assassination attempts.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but one reason the police procedural is less common in Brazil may be the widespread belief that most cops, who are normally recruited from the lower socioeconomic brackets and are poorly paid, are little better than bandidos themselves. Shakedowns, graft, payoffs from the “bankers” of the illegal but ubiquitous “animal game” lottery–all contribute to the popular sentiment that police are unreliable at best and quasi-criminal at worst. Hardly the stuff from which literary heroes are made.

However, not all police are venal and corrupt, as Fonseca’s Mattos demonstrates. Another good-guy cop is Chief Inspector Espinosa, who operates out of Copacabana’s 12th Precinct in Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s novels (now numbering seven), translated by the scholar Benjamin Moser. Alone in the Crowd, the latest entry, is typical of the series.

The ultimate insider’s view of crime in Brazil is perhaps that of Captain Roberto Nascimento in the novel Elite Squad, made into the movie that won the 2008 Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The fact-based work is by Luiz Eduardo Soares (an anthropologist and political scientist), and André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel (two former BOPE members). BOPE was the special division of the military police charged with ridding the favelas (hillside shantytowns) of entrenched drug gangs. Its methods were violent, sometimes crossing the line between law enforcement and vigilantism. Nascimento is portrayed as a basically decent but flawed individual whose capacity for empathy and mercy has been strained to the breaking point by the carnage he witnesses almost daily in the favelas.

Far more common in Brazil than the literary hero cop is the private investigator. Private detectives have been a staple in crime fiction since at least the time of Arthur Conan Doyle. In America, the 1930s marked the heyday of the so-called hardboiled detective school, with writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Significantly, it is this period that has had the greatest influence on Brazilian crime writers.

One example is Tony Bellotto, guitarist for the hugely popular rock band The Titans, who is also an author. His literary avatar, named Bellini, is a private eye whose deeds are recounted in Bellini and the Sphinx (made into a film) and two other novels. Not shying from violence and sex, Bellotto’s fiction unabashedly captures the sleazy underside of contemporary São Paulo. Unfortunately, at present his works are available only in Portuguese.

The greatest fictional private detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, is the focus of late-night television personality Jô Soares’s hilarious pastiche A Samba for Sherlock, source of the film The Xango of Baker Street. By far the most polarizing work I have ever translated, it infuriated dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockians as much as it delighted more detached readers. In the 1880s, Holmes (who supposedly had learned fluent Portuguese when researching exotic poisons in Macau) and the clueless, Nigel Bruce-inspired Dr. Watson are in Rio de Janeiro at the invitation of Emperor Pedro II to find a stolen Stradivarius the monarch had given one of his many paramours. In the course of the investigation Holmes confronts a series of grisly murders of young women (and incidentally coins the term serial killer).

So whence the controversy? Because Soares’s Holmes invariably draws wrong conclusions, usually to comic effect. His misadventures include suffering diarrhea from the spicy Brazilian cuisine while in hot pursuit of the killer, and (horror of horrors for Baker Street Irregulars) falling in love with a beautiful biracial actress. In short, Sherlock becomes thoroughly “Brazilianized” by his exposure to Rio’s tropical paradise, even forsaking his cocaine habit for the local “Indian cigarettes” (cannabis). Reviews of the novel sharply divided into those who excoriated the blasphemous treatment of a hallowed icon and those who, going along with the joke, enjoyed an irreverent romp marked by wit and a good-natured parody.

Another common policial subgenre deals with the professional hit man (“rented assassin,” as he’s known in Portuguese). The internationally acclaimed Patrícia Melo first came to literary attention with her novel The Killer, made into the film Man of the Year. Its antihero Máiquel stumbles by accident upon the lucrative trade of murder for pay and is soon in great demand; hired by businessmen to rid the neighborhood of young thieves and troublemakers, he quickly gains “respectability,” until things begin to fall apart. A sequel, Lost World, picks up Máiquel’s story ten years later.

Rubem Fonseca, indispensable to any discussion of the policial, has used his complex and rounded hit man, known only as José, in several short stories and as protagonist of the novel The Seminarian (as yet untranslated into English). José narrates the intriguing “The Book of Panegyrics” from The Taker and Other Stories (Open Letter, 2008) as well as “Guardian Angel,” “Belle,” and “Xania,” from Winning the Game and Other Stories (Tagus Press, 2013). In “Teresa” (published in EQMM) he eliminates two parasites who are imprisoning and abusing an elderly widow. Afterwards he says, “I’m a hit man. I kill for money.” And adds, “Not always.”

Like detective/mystery works from other countries, Brazilian fiction sometimes highlights ordinary citizens, neither policeman nor PI, who are thrust into solving a crime. In Fonseca’s novel Bufo & Spallanzani, Gustavo Flávio is a “civilian” and would-be writer who works for an insurance company and comes upon a suspicious case: a healthy man in his thirties takes out a million-dollar policy and a month later dies of natural causes–or does he? Flávio’s obsession with the case will lead to tetrodotoxin, defenestration, a ruined career, and a near-fatal run-in with a jealous husband.

Space limitations oblige this to be a mere appetizer despite the copious smorgasbord of crime fiction in a constantly evolving genre coming out of South America’s largest country. In a future blog I plan to address some of the newer names emerging on the literary crime front in Brazil.

Posted in Books, Fiction, Genre, Guest, International, Passport, Translation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Raoul Whitfield: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Best of Them” (by Boris Dralyuk)

Posted on September 18, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Two weeks ago Mark Evan Walker contributed an article to this site about largely forgotten mystery writer Brett Halliday and his most famous character, Michael Shayne. This week another writer who has faded from memory—and was perhaps never given his full due during his lifetime—is discussed by Dr. Boris Dralyuk, whose articles have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and many other publications.  Boris is also associate editor for Black Mask Press, where he works with Black Mask Magazine conservator and publisher Keith Alan Deutsch. In this capacity he has been involved in creating and editing e-books for the new Black Mask Library, which releases its first several titles by contributors to the classic Black Mask Magazine this month (MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media). Raoul Whitfield, who was one of Black Mask’s most important contributors, is the subject of Boris’s post today. He has written an introduction to the Raoul Whitfield collection West of Guam: The Complete Cases of Jo Gar, which will be published by Black Mask Library in 2014, and shares with us some of his perspective on Whitfield. Readers who’d like to read more of Boris’s analysis will have to wait for the book. . . . —Janet Hutchings

Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield, one of the great pioneers of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, broke into the legendary Black Mask Magazine in March 1926, with the third-person aviation adventure “Scotty Troubles Trouble.” The February 1934 issue marked his final appearance in the magazine’s pages—a standalone first-person private-eye tale titled “Death on Fifth Avenue.” All told, he managed to place ninety stories with Black Mask, exploring a vast variety of settings, characters, and narrative perspectives. In the 1970s, Whitfield’s first wife, Prudence, told Keith Alan Deutsch, Black Mask’s current publisher and conservator, that Raoul saw himself as the originator of the “flying ace” genre. This may be true, but it is only a small part of his contribution. Whitfield’s characters—most notably, the Island detective Jo Gar, the conscientious gambler Alan Van Cleve, the dogged avenger Mal Ourney, and the prototypical Hollywood P.I., Ben Jardinn—have real depth and continue to resonate with modern readers.  They set a high standard for generations of hardboiled protagonists to come.

And yet, despite the originality and power of Whitfield’s fiction—as well as tireless boosting from Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and EQMM’s own Frederic Dannay—he remains in the shadows.

It is now customary to weigh the lesser-known Black Mask boys against the two that made it, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. To weigh them, that is, and find them wanting. Since Chandler put his own unmistakable spin on the Black Mask house style, it is Hammett’s work that generally serves as the gold standard for the pure hardboiled mode. And none of the other pulpsters, the majority of critics have it, quite measures up. This opinion took hold in the early 1930s, when a couple of Hammett’s colleagues followed him into the hardboiled market – and it has hurt no one as consistently as it has Raoul Whitfield.

Even those critics who appreciated Whitfield’s novels compared him unfavorably to Hammett. Burton Rascoe’s otherwise glowing review in the August 1931 issue of Arts & Decoration, which praises Black Mask’s editor Capt. Joseph T. Shaw for sponsoring Hammett and Whitfield, demonstrates this tendency:

Another writer Mr. Shaw has nurtured and developed in Black Mask is Raoul Whitfield and before the field gets too crowded with people congratulating Mr. Shaw on his discovery and shouting applause to Whitfield, I want to get in a yell for him. Take a look into his new novel. Death in a Bowl (Knopf). If you get that far, you will be glued to your chair until you finish reading it. So far Whitfield seems a notch below Hammett as a character creator and he is not as careful a writer as Hammett; but he is inventive and dramatic and his hard-boiled people are hard-boiled people.[1]

There were, of course, a few dissenting voices, like that of the New York Herald Tribune’s Will Cuppy, who declared Green Ice (1930) to be “by several miles the slickest detective job of the season,” besting Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. But such voices were far between.

Cap Shaw himself gave in to the temptation to stack Whitfield against Hammett. Drafting an introduction to his Hard-Boiled Omnibus in 1947, Shaw characterized Whitfield as a “hard, patient, determined worker. His style from the first was hard and brittle and over-inclined to staccato. Later, he became more fluent.” When he writes that Whitfield rose to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the best of them,” it’s clear he has Hammett’s lanky frame in mind.

Shaw then relays a fascinating anecdote about Black Mask shoptalk:

Long and fascinating were the discussions between Whit and Dash. Whit maintained that, given characters and a general plot, it was a cinch to write a detective story. When in a spot, all you need do, is use the well-known props. A good writer should produce a novel without any of these appurtenances to achieve effect. And Dash’s comeback, “All right, if you want to make it the hard way, try writing a book omitting every word that has the letter ‘f’ for example.”

It appears that Whitfield had all the “well-known props” at hand, but aspired to get along without them, to be a “good writer.” As Shaw put it, “Whit was ambitious. He wanted to invade other fields than that of crime detection and criminal conflict.” This version of Whitfield—the competent, workaday storyteller reaching beyond his hard-won skills and meager talents—doesn’t quite jibe with the other, more intimate account that emerged at around the same time.

The only substantial description we have of Whitfield’s actual process comes from his first wife, Prudence, who took it upon herself to preserve her former husband’s legacy after his death in 1945. Between 1947 and 1949 Prue managed to republish six of Whitfield’s stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Frederic Dannay, one half of the Queen franchise and the primary editor of EQMM, was himself an advocate of Whitfield’s work. He mined his conversations and correspondence with Prue for valuable, if not always reliable, information, which he then doled out in headnotes to the stories. Here is Prue’s vivid description of Whit at work, care of Dannay:

Raoul Whitfield always wrote very easily and quickly, and with a minimum of correction. He had a particular talent for starting with a title and writing around it. His wife has said that once he had a title, he had the story. He would place neat stacks of chocolate bars (which he ate by the thousands) to the right of his typewriter, and a picket fence of cigarettes to his left. He wrote and chain-smoked and ate, all in one unified operation. He could be surrounded by a cocktail party going at full blast—and keep right on writing. [2]

More on those cocktail parties later. First, another tidbit from Prue and Dannay:

The fact is, Raoul Whitfield needed very little to start him on a story. An incident which most people would consider trivial, a newspaper account buried on an inside page, a casual remark by a stranger—these were the fragile details out of which he wove flashing designs. [3]

Place this next to Prue’s image of “Hammett writing laboriously, alone in a room, with dirty dishes strewn all over the kitchen floor,”[4] and a neat dichotomy begins to take shape: Dash slaved away on masterpieces, while Whit dashed off “flashing designs.”

Shaw’s Whit is yeomanlike and ambitious, while Prue’s hums along like a well-oiled machine; neither can really match Hammett, the inspired perfectionist.

In truth, Whitfield was no less agile a hardboiled stylist than Hammett. On that score, one could cite the unfailing instincts of French connoisseurs: The first hardboiled novel translated by Marcel Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard’s Série Noire, was neither Red Harvest nor The Maltese Falcon, but Whitfield’s Green Ice (Les Émeraudes sanglantes, Gallimard, 1931).[5] As Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser writes in Le roman noir français (1984), for France, “Raoul Whitfield led the way.”[6] Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald—a native-born cognoscente of the genre—was ready to declare Whitfield “as good as Hammett” when suggesting neglected books to Malcolm Cowley in the April 18, 1934 issue of New Republic.[7]

Or one could take Dash’s own word for it. He and Whitfield had a profound appreciation for each other’s writing. It was Hammett who recommended Whitfield’s Black Mask “Crime Breeder” series to Blanche Knopf for hardcover publication as Green Ice. Some years earlier, Dannay reports, Whitfield had gone to bat for Dash in the magazine trade:

Whitfield was writing prolifically and being published like mad, but Hammett’s stories were appearing only now and then. Whitfield, who was surely one of Hammett’s first boosters, used to write many letters to editors asking: “Where is this man, Hammett? Why don’t you accept more of his stories?” [8]

Hammett’s review of Green Ice in the New York Evening Post gives us a good sense of just what he saw in his friend’s work: “The plot does not matter so much. What matters is that here are two hundred and eighty pages of naked action pounded into a tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing.”[9]

No, it wasn’t just the ease with which Whitfield spun his plots. The plots didn’t matter nearly as much as the “hammerlike” style, and the world of “naked action” it depicted. To be sure, Whitfield was capable of lyricism, and the language of the Jo Gar tales, like the detective himself, is redolent of “the climate of the Islands” (“Signals of Storm” [1930]). But it is Whitfield’s command of the tough, laconic mode that sets him apart. The following passage from Green Ice, in which the tough protagonist Mal Ourney peruses a newspaper account of a gangland murder, distills the hardboiled to its essence: “ ‘Angel’ Cherulli had been found in an alley behind his club, with a flock of thirty-eights in his stomach and chest. There wasn’t a clue. He had many enemies. The rest of the story was just writing.” Nothing else need be said. Each declarative sentence carries a load. Neither Ourney nor Whitfield is about to waste precious time on “just writing.”

And therein lies a key animating tension of hardboiled prose: It is a literature that aspires to silence. A protagonist boiled hard enough has no use for words at all. Action alone counts. At its best, the action of hardboiled fiction reflects not only the unrelenting brutality of life as its authors see it, but also a kind of transcendent mindfulness beyond matter, a presence in the moment. There is a strangely meditative quality to Whitfield’s most frantic and violent scenes, even if the Buddha ends up as collateral damage:

Van Cleve turned his back. He took two steps towards the door that led from the library to the living room and the phone. Then he leaped to one side. Barney’s gun crashed, and the Buddha on the library table shot jade chips across the amber light from the table lamp. Dale Byrons screamed. (Killers’ Carnival [1932], published under the pseudonym Temple Field)

The finest hardboiled stylists—like Whitfield, Hammett, and the consciously “ultra-hardboiled” Paul Cain—are true modernists; their dissatisfaction with language’s insufficiency, its inability to capture “naked action,” drives them toward ever-greater experimentation, ever-greater refinement. Ultimately, it drives them to silence.

Whitfield more or less abandoned writing during his second tempestuous marriage to a socialite named Emily O’Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer. It seems he began to leave his typewriter more and more often to join those cocktail parties going on around him. Decades later, Prudence told Keith Alan Deutsch that Whitfield “was bored with writing; plotting came too easily.” Maybe so—and maybe other things proved too hard.

[1] Burton Rascoe, review of Death in a Bowl, Arts & Decoration 35, no. 4 (August 1931): 83.

[2] Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (October 1947): 16.

[3] EQMM (March 1949): 81.

[4] EQMM (May 1948): 40.

[5] See Marcel Duhamel, Raconte pas ta vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 293.

[6] Jean-Paul Schweighaeuser, Le roman noir français (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), 16.

[7] F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Malcolm Cowley, “Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read,” New Republic 78 (April 18, 1934): 283.

[8] EQMM (May 1948): 40.

[9] Dashiell Hammett, review of Green Ice, New York Evening Post, July 19, 1930, p. 5A.

Posted in Business, Characters, Fiction, Guest, History, Noir, Novels, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“When the Place Itself Is a Mystery: Ten Tips for Someone Writing in an Exotic Location” (by Nathan Beyerlein)

Posted on September 11, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Nathan Beyerlein is a blogger, a teacher of English as a second language, and a world traveler. His first fiction, “The Tricky Business in Mai Chau,” appeared in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in June of this year. It was the start of a mystery series that blends classical plotting with hardboiled action, using the author’s current home, Hanoi, Vietnam, as backdrop. A second story in the series, “Following the Likely Path of the Moon Bear,” will be featured in our March/April 2014 issue. Nathan’s advice to writers working with exotic locations is complemented by photos from photographer Sebastiano Favretto. —Janet Hutchings
photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

When friends or family come to visit my life in Hanoi, Vietnam they often leave with digital pictures in the thousands. If the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is correct, where does that leave a writer trying to include an exotic location in his own work? Of those millions of words that it would take to give any sort of real picture, which should a writer choose?

My recent series of short stories, the Nat Burg Mysteries, depict a Sherlockian detective and his friend solving mysteries in Vietnam’s remote jungles, countryside, and metropolises. I’ve lived abroad for six years in various countries around the world and have always struggled with the appropriate way to write about place. In this recent series, I think I’ve found my way. Below are my ten tips for anyone whose writing includes what for many is considered an exotic location.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

1. Take Part in It

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

Three days ago I went to work in a swim suit and a poncho; I put my goggles on to keep the rain from pelting my eyes. I drove my motorbike much of the way there through ankle-deep brown water that smelled like things of which I’d rather not solve the mystery. The streets were packed with people engaged in a similar battle with their daily commute. It was fun.

Many of my Western colleagues either came late or took cabs. If you want to give a flavor of the life of a place, you’ve got to really live there: eat local food, drink in local watering holes, play games, gamble, try to chat with old ladies at tea stalls . . .

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

2. Learn the Language

By no means a simple task, but one that will open up any country to you. For months I found myself having the same conversation in Vietnamese with anyone willing. It led to many an interesting lunch invitation or confusing adventure. One example: an old woman giving me a local drug of Betel nut and areca leaf. Not to be taken lightly, the concoction is like a caffeine trip that begins and ends in two minutes.

3. Bring a Notebook Everywhere

Every walk down the street in Vietnam provides ample inspiration. There are so many people densely living in Hanoi that if one just stops and opens one’s eyes, one can see a myriad of mini dramas take place. As I sit at a cafe writing this: a man with two mattresses on the back of his motorbike, a little girl trying to float a cardboard boat in the gutter, two drunk men angrily pointing at each other at a Phở stand, the fat owner of my cafe peeling fruit with a sharp knife and watching football . . .

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

You can’t capture it all, but make sure you’re ready when you experience something that touches you. Personally, I’m a fan of Evernote, which allows you to store your notes on any computer or smart device. If my favorite notebook is at home, I can write on a napkin, take a photo, upload it later, and keep it forever.

4. Remember Your Objective

Don’t mince words. If you’re writing a mystery, the story needs to be driven by the plot. There will be a lot of moments from the napkins referred to above that you’ll want to include, but it’s not about them. If you’re not writing a travelogue, remember what you are writing and don’t let the place get in the way. The place is a spice. One should never make a meal completely out of nutmeg. (I tried that once after reading a W.S. Burroughs novel, and it nearly killed me.)

5. Be Mindful of Your Audience

Always good advice but especially in conjunction with tip number four. The more exotic the location, the more difficult it is to relate it in a way that will create an image. To test my relaying of an experience, I usually try to describe it to my more inquisitive friends from back home and see what questions they have. Below is a sample of one of those conversations.

Me: I went to laughing yoga this week.

Friend: I’ve never really seen you as the flexible type. Why do they call it laughing yoga?

Me: It’s not really the stretching sort of yoga. It’s just a large group of older people that meet by the lake at 5:30 A.M. and make each other laugh. It’s very good for your health they say.

Friend: How do they make themselves laugh . . . ?

The conversation continues and I start to realize that merely saying “laughing yoga” is not enough.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

6. Sometimes It’s the Foreign Nature of the Language or Idea That’s Appealing

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

Inevitably, there will be a lot of things in your writing that the reader will have no real context for. If mentioning Mắm tôm, I don’t need to go into all the details of how it’s made from fermented shrimp paste (not the big shrimp, the tiny brine ones). It’s maybe enough that I mention a foul-smelling purple sauce that is placed in front of a character.

Also, think of how many times a mention of some exotic food or beverage, in literature you’ve read, has inspired a need to try it. The foreignness stimulates the imagination.

7. Listen to Your Friends’ Stories

It’s easy to get bogged down in your own experience of a place. For months, I had all sorts of notions of things that I thought I knew to be true about Vietnamese culture and ideas. Many of them turned out to be stereotypes that I’d formed from one or two incidents. A different perspective on foreign culture can keep your own flights of imagination in check. Also, they’ve probably got some interesting material you could “borrow.”

8. Get Over Your Inhibitions

Living in a foreign culture provides a chance to reinvent yourself somewhat. Try things that you wouldn’t normally do. Laugh with old people at 5:30 A.M. until your sides ache. Try the purple sauce that smells like death. If you want to flavor your story with the place, you’ve got to know what’s in it.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

9. Don’t Lose Your Voice

Similar to point number four, you don’t want to get so lost in the thing that your unique voice is buried. I might be entering a phase of contradictions here, but I often have to remind myself that it is “me” doing this thing. This usually happens through the occasional out-of-body experience. Like when I look at myself gambling with a group of young Vietnamese people on a bamboo mat (we are all taking that five-dollar pot very seriously). Don’t lose the “you” when you write about the game.

10. Mystify It

When you keep yourself in the equation, it creates a certain sort of mythology of the place. Vietnam as experienced by Nathan Beyerlein. There will be inconsistencies and certain things that researchers may disagree with, but it will be a whole lot more interesting.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

photo by Sebastiano Favretto.

Posted in Adventure, Characters, Editing, Fiction, Guest, International, Setting, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Call for Michael Shayne” (by Mark Evan Walker)

Posted on September 4, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Two weeks ago, when Mark Evan Walker posted about his career as an illustrator, I mentioned that he is also a knowledgeable fan of crime and mystery fiction. This week he shares with us some reflections on a character who’s barely remembered nowadays, but who dominated the mystery scene for several decades of the twentieth century: Michael Shayne.—Janet Hutchings

Above is one of many Michael Shayne covers by renowned illustrator Robert McGinnis for Dell Publishing. The iconic face of Shayne was done by another noted illustrator, Robert Stanley, who also provided many memorable Shayne covers.

This is exactly what I remember as a youngster from the supermarket check-out line or the circular paperback rack at Moreland’s Drug Store. The illustration shows the genius of Bob McGinnis: Whether the model’s hair color matches the girl in the story, or is even in or has any relationship to the story, is totally irrelevant. It smacks you right in the face. It’s brazen, jaw-dropping pulp. It’s innuendo. It says, “Read me, Baby, and I won’t let you down…”

And that’s pretty much right when it comes to Michael Shayne.

Below, another wonderful Dell “Keyhole” cover from the forties:

It’s surprising that Michael Shayne isn’t better known today, yet Brett Halliday’s two-fisted hard-drinking, hard-thinking private detective is certainly worth rediscovering. Perhaps in today’s world of CSI and forensics it might be easy to poke holes in the plot, yet taken in context, and with the police work at the time these were written, they come off quite well and are highly entertaining page turners. In my own children’s mystery The Case of the Blood Red Stars: A Kelly Riggs Mystery, the final chapter title, Blood on the Stars, is an ode to Michael Shayne and Brett Halliday (pseudonym of Davis Dresser) and the fifteenth Shayne novel—which is where the specific idea came from for my own plot’s “McGuffin.”

Described as tall and rangy, with coarse red hair, bushy eyebrows, and a corrugated forehead with deep trenched cheeks, Michael Shayne operates primarily from his apartment hotel in Miami, overlooking Biscayne Bay. Though some of the novels take place elsewhere, places such as El Paso and Colorado, the Miami settings are the most memorable and evocative. Halliday puts you right there with his mood-filled descriptions and it’s easy to transport yourself back to another era, when there was more open space, less traffic, and you could smell the bougainvillea and fresh sea air.

A Dell “Map Back” from the forties, here showing the geography of Biscayne Bay, sandwiched between Miami and Miami Beach.

A Dell “Map Back” from the forties, here showing the geography of Biscayne Bay, sandwiched between Miami and Miami Beach.

As you read, it’s always amusing to see how quickly, and by what page, Mike will take his first (of many) snorts of cognac—his favorite beverage—and this being fiction, he consumes more liquor in one sitting than is humanly possible. In fact, all the Michael Shaynes stretch credulity to the limit, but then that’s part of the fun.

The series featured a regular cast of recurring characters. Described as lean like a racing hound, tall, gangly reporter Tim Rourke is Mike’s best friend, and helps him in various ways to solve some of his best cases, whether he’s running down facts in the newspaper’s clipping “morgue,” being a sounding board over drinks, or in one case—transporting a body that refuses to go away—getting too close to the truth and narrowly escaping death.

Fifties cover by Robert Stanley; early sixties cover by Robert McGinnis

Fifties cover by Robert Stanley; early sixties cover by Robert McGinnis

Shayne’s main antagonist is Miami Beach Chief of Detectives, the dapper little Peter Painter. Halliday’s description of Painter is so perfect that it’s always a pleasure when Shayne comes up against him and ultimately outwits him. On the other hand, Shayne has an ally on his side of the bay in Miami Police Chief Will Gentry, a big, florid, solid cop who lets Mike Shayne go the limit, and always seems to have his back.

In his first case, Dividend on Death (1939), Shayne meets a young debutant, Phyllis Brighton. He encounters her again in the next novel, and this time they fall in love, though Shayne is fifteen years her senior. They marry, but Halliday had a difficult time working a married Shayne into the action, and when a lucrative movie deal came up it was decided Phyllis should be dropped from the series. She dies tragically in childbirth, and the child also succumbs.

Cover by Robert Stanley and an earlier Dell “Map Back” of the same story from the forties

Cover by Robert Stanley and an earlier Dell “Map Back” of the same story from the forties

The tone of the series definitely changes at this stage, with Shayne leaving Miami for New Orleans in Michael Shayne’s Long Chance, (1944). There, he meets a local girl on his first case, Lucy Hamilton, who goes on to become his faithful secretary. After a couple of novels they return to Miami. Their relationship is complicated, and though they do mix business with pleasure, they do not sleep together. Lucy Hamilton is a wonderful character, and the complexity of her relationship with Shayne lends another layer of interest behind the mysteries.

Cover Art by William George

Cover Art by William George

Michael Shayne was featured in mass-market Dell paperbacks for over three decades, with millions of copies sold worldwide. In 1955, Dresser created Michael Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, which went on to run for some thirty years. Halliday retired from writing full time in the late fifties, and subsequent novels were ghostwritten. This worked well for several years, but by the early seventies, the character of Shayne had become somewhat harsh and wooden at the same time. Also, Lucy Hamilton was dropped from the series so Shayne could become more of a cold Bondian-styled bed-hopper. I much prefer the earlier Halliday-written novels and the series up through the mid sixties.

As an illustrator and mystery writer and fan, Robert McGinnis is one of my heroes; I have collected his work along with many others whom I totally dig over the years either in paperback or filed digitally. Here are some more great Dell Shayne covers by McGinnis:

Shayne7

Michael Shayne has been all over media. In 1940, Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights, producing seven films starring the always reliable and likable character actor Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. Nolan plays up the Irish blarney, and he’s great in the role. Despite almost total deviations from the novels, these are quite well done and entertaining little mysteries. In 1946, Fox dropped the series, which was picked up by poverty row PRC (Producer’s Releasing Corporation), which cranked out five more much cheaper productions starring Hugh Beaumont (Leave it to Beaver).

Shayne was on radio during the forties and fifties, played variously by Wally Maher and screen actor Jeff Chandler. Then came the 1960-1961 hour-long NBC TV series starring Richard Denning in 32 episodes. My grandfather really liked this show and I remember it from my childhood. You can watch an episode now at TV4U.Com on the Detective Channel.

Interesting factoids: In addition to Michael Shayne, Richard Denning played on two other crime shows, Mr. and Mrs. North, and as the governor on the long-running Hawaii Five-O. Lloyd Nolan played TV detective Martin Kane in the fifties.

My own Kelly Riggs mystery owes a huge debt of gratitude to Brett Halliday and Michael Shayne. Revisit this great series yourself!

Part of detection is making connections.

Michael Shayne on eBay

Michael Shayne’s Amazon Page

Michael Shayne DVDs

Michael Shayne at Thrilling Detective

Posted in Books, Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, Illustration, Noir, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

LABOR DAY E-EDITION SALE

Posted on August 30, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

EQM_Magzter_LaborDay_ad

Now through September 2nd, get 50% off a digital subscription to EQMM as part of Magzter’s Labor Day Sale. Enjoy!

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CHILD CHARACTERS IN CRIME FICTION

Posted on August 28, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Using child characters in crime fiction involves navigating land mines. This is something I wrote about a couple of years ago on EQMM’s website, but as I’ve had a few additional thoughts about it since then, here’s an update to that post.

EQMM has always been reluctant to publish stories in which children are the victims of murder or other violent crimes. I’m told that under our founding editor, Fred Dannay, it was strictly taboo. I too tend not to like stories in which explicit harm is done to a child; mostly that’s because I don’t like to see crimes against children trivialized by becoming the stuff of entertainment. The subject will generally only become palatable to me in the hands of a very sensitive writer, or else when told from the perspective of an adult looking back at the childhood situation, so that there is a sense of distance from the horrific events, and less “on-camera” torture or abuse.

My disinclination to publish stories with graphic violence towards children certainly has not been shared by many others in the publishing industry over the past decade or so. In fact, child victims of crime, and in particular of sexual abuse, have become so common in crime fiction that it’s easy to feel there can’t be many interesting perspectives relating to such characters remaining to be explored. That’s one trap an author writing a story involving the sexual abuse of minors has got to get around; the story’s intended audience—especially the first part of that audience, the editors to whom the manuscript will be submitted—likely think they already know everything there is to know about the subject after being exposed to so many published stories and/or unpublished manuscripts in which it occurs. And beyond that, the villain of such a piece, the child molester, inspires such automatic antipathy that the author skirts one of the crime writer’s hardest but most important jobs: creating a multidimensional culprit. There are no shades of gray in such a story when it comes to the perpetrator, and in fiction that’s a definite minus, since most readers—and editors—find shades of gray a lot more compelling than stark portrayals of good and evil.

Different kinds of tripwires exist when a child appears in a story not as a victim but as a sleuth. Too often, I find, child sleuths are portrayed either as precocious (in which case I wonder if an adult might have served better in the role) or as having a truer moral sense than the adults in the story. The roots of the idea that children have a surer connection to what is good or moral in human life than adults do is found at least as far back in history as Rousseau, who famously thought that children are naturally innocent and that society is their corrupter. A corollary to this, for Rousseau, was that the human moral sense—this faculty he thought children were born with—weakens as children are socialized. I’ve never found this convincing; it doesn’t square with what I think are common, very widely shared observations about the behavior of children. And it’s certainly not a point of view I find convincing in fiction.

Far more convincing to me than the view of Rousseau and the Romantic movement is the portrayal of childhood found in a wonderful 1929 novel by Richard Hughes. If you’ve never read A High Wind in Jamaica, and you intend to write about children, I highly recommend this book. I came upon it back when I was a student interested in the philosophy of mind. What an eye-opening book. It stripped away that idealized view of childhood and opened the door for me to another way of seeing how morality forms. There’s a bit of a spoiler in what I’m about to say: In that novel, a child becomes a killer—and no, the killing doesn’t arise from the child having suffered abuse (as we might expect to find in a contemporary novel). The killing—or murder, if that word applies—arises partly from the child’s way of perceiving events, which is very different from how an adult would perceive the same circumstances, but also from the disposition children have, in the absence of controlling adults, to act on emotions and impulses that are more animalistic than human. In Hughes’s novel, the children are not evil, certainly. But they’re essentially amoral beings. They’re feral; they haven’t yet been molded to a sense of morality. Hughes’s depiction of that feral state is nothing at all like Rousseau’s happy state of innocence. We find these children very unsettling, and in much the same way we might find a dangerous wild animal so.

One of the best stories I’ve ever read with a child central character is David Dean’s December 2012 EQMM story “Mariel,” which is the tale of just such a feral child, in contemporary suburbia. I think it won’t be much of a spoiler if I say that Mariel is no killer, and she certainly isn’t the villain of the story. Nevertheless, the attitudes, emotions, and feelings that we associate with morality are disturbingly absent in her, and I think the reader comes away from the story thinking that Mariel might very well commit a serious crime some day if an adult doesn’t step in soon.

What David Dean’s “Mariel” touches on, with a light and entertaining hand, is something you can see played out to disastrous consequences nearly every day now in the real world—the failure to parent and socialize children. Hanna Rosin’s article “Murder by Craigslist” in the latest Atlantic illustrates this perfectly (though the piece is really focused on a different point). It’s an account of serial murders committed by the sociopathic adult Richard Beasley with the aid of a teenager, Brogan Rafferty, whose attachment to Beasley seems to have been motivated, at some primitive level, by the need for a strong adult presence in his life. It’s anything but a unique story: Think of the Beltway Sniper attacks of 2002, in which John Allen Muhammed recruited minor Lee Boyd Malvo in his killing spree.

Children who kill are perhaps the hardest of all child characters to depict convincingly in fiction. Romanticism’s view of childhood is so deeply entrenched in our culture that I think many writers feel they have to incorporate some history of abuse to explain (and excuse) the villainy of children. Almost always, the explanation or excuse chosen is previous sexual abuse. But often, real child killers have no such history. Brogan Rafferty, for instance, had never been abused, sexually or otherwise; the only complaint he articulated about his background appears to have been that his father was “too strict”—and what teenaged boy doesn’t think that? Nor was he a victim of neglect—at least not of the sort a parent might be arrested for. His father worked hard to make sure he had a roof over his head, enough to eat, went to school, and so forth. What the father couldn’t do, apparently, was deliver on the less tangible—but so important—aspects of parenting; he was a single dad, overworked and tired. Those appear to be the facts; whether the father’s inability to provide adequate parenting was determinative of the course his son took is something I’m sure not everyone interested in the case would agree about. But either way, this case is in direct conflict with Romanticism’s notion that it takes some violence, abuse, or criminal neglect to turn an otherwise good and innocent child bad. Jettisoning that idea opens the door to the very different view that in the absence of the strong guiding and shaping presence of adults, children have in them—naturally—a potential for violence. It’s that potential for violence in the feral child and the ways it can be (but often isn’t) diverted that I find interesting in many of the true crime cases I’ve read about involving children. And there are interesting treatments of this theme in fiction too. Patricia Highsmith’s “Summer Doldrums” (EQMM April 1994) about two teenaged boys who decide to commit murders to alleviate their boredom, comes to mind. (It was, incidentally, Highsmith’s last story for EQMM and probably her last story full stop.)

I said at the beginning of this post that there are a lot of land mines to be circumvented when writing of crimes involving children, especially in fiction. I think it takes courage to write truthfully about children when the subject is crime. There are so many unspoken expectations; so many taboos. Nearly twenty years ago Batya Swift Yasgur wrote a story for EQMM that I thought brave. “Me and Mr. Harry” (from our Mid-December 1994 issue) is a tale that deals with child sexual abuse, but in telling the story from the young girl’s point of view—a point of view that is as different from an adult viewpoint as are the thoughts of the children in Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica”— the author was able to bring something very thought-provoking to the situation. (The Edgars judges that year must have thought so too, because the story won the Robert L. Fish Award.) If I were to summarize what I like to see in stories like these, that ability to make us see things from a different angle—even if that angle is uncomfortable—would be right up there near the top.

Given the large and continually increasing number of children now committing murders and other violent crimes, I think it’s probably only a matter of time before a fiction writer of note emerges to shine a light on these killer kids in the way that Dickens, for example, took up the cause of the economically exploited children of the Victorian era. (And maybe that writer is already out there now; I don’t get much chance to read anything except EQMM’s submissions, so it’s possible I’ve missed a relevant author.) But if such a voice does appear, I hope it will be an unflinching one, free of any romantic or sentimental gloss.—Janet Hutchings

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“Illustrator, Author, Fan” (by Mark Evan Walker)

Posted on August 21, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Mark Evan Walker had been an EQMM illustrator for years before, in 2011, we received a copy of his first novel, The Case of the Blood Red Stars. What a surprise that was—though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, for a number of our fiction contributors are also working artists. What is unusual about Mark Walker is that he also brings to the table a lifelong love of crime fiction and an extensive knowledge of the genre’s history. His illustrations are some of the most evocative EQMM has published; new ones appear in almost every issue.—Janet Hutchings

I’ve been deeply honored to be a part of the Ellery Queen and Dell Magazines stable of illustrators for some seventeen years now, having just completed my one hundred twenty-second “illo.” I am also deeply thankful to my art director, Victoria Green, and editor, Janet Hutchings, for continuing to send such delightful stories my way. It’s rather like being part of a longstanding, extended family, continuing the pulp tradition and following in the footsteps of so many of my artistic heroes—some of whose work is pictured in this homage collage:

Above: Background—Robert McGinnis’s cover for Ellery Queen’s Best Mysteries of 1964; Left to Right: Saturday Evening Post illustration by Edwin Georgi from the ’40s; iconic image of Sean Connery from the poster for From Russia With Love by Renato Fratini, 1963; Alex Raymond’s comic strip detective, Rip Kirby, circa 1950; Peter O’Donnell’s exotic comic strip and book heroine Modesty Blaise by Jim Holloway.

Above: Background—Robert McGinnis’s cover for Ellery Queen’s Best Mysteries of 1964; Left to Right: Saturday Evening Post illustration by Edwin Georgi from the ’40s; iconic image of Sean Connery from the poster for From Russia With Love by Renato Fratini, 1963; Alex Raymond’s comic strip detective, Rip Kirby, circa 1950; Peter O’Donnell’s exotic comic strip and book heroine Modesty Blaise by Jim Holloway.

I have the privilege to illustrate some of today’s finest authors of mystery fiction in the most intimate of settings—the short story. Stories that range from ironic, breathtaking, surprising, and creepy to outright hilarious, and when I say the finest authors, we’re talking masters here. As someone who grew up on TV shows like Mannix and Columbo, it’s been a thrill to have illustrated stories by William Link; then there are the classics and final works by the Late Great Edward D. Hoch. Once, I called Ian Rankin overseas with a specific question about a van—he didn’t have email then. Others I’ve illustrated include Jeffery Deaver, Peter Lovesey, Robert Barnard, Jeremiah Healy, Toni L.P. Kelner, Amy Myers, Steve Hockensmith, James Powell, Neil Schofield, Liza Cody, and many more, even Monk stories by Lee Goldberg. (My only regret is not being able to have Traylor Howard model for me on those!)

Illustration for Santa in Sunglasses, by William Link

Illustration for “Santa in Sunglasses” by William Link

It’s always exciting to get a new assignment. I never know what will be thrown my way. As an old London hand and one-time student at Cambridge, I often get stories set in the UK, so they’re a natural fit. Sometimes however, the stories can be pretty tough to crack and I’ve wondered if that’s not on purpose—in a good way. Although not specified, there’s one major caveat: Don’t give away the plot! My goal as an artist is to come up with a compelling composition that tells enough or part of the story to get the reader interested and involved so they’ll want to dive right in. I always hope that by the end of the story the reader goes back to look at the art and has an “Aha!” moment.

Illustration for The Faceless Thing by Edward D. Hoch

Illustration for “The Faceless Thing” by Edward D. Hoch

I’m always looking for a hook. Sometimes I may use a specific scene from the story; other times it’s a collage or composite; occasionally though, it may be something surrealistic or what I like to think of as “psychological,” as ironically graphic as the story. It’s gratifying in those cases when I’m allowed to step outside the box—keeping me and the art from becoming stagnant:

Here’s the process: Unlike the old days of getting the MS by snail mail (not a bottle) it has come by email for many moons. I’ll read the script and usually certain passages, characters, or ideas will jump out at me. Generally I start doing thumbnail sketches whilst the ideas are fresh. Sometimes if the story is complex or I’m stuck, I’ll rest on it a day or two; but the best way is to start right in as one idea leads to the next. I used to scribble these on the printed-out MS itself, but these days I read off the screen and the thumbs go right into my sketchbook.

At this stage I usually step back for a few days to choose my three strongest concepts. I always revisit the story to check details. Then I draw three fairly tight sketches at the size at which they’ll be printed. These I present to the art director and editor for approval.

Sketches to Final Art for "Skull and X-Examinations" by Toni L.P. Kelner

Sketches to Final Art for “Skull and X-Examinations” by Toni L.P. Kelner

I try to think through each sketch carefully so no matter which one is selected, I’ll feel confident going into the final. Many times, research is required about certain aspects of a story. This is something I have enjoyed immensely my entire artistic life, whether as a scenic designer in the theatre, an illustrator, or an author: To continually learn and explore, satisfying basic human curiosity, that’s the very basis of detection—the need to know, to discover. Part of detection is making connections.

At times I’ll use photography, often casting family, friends, actors, wait staff, and even Yrs. Trly as characters. Others come straight out of my head based on the story, and others from my travel sketchbooks or file photos. The fun part is you just never know. Most recently, I used my oldest friend and his younger brother as models in the same illustration. I’ve used their mom as well.

M.E.W. in the starring role for "Beer Money" by Shane Nelson

M.E.W. in the starring role for “Beer Money” by Shane Nelson

The Chef is a friend who is a dentist, actor, and filmmaker; the other guy didn’t show, so I made him up for "Murder in the Pineapple Pit"

The Chef is a friend who is a dentist, actor, and filmmaker; the other guy didn’t show, so I made him up for “Murder in the Pineapple Pit”

The style has evolved some over the years, and it’s funny to think back to the original samples I sent in, which were in a woodcut style I’d developed doing packaging illustration for Pier 1 Imports. Originally, they were sent to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and not to Ellery Queen! Regular readers will note the cinematic and film noir influence in the angles and compositions.

My very first Ellery Queen Illustration: "One Dead Canary"

My very first Ellery Queen Illustration: “One Dead Canary”

As I mentioned, I’m also an author of mystery. The compulsion to write took hold at an early age, formulated by many factors. Popeye, Roy Rogers, and Lassie had been vanquished in the span of a couple of years by the explorations of John Glenn in outer space and Jacques Cousteau under the sea; seeing Lawrence of Arabia, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Fantasia; but then I was caught up in a real-life mystery, very close to home. By circumstances I may relate at another time I ended up in Dealey Plaza (a very familiar place, where the “Hertz Building” was) about three hours after President Kennedy’s assassination. After this, despite the Beatles, I became fascinated with mystery and crime.

Then the game-changer, seeing Goldfinger, and being totally caught up in the phenomenon that took the world by storm—James Bond, 007—the super-secret agent who traveled to exotic locations around the world and had incredible adventures and met beautiful women and fought the nastiest of villains. It was undoubtedly Ian Fleming who inspired me to write fiction.

My earliest book covers circa 1965

My earliest book covers circa 1965

It was a hot summer day in New York City, 1966, when I spied with my little eye copies of From Russia With Love and Doctor No at a used bookstall. The stylish cover art by Barye Phillips  was especially tantalizing. Some pleading and allowance money soon found them clutched in my hot sweaty little nine-year-old hands. I was hooked.

Doctor No remains an accessible read. As a child I noted all the differences between book and film, one of the main ones being the spider /centipede passage. In the film, Professor Dent (not in the book) picks up a deadly spider in a scene memorable for both Ken Adam’s futuristic sets and the sonorous voice of the all-powerful, all-seeing unseen Doctor No. The scene that follows in the film is harrowing, yet in the novel, as written by Fleming, a deadly centipede is used to even greater effect. Other horrors await 007, but this particular sequence stands out. It is one of the most suspenseful passages anywhere, easily on a par with The Tell-Tale Heart. In the space of but three pages Fleming’s words transfixed and terrorized the nine year old that was me, and still do to this day. They were what first inspired me to write fiction.

I began to devour any and all mystery fiction and cinema, all the while still enjoying Sherlock Holmes, Stevenson, Poe, Lovecraft, Man From Uncle comics, and even the Hardy Boys.

Early illustrations for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, circa ’67-’68

Early illustrations for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, circa ’67-’68

But I had a problem. I simply could not understand plotting, or how to create a scenario and storyline. I also felt I simply didn’t know enough about life yet to write, so I set myself a goal—that I would start writing after I turned forty. I set about reading and learning—and living. Then, and to this day, I read everything I could of mysteries, thrillers, crime, and noir. Fast forward to the late eighties: I was in Puerto Vallarta, soaking up the sun, reading John D. MacDonald’s Darker Than Amber, the strains of the Fine Young Cannibals thudding in the background, and suddenly I was inspired. I started writing down all sorts of story ideas.

Within a year I made my first notes about a Scotland Yard Detective and three kids who always get mixed up in his cases. Concurrently, working a roadshow production of Les Miserables, I met an actor named Kelly Briggs, who was a relative of—and named for—the Late Grace Kelly, Her Royal Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. This sparked my imagination, but I made a small adjustment with the family name. About six years later I turned forty, and started writing the first incarnation of Kelly Riggs, which, fourteen years later, turned into my 2011 opus, The Case of the Blood Red Stars, A Kelly Riggs Mystery, illustrations c’est moi.

Kelly Riggs in Piccadilly in The Case of the Blood Red Stars

Kelly Riggs in Piccadilly in The Case of the Blood Red Stars

In the meantime, I began writing short stories with Forgotten Horrors author, cinematic and musical expert, journalist, and comic artist Michael H. Price, published by Midnight Marquee Press: What You See May Shock You! (2009).  A collection of postmodern pulp fiction, the stories range from supernatural to horrific; ironical to whimsical. We are putting the final touches on new stories (and “illos”) for an expanded edition to be released Christmas 2013, entitled Dark Borderlands.

As a writer, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ian Fleming and the passage of a centipede, not to mention all those before me; and as an illustrator and lover of mystery, suspense, noir, the horrific and fantastical, I’m grateful and fortunate to be part of this rich, mysterious world.

Posted in Books, Characters, Genre, Guest, History, Illustration, Magazine, Noir, Setting | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

“Scandinavian Crime Fiction” (by Terje Thomassen)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Oil painter and graphic designer Terje Thomassen contributed the art for EQMM’s March/April 2013 cover, but he is posting today about fiction rather than art—giving us a roundup of the best mystery writers in Scandinavia. It’s a subject he knows a lot about, for he is the son of Reidar Thomassen, whose stories have frequently appeared in EQMM’s Passport to Crime department under the pseudonym Richard Macker.  At the conclusion of Terje’s post you’ll find links to titles available in English by the authors he discusses.

Scandinavia consists of the countries Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. 9.5 million, 5.5 million, and 5 million people, respectively, live in these countries. The inhabitants of these countries can read and understand one another’s languages, so books can reach a market of twenty million readers.

Henning Mankell (born 1948), Håkan Nesser (born 1950), Liza Marklund (born 1962), and Lars Kepler are among the most famous Swedish writers. Lars Kepler is in fact an alias for Alexander Ahndori (born 1967) and Alexandra Coelho Ahndori (born 1966), a married couple who write together. The duo have been the most popular crime writers in Sweden for the last couple of years, with their first book, Hypnotisören (The Hypnotist), reaching number one on the bestseller list. But the couple kept their names a secret for a long time, and some journalists even presumed that Henning Mankell was behind the alias. Another famous Swedish name is the deceased Stieg Larsson(1954-2004) who had enormous success with three books after his death. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is perhaps the most well-known to the American audience, as it was made into a movie featuring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. All three Larsson books have also been adapted by the Swedish film industry. Noomi Rapace (born 1979), who played the lead role in all of the Swedish movies, has made a name for herself in Hollywood because of her strong performances in these films. She continued with roles in Prometheus (2012) and in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011).

Jussi Adler-Olsen (born 1950), Anders Bodelsen (born 1936), and sister and brother Lotte Hammer (born 1955) and Søren Hammer (born 1952) are among the most famous Danish crime writers. The Danish writers may not have reached the same level of success as the Swedish writers, but they surely get first prize in Scandinavia for creating very strong crime TV-series. Forbrytelsen (Crime—shown on the BBC in England with subtitles as The Killing, to an enormous audience) and Broen are top-class entertainment. Broen has been made into an American version called The Bridge (2013).

Even though there are more well-known Swedish than Danish actors, the best Scandinavian movies in modern times are also made in Denmark. The most famous Scandinavian director by far is Lars von Trier. Mads Mikkelsen (born 1965) who plays the lead role in the TV series Hannibal, and also the bad guy in James Bond: Casino Royale from 2006, has made a career for himself over the last decade. Viggo Mortensen (born 1958) who plays Aragorn in The Lord of The Rings is perhaps the most famous Danish actor, and has also starred in several crime movies made in America.

In Norway there is no crime writer above or beside Jo Nesbø (born 1960). He has reached worldwide success with his crime novels about Harry Hole. The Norwegian movie Hodejegerne (Headhunters) was based on one of the books in the series, and it did well on the international market. Martin Scorsese was rumored to be about to make the first English-language movie based on Jo Nesbø’s books, but the American legend seems to be tied up in too many projects to find the time for this one. Other Norwegian crime writers well worth mentioning are Unni Lindell (born 1957), Gunnar Staalesen (born 1947), Karin Fossum (born 1954) and Anne Holt (born 1958). All of them have written novels that have been adapted for TV.

Since the writer of this post is Norwegian, I want to close this article with a little more about Norway and its crime writers. Richard Macker (born 1936) and I (Terje Thomassen, born 1968) are father and son, and Macker will soon have his ninth short story in EQMM. Richard Macker is an alias for Reidar Thomassen, but aliases are a dying breed in Norway. They were used more often in the past to separate writers who wrote books in several literary genres. The most infamous Norwegian crime writer was Jonas Lie (1899-1945). He was a government minister under Quisling when Norway was occupied by the Germans, and he was leader of the Nazi police department. He committed suicide in 1945. Before the war, he wrote a crime novel under the alias Max Mauser. Only Richard Macker and one other writer we know about use an alias in Norway today. In Norway (and I presume there has been much the same development in other countries in regard to crime fiction) we are now seeing a tendency towards much more violent and internationally focused plots in crime novels and series on TV. Like Agatha Christie, the likes of Macker and his generation often wrote mysteries that took place in a kind of closed environment. The essential part was not measuring the amount of blood and closely describing how the murder was executed. It seems now that writers want their readers to have a close encounter with the most sadistic murderers they can come up with. Not to say that this makes the crime fiction bad, but it is a development. Just think of how much more violence you can find now in children’s TV programs and video games.

When it comes to crime series on Norwegian TV, the most famous these days has to be the Varg Veum series, based on the crime novels by Gunnar Staalesen. Richard Macker had his time in the ’70s and ’80s with a series about two investigators named Helmer and Sigurdson. Another tendency in Norway seems to be that the writers have worked in the environment they write about. Jo Nesbø worked in finance before writing books set in that world, and Jørgen Lier Horst (born 1970) was a police officer before he became one of the new successful crime writers. Many more of these links could be mentioned, and it is surely positive for a writer to have had a close connection with the environment he describes in his books.

Finally, you cannot talk about crime literature in Norway without mentioning the close link it has to the Easter holiday. Nearly all Norwegian families own a cabin in the mountains, or by the sea. True to tradition, Norwegians flock to their cabins at Eastertime and read a lot of crime novels and watch crime series on TV. We even print crime riddles on milk cartons for the holiday!

Swedish authors:
Henning Mankell
Håkan Nesser
Liza Marklund
Lars Kepler
Stieg Larsson

Danish:
Jussi-Adler Olsen
Anders Bodelsen
Lotte and Søren Hammer

Norwegian:
Jo Nesbø
Gunnar Staalesen
Karin Fossum
Anne Holt
Jørn Lier Horst

Posted in Books, Characters, Fiction, Guest, International, Passport, Publishing, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Little Amusement at His Expense: Conan Doyle’s Sly Subversion of English Society,” Part 2 (by Dr. Kenneth Wishnia)

Posted on August 7, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
See last week’s post for Part 1 of Kenneth Wishnia’s discussion: “Barbaric Kings and Plodding Imbeciles: Conan Doyle’s Sly Subversion of English Society,” Part 1.

The French author Honoré de Balzac once wrote that “behind every fortune lies a great crime,” and his words are borne out in “The Blue Carbuncle.” Belonging to a countess and worth at least £20,000, the precious stone brings nothing but trouble to whoever possesses it. Holmes dismisses the fetishization of such objects in a famous passage:

In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old . . . In spite of its youth, it has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of crystallized charcoal.

Dismissing the immense wealth of an aristocratic countess as a piece of “crystallized charcoal” represents a fairly overt critique of the culturally constructed relationship between wealth and class.

In “The Noble Bachelor,” Holmes once again expresses his distaste for cases dealing with the nobility, “which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie,” while “the humbler are usually the more interesting.” Holmes even yawns as Watson first describes the case to him, and shows further contempt for the British class system, noting that “the status of my client is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case.”

This is one of many characteristics that make Holmes such a beloved archetypal hero. Money, class, status—none of it matters to him. But it mattered very much to the Victorians.

Lord St. Simon, whom Watson describes as “a man whose pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to be obeyed,” comes off as a condescending fool in his first exchange with the great detective:

     [Lord St. Simon:] “I understand the you have already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the came class of society.”

[Holmes:] “No, I am descending.”

“I beg pardon?”

“My last client of the sort was a king.”

“Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?”

Lord St. Simon also believes that his fiancé ran off because marrying into such a fabulously prominent family was simply too much for her. Needless to say, Holmes rejects this self-aggrandizing assertion.

This issue of wealth and class turns up again in “The Beryl Coronet,” in which one of “the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England” refers to £50,000 as a “trifling” sum before entrusting the coronet in question to a banker who is understandably hesitant to assume responsibility for such a priceless and irreplaceable object. That the nobleman makes this unorthodox arrangement in order to cover up some potentially embarrassing indiscretion goes without saying, of course.

Too much wealth concentrated in one place has a poisonous effect on human relations, and in this story we see it trickle down from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie: The banker is awfully quick to presume his son’s guilt when a piece of the coronet goes missing, and when the jewels are returned, he hugs “his recovered gems to his bosom,” a display of affection he has not shown to his own family. Like Mr. Jabez Wilson in “The Red-Headed League,” the banker is another “portly” figure who resembles John Bull in the Paget illustrations, and who therefore could be said to symbolize English society in general.

In contrast to the “vacuous” Miss Mary Southerland in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes is “favorably impressed” by Miss Violet Hunter in “The Copper Beeches.” She is humble, brave, and above all, intelligent: Her story provides Holmes with all the details he needs, and unlike the petulant and privileged aristocrats who typically engage Holmes’s services, she is “a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.”

This time, the bourgeoisie take it directly on the chin: Mr. Rucastle is “a prodigiously stout man” who rubs his hands with glee as he ogles the prospective governesses for his child, a nasty little boy who enjoys trapping animals and “giving pain to any creature weaker than himself.” Oh, and Mr. Rucastle also keeps his own daughter locked in an upstairs room so he can keep all her money for himself.

Once again, he resembles John Bull in the Paget illustrations, and an academic might be tempted to suggest that if Mr. Rucastle represents England, his false good humor masking a homicidal coldness and greed, then his sins are visited upon his children: his son represents the cruelty that a system of such extreme economic inequality produces—the violence needed to enforce imperialism abroad and repressive values at home—while his daughter represents those who suffer from their vulnerability to the forces symbolized by the two male figures. But that might be going a bit far for some of you.*

Fortunately, a member of the working class, “a persevering man, as a good seaman should be,” in Holmes’s words, wins the girl’s heart and spirits her away.

(*And if you really want to go off the deep end, one might suggest that in “The Engineer’s Thumb,” the loss of Hatherly’s opposable thumb—a crucial characteristic of our development as a tool-making species—to an ax-wielding assailant in a room that has been converted into a giant hydraulic press represents how industrialization and its accompanying greed robs us of our humanity. [Warning: This is extreme literary analysis performed by a trained professional. Don’t try this at home.] Hatherly is another Doyle-like figure, most notably when he describes the troubles facing a newly minted engineer: “I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a dreary experience. To me it has been exceptionally so. During two years I have had three consultations and one small job,” he laments, in words that could be describing Doyle’s own early struggles.)

Another arrogant bourgeois gets a taste of Holmes’s unique brand of justice in “Silver Blaze,” when Holmes notes, “The Colonel’s manner has been just a trifle cavalier to me. I am inclined now to have a little amusement at his expense.” Presumably Doyle’s audience lapped this up, just as we do today. (We still love to see arrogant rich people get their comeuppance, don’t we?)

Finally, we come to “The Yellow Face.” Though by no means one of the great Sherlock Holmes stories—and perhaps because of it—this story contains a number of references to cultural tensions between the English and the Scots, and seriously challenges the presumed moral superiority of the imperious English.

Though unstated in the story, Mr. Grant Munro is very likely Scottish (Leslie Klinger informs us in the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes that “both Grant and Munro are common Scottish names”). English popular culture of the time typically caricatured the Scots as backward country folk with thick accents who were ignorant of big city ways and, above all, cheap. (The Scots would counter that their characteristic frugality is a result of having their country’s wealth plundered by the English, but that’s another story.)

Munro has called while Holmes was out, leaving behind a pipe that Holmes examines closely and identifies as a well-made but relatively inexpensive model that has been “twice mended.” Doyle’s target audience was presumably expected to jump to the conclusion that this is a sign of cheapness, until Holmes points out that the repairs have been made with silver bands that “must have cost more than the pipe did originally.”

So instead of labeling Munro a cheapskate, Holmes deduces that he is a man who would rather repair something that has emotional significance for him than “buy a new one with the same money.” Munro is loyal to the things he loves, which has important ramifications later in the story.

We are soon told that Munro didn’t want his wife to sign her money over to him, even though she has “a capital of about four thousand five hundred pounds,” because he already has an income of “seven or eight hundred.” Again, there is a difference between appreciating what you have and being “cheap.” Munro (“a muscular man . . . with an excellent set of teeth”) compares quite favorably with the portly, overfed Englishmen in the other stories who are willing to abuse and imprison their family members for the sake of money.

Munro fears the worst—that his wife’s first husband has come back to haunt them, perhaps—and is greatly relieved when he learns that the big secret his wife has been keeping from him is that her first husband was black, and that they have a black child.

“It was a long two minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence,” we are told. Munro’s silence is apparently due to him processing the unpleasant revelation that his wife didn’t have enough faith to confide in him from the beginning. Thus the story suggests that the Scots may be more tolerant of racial difference than the English, perhaps because they identify more readily with oppressed minorities.

In his final speech, Munro can be seen as representing all of Scotland addressing their English neighbors to the south when he says: “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”

And just in case you start feeling superior to all those smug Victorians, Klinger points out that the first American publication of “The Yellow Face” lengthened Munro’s silence to ten minutes, suggesting that Munro is confronting the unpleasant revelation that his wife had a child with a black man—a very different emotional moment, to be sure.

There are many more examples of such implicit critiques of Victorian society in the Holmes canon, but I think that’s enough for now.

Thanks to E.J. Wagner for her helpful comments on an early draft of this material.

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“Barbaric Kings and Plodding Imbeciles: Conan Doyle’s Sly Subversion of English Society,” Part 1

 (by Dr. Kenneth Wishnia)

Posted on July 31, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
I was editing EQMM’s February 2014 issue when this interesting two-part post by Dr. Kenneth Wishnia arrived in my in-box. Each year, EQMM’s February issue contains special Sherlock Holmes features, so the great detective and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were already on my mind. I will confess, though, that I had never seen the Holmes stories in the light the professor shines on them. Ken teaches at Suffolk Community College on Long Island, and says he would love to do a panel someday that reflects the unique perspective he shares with fellow crime-writing Ph.D.’s like Dr. Megan Abbott, Dr. David Bell, and Dr. Christine Jackson. His crime fiction includes many novels and short stories (some published in EQMM), but he believes that The Fifth Servant—more than any of his other fictional works—was influenced by Sherlock Holmes. The novel was nominated for the Sue Feder Historical Memorial Award (Macavity). Be sure to look for Part 2 of Ken Wishnia’s discussion of Sherlock Holmes next Wednesday.—Janet Hutchings

A number of today’s crime writers are also college professors who bring a unique critical approach to reading (and writing) crime fiction. In the course of teaching a college class that covers material stretching from Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammett to S.J. Rozan and Megan Abbott, I have uncovered evidence of numerous indirect criticisms of English society in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and a propensity for subverting revered Victorian institutions such as the aristocracy, the justice system, and even motherhood itself.

Any Holmes fan is familiar with the scenarios in which the police officials are completely baffled by a case, draw ridiculous conclusions from the available evidence, waste time chasing worthless clues, are stubbornly insistent upon arresting an innocent man, and then claim all the credit when Holmes solves the case.

This is not the cynical world of corrupt police officials found in the later American hardboiled school. In the Holmes stories, the incompetence and arrogance of the police inspectors is usually handled with a humorous wink at the reader. But any competent literary critic will tell you that in rigidly hierarchical societies such as Victorian England, humor is often the best vehicle for social commentary, since a direct attack on such institutions would be met with ostracism and even prosecution in some cases.

Think of that fabulously arch moment in the first published Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” when the king of Bohemia, so overdressed when we first meet him that Watson is unfavorably impressed by his “barbaric opulence,” speaks of Irene Adler:

      “Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”

       “From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes, coldly.

Meaning, of course, that she is far superior to the king.

That princes and kings can be cads is not exactly news, but we should take a moment to consider how radical it was to say so in print at the time, even if the criticism was safely displaced onto the Bohemian nobility. While some Victorian readers might have chuckled at the implied inferiority of the Central European nobility to a mere stage actress (and a commoner), many in the audience must have picked up on the indirect criticism of all such spoiled monarchs. The king in question, after all, has a German name—an almost comically absurd one at that—just as Queen Victoria’s mother and husband did (Princess Marie Luise Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, respectively).

Some of these negative attitudes towards the aristocracy and the police are a result of the British class system. The audience for the Holmes stories clearly relished the depiction of the nobility as pompous asses who are every bit as criminal in their behaviors as the lowest thieves, and the besting of the plodding, lower-class British bobbies time and again by an amateur (and a gentleman) who is happy to work for free if the client is needy and the case has one or two points of interest, as Holmes himself would say.

However, if we recall that Victorian Britain considered itself to be the very pinnacle of civilization at the time—the aristocratic characters repeatedly treat police inspectors (and even Holmes himself) as mere servants who are there to serve their “superiors”—it is possible to perceive the sly subversion of that society in these unflattering portrayals of the noble classes and the criminal justice system. (Perhaps that is also one of the reasons Holmes keeps quoting French terms and catchphrases in the early stories as well.)

These carefully crafted critiques may also reflect Conan Doyle’s own experiences as the Scottish-born child of an Irish family (yes, they were an oppressed minority) living in England, who couldn’t directly attack the social structure that he desperately needed to be a part of, and as a young doctor who, despite his excellent medical qualifications, struggled for many years to gain recognition and build a client base, much like Holmes himself in the early stories. (In later stories, once his reputation has been better established, Holmes is shown working in closer collaboration with the police.)

Consider the case of Mr. Jabez Wilson in “The Red-Headed League.” As a businessman and a shopkeeper, he can be said to represent the very backbone of English middle-class society. He is also described as “a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman, with fiery red hair.” In other words, he very much resembles John Bull, the symbol of England personified, especially in the original black-and-white illustrations by Sidney Paget. If we combine this image with Napoleon’s famous dictum that England is “a nation of shopkeepers,” Mr. Wilson can indeed be said to symbolize England. Yet Watson tells us that Mr. Wilson “bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous and slow.”

So a symbolic representative of the average Englishman is obese, pompous and slow—so slow that he doesn’t even recognize Holmes’s genius: “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all,” says Wilson, chuckling with self-satisfaction.

Once we leave 221B Baker Street, the main action of “The Red-Headed League” takes place in Saxe-Coburg Square (the surnames of Queen Victoria’s closest relatives), where we are introduced to Merryweather, a bank director dressed in an “oppressively respectable frock-coat” (now there’s a curious phrase) who apparently cares more about missing his card game than preventing a bank robbery, a police agent named Jones whom Holmes calls “an absolute imbecile,” and a criminal, John Clay, who as he is apprehended declares, apparently without irony: “I beg that you will not touch me with your filthy hands. You may not be aware that I have royal blood in my veins. Have the goodness also when you address me always to say ‘sir’ and ‘please.’”

No wonder Holmes declares near the end: “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.” After all, his remarkable gifts go unrecognized by the “oppressively respectable” and hypocritical society of his time. (To top it off, Holmes’s final remark is a quotation from Flaubert—another Frenchman.)

Crime so often shows the worst of human nature, so depicting an evil mother is not to be taken as a condemnation of all mothers. But consider the mother in “A Case of Identity” who connives with her second husband to take advantage of her daughter’s “short sight.” Not only is the Victorian ideal of the self-sacrificing mother inverted here, but even the daughter comes in for poor treatment. Watson tells us that Miss Mary Southerland has a “somewhat vacuous face,” gives a “rambling and inconsequential narrative,” and wears a “preposterous hat.” Watson notes her “vacuous” face twice and her shortsightedness several times. So much for the idealized image of the young woman as innocent victim of criminal deception.

In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” an innocent man has been charged. “Many men have been hanged on far slighter evidence,” says Watson. “Many men have been wrongfully hanged,” Holmes replies, questioning and subverting the exalted principles of British jurisprudence.

Naturally, Inspector Lestrade dismisses Holmes’s methods:

     “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.”

      “You are right,” said Holmes, demurely; “you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.”

Holmes calls Lestrade an “imbecile” later in the story.

Some of Holmes’s frustration at being dismissed by those with inferior minds is derived from Poe’s Dupin, another man with a brilliant mind who is forced to waste his time dealing with ignorant and unappreciative people. But Dupin’s contempt was displaced from Poe’s America and aimed at the Prefect of the Parisian police. Doyle was writing about his own society.

One might even suggest that the happy ending of this Holmes story, in which the young couple will live “in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past,” is a veiled condemnation of the average Briton’s ignorance of (or indifference to) the ravages of British colonialism, since the germ of the story’s conflict began years before in the diamond mines in Victoria, Australia. (Victoria, you say? Gee, that name sounds familiar…)

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