my very own boomerang

Thanks, Bernadette. This is the nicest award I’ve ever gotten because I love its anti-authoritarian rules:

Enjoy the award. If you don’t want to put it on your blog, don’t. Just get the warm, fuzzy feeling that I’m sending your way!

You don’t have to reveal any deep, dark secrets about yourself or answer any sort of questions. You’ve already earned it!

You don’t have to link back to me.

You don’t have to give it to anyone else.

I am enjoying it.  And I will pass it along (no strings attached) to some of the blogs that I tap into constantly

• Chucking it back at Bernadette’s Reactions to Reading (I love the idea of Maureen O’Donnell of Garenthill taking over the definition of “chick lit” – lord, how I’d love to see that happen)
• Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders, though I’m sure he already has at least one boomerang
• Dorte’s bilingual DJSKrimiblog – here’s another Australian Frisbee for your collection
• On Fiction – a fascinating look at reading through the lens of psychology
  

. . . not to mention a bazillion more, which is why I’m so bad at getting things done. How on earth does Maxine / Petrona do it? I am in awe.

kiitos is in order. . .

Pardon a bit of navel-gazing, but I am tickled that Nemo, a Finnish publisher, wants to take a gamble on translating In the Wind for a Finnish audience. This is thanks to a Finnish reader somehow getting a copy of it, enjoying it, and bringing it to the publisher’s attention. Thanks to him, to Ann-Christine Danielsson, and to Nina Karjalainen, the publisher for taking a leap of faith. I’m extra happy because -

• Finland rocks. Helsinki is a wonderful liveable city with neo-classical, art nouveau, and very modern architecture. They have a gorgeous public library in Tampere that amazed me many years ago because they served delicious ice cream. Back then, that would have been heresy in the US. Now we’re catching on to the idea that food and books do go together. They now have a Moomin museum in the basement. Moomins are another reason I love Finland.

• The Finnish language is amazing. I love the way it looks and sounds. (That’s why I gave my main character a Finnish name; it sounded good. Shallow, I know.) I think it would difficult to learn, though. Here’s how Nemo presents one of their translated authors: “Marcia Muller on syntynyt Detroitissa Michiganissa vuonna 1944. Opiskeltuaan kirjallisuutta ja tiedotusoppia Muller muutti San Franciscoon. Hän työskenteli lehtimiehenä ja haastattelijana kirjoittaen yksityiskohtaisia kuvauksia ihmisistä ja heidän elinympäristöistään. Romaanihenkilönsä McConen tapaan Muller harrastaa lentämistä. Hän on kirjoittanut 27 rikosromaania ja toimittanut miehensä, rikoskirjailija Bill Pronzinin, kanssa rikosnovelliantologioita.” Isn’t that fabulous?
  
• Finns read a lot. I told a friend, a professor of Scandinavian Studies, about this and he said, “that’s great! Finns read more than anyone.” Gotta love a country where reading is so popular.
• Scandinavian crime fiction is the best in the world. The. Best. Just look at who’s up for the CWA International Dagger this year. I rest my case. So incredibly cool to be able to share a bit of shelf space with the best of the best.

Now, back to our usual ranting and raving . . .

Carnival of the Criminal Minds, No. the Last

This is the 32nd Carnival – a traveling celebration of crime fiction blogging that has been going on since the fall of 2007. They say all good things must come to an end. (I don’t know why – dark chocolate should never come to an end.) But it seems time to strike the big top, break down the roller coaster, and shut off the lights. It’s getting harder to find new hosts, I hate to keep imposing on the same contributors, and a truly wonderful substitute has come along that . . . well, I’ll tell you about that later.(This is how crafty writers build suspense.)

After its launch at Karen Chisholm’s blog, part of the wondrous AustCrimeFiction site  in 2007, it has made its way around the world a couple of times. As you can see from the map, we’ve been all over. And that was largely my goal – to discover interesting bloggers who could introduce us to even more bloggers who could expand our mysterious universe.

Okay, we didn’t really travel to Mongolia, but Michael Walters did show us around remotest Manchester. And I don’t really live in Scandinavia, though we do eat lutefisk in Minnesota. Does that count?

Every carnival has been different. Some have focused on film or on dead guys, others on specific settings such as the Australian Outback, or on cataloging various holidays. They’ve ranged from the deeply strange, to a veritable freak show. What would we have done without Mekon who has a brain the size of a (very green) planet or without Tillie of Palace Amusements?

I’ll always treasure the classic posts that Bernd preserved in his museum, and the rousing call to arms (or keyboards, anyway) when Declan Burke pondered the purpose of blogging and the role that thoughful commentary can play in demanding the best from a genre that gets short shrift from the mainstream press.I can’t resist quoting him at length because, well, it may be all fun and games, but really – isn’t this what we’re all striving for?

I am not saying that crime / mystery fiction should strive to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. They do what they do, and good luck to them; my personal reading habits involve quite a lot of what would be considered literary fiction, and I have no beef with what they do or how they do it. By the same token, and speaking only for myself, the last thing I need or want is a pat on the head from the literary establishment. What I AM saying is that the critical work on crime fiction needs to develop of and through its own metier, that the Johnsons of the crime / mystery community require their Boswells, and that I believe heart and soul that crime / mystery fiction needs and deserves the kind of widespread, top-to-bottom critical work that would in turn inspire the writers to strive towards ever-higher standards of work. . . . here’s the thing – crime / mystery fiction is the most popular genre on the planet, it is inarguably the most relevant and important fiction out there, and that’s why I believe it deserves more. It deserves more from me, certainly, than reviews that run along the lines of, “This is a great book because I liked it and I liked it because it’s a great book.” It deserves the kind of dynamic, rigorous, extensive and constantly evolving critical work that the interweb is perfectly placed to provide, and it deserves to be critiqued, justified and praised not by the kind of commentator who will suggest that a particular novel has (koff) ‘transcended the genre’, but by those who understand that good crime / mystery fiction is simultaneously scourge and balm, panacea and drug, a fiction for the world we live in that is also its truth.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to talk about. Blogs are full of interviews and book reviews and facinating challenges and interesting cover art. And if blogs aren’t enough for you, Mack offers a tour of the crime scene in Second Life. There’s no shortage of material. But here’s the thing – a 24/7 carnival has set up shop, a veritable Coney Island of the Criminal Minds. Just toddle over to FriendFeed and join the Crime and Mystery Fiction room. There you’ll find a constant stream of links, with chances to be part of an ongoing conversation with crime fiction critics and fans from all over. And it seems much more spontaneous and less of an imposition than the Carnival. I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s had its day.

Meanwhile, thanks to all the contributors who have hosted the carnival, many of you more than once.You get to go home with all the stuffed animals and more cotton candy than you can eat.

• Karen Chisholm of AustCrime
• J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet
• Julia Buckley of Mysterious Musings
• Mary Saums of Femmes Fatales
• Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays
• The Material Witness
• The BookBitch
• Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders
• Crimespot
• B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder
• The Jungle Red Writers
• Sharon Wheeler of Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room
• Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine
• Bernd Kochanowski at Internationale Krimis
• Sandra Ruttan of On Life and Other Inconveniences
• Martin Edwards of at Do You Write Under Your Own Name?
• Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise
• Damien at Crime Down Under
• Anthony Neil Smith at Crimedog One’s Virtual Dive Bar
• Brian Lindenmuth at Observations from the Balcony
• Michael Walters’ Shadow Walker Blog
• Gerard Brennan at Crime Scene NI
• Helen at It’s Criminal
• And special thanks to New Zealand author Vanda Symon who offered to host the carnival at her blog, Overkill, just as I was dismantling the roller coaster.

See you all around the Interwebs. And maybe we’ll bump into each other at FriendFeed.

photo courtesy of j.reed

things found on the Internet when I should be working, no. 2

There a kind of splendid if somewhat pointless (or splendidly pointless) creativity that thrives in certain circumstances. It’s the impulse that drive outsider artists to create beauty out of junk and idiosyncrasy.

It’s both a mysterious process and a work of obsession. To quote a Lawrence Block character musing about an outsider artist in Small Town, “she couldn’t hope to guess what had prompted a wild-eyed little black man in Brooklyn to stab knives and forks into the wooden spool, to pound nails and screws and miscellaneous bits of hardware into it, to screw in a brass doorstop here, the wooden knobs from a chest of drawers there. Why he had done it–and, most mysterious of all, how had he managed in the process to create not a mad jumble, not a discordant conglomeration of junk, but an artifact of surpassing beauty?”

This kind of beautiful bizarreness flourishes on the Internet.  One example is the weirdly wonderful human clock. (Thanks, RAMily!) Every minute, a new photo pops up which happens to give the time. Photos are submitted by people who want to play – and you can too – when you should be working.

Photo of the Forevetron courtesy of queenodesign.

stranger than fiction, stranger than reality

The affidavit is an interesting branch of the crime genre. A little stilted, perhaps, but full of strange gems. You can’t make this stuff up.

Illinois may be famous for the back-scratching corruption that is a way of life. But Blago seems to have taken it to new heights.

small miracles

The Tribune reports that Holy Cross church in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood was facing closure when parts of its ornamental plaster began to fall from the ceiling – which is, indeed, spectacular.

We were passing by two summers ago and a church worker let us in and showed us the amazing interior. The church was originally built by Baltic immigrants (and there’s a Black Madonna from that era, but unfortunately none of my photos of her came out). The organ is a spectacular instrument, recently restored by a Jewish family that runs a flea market int he neighborhood. And there’s a Virgin of Guadalupe made fairly recently by a Mexican artist, because the Back of the Yards neighborhood, made famous by Upton Sinclair’s rabblerousing book The Jungle, is now largely Latino.  It was clear that the church was in need of repair, but also clear that it was and remains a monument to immigrants and their dreams. So I’m happy to read that somehow the community was able to raise enough money to restore the church just in time for the feast day of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, which will be celebrated on Dec. 12th.

very, very relieved

. . . now that people are able to return to New Orleans. The storm was fortunately not as bad as was anticipated. Our relatives in Lake Charles weathered it withough any signficant damage, a relief after what they had to deal with after Rita.

very, very worried

This is just too, too, too horrible and scary.

I love New Orleans. There’s no place like it, and it’s worth preserving. Watching the Katrina unnatural disaster unfold was as upsetting, horrifying, and affecting as watching another favorite city, New York, cope with 9/11. The difference was we did it to ourselves. Most of the victims of Katrina were not killed by the storm, but by human failures. Our failures.

Given the shoddy rebuilding of levies, the greed that has ruined the wetlands that protected the coast, and the continuing ability for our government to screw up, this could be the end.

And the last of the unclaimed bodies from Katrina were buried just last week.

UPDATE: It wasn’t so bad after all – and as the real-time updated weather map shows, things have been mostly not scary since I wrote this. The threat remains, and the human-made damage is not yet sufficiently repaired. I hope this map doesn’t tell a different story any time soon.

slworking with wordle

Because I should be working, I decided to play with wordle- this is what my del.icio.us tags look like when shelved vertically. (You can embed a smaller image, but to make it this size, I had to do a screen capture, select the part I wanted, and upload it to flickr. Yes, I am being geeky.)

I actually think this has some interesting research potential – looking for patters within texts. For example, you might guess from this that I’m interested in libraryish things but also collecting sources for my next novel. But it mostly offers a weird aesthetic pleasure. And a chance to do some slworking.

a brief moment of navel-gazing

I’m very fond of the Trib. I miss having it delivered to my door, as I did during my sabbatical in Chicago, but I check my RSS feed daily to see what new havoc is happening in the city that my imagination has adopted as its home. And now I’m even fonder, since their crime fiction reviewer, Paul Goat Allen, said he liked In the Wind.

In print. In the book section. Page 8. Holy smokes.

The whole column is here – starting out with a rave for my near-neighbor Neil Smith, who brings a dark kind of mayhem to southwestern Minnesota with Yellow Medicine. After reviews of several other intriguing books, mine brings up the rear, a pair of Minnesota bookends. And . . . awright, he calls In the Wind “an understated crime-fiction gem” with “a highly intelligent story line that underscores disturbing similarities between the counterintelligence practices of post-9/11America and those imposed during the Vietnam War era.” It goes on:

Fledgling Chicago private investigator Anni Koskinen is hired to clear the name of a dissident accused of murdering an FBI agent in the ’70s. Her investigation leads to some troubling revelations about the government and human nature in general. Discerning fans of political mysteries and thrillers looking for a wildly thought-provoking whodunit should check out this surprisingly compelling read.

Okay, enough of preening. But it is cool to be in the Trib. My father was a journalist, so I grew up in a house where, at breakfast, you had to hunt for the butter under all the newspapers. My mother was distressed when she heard I read the Trib regularly; she still holds a grudge against Robert McCormick. It’s true that it’s conservative – the paper hasn’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate since Horace Greeley. But the paper covers the news with solid, meat-and-potatoes reporting, doing some excellent investigative series from time to time, including a groundbreaking series on wrongful convictions.

It feels oddly postmodern to say this,but I have a character who works for the Trib, a genuine good guy with a weakness for cops. Here’s a snip:

A man with short grizzled hair was standing on the sidewalk outside my house, tapping a notebook impatiently against his leg. He had the sagging suit and the broad build of a cop, but I knew he wasn’t one. I was planning evasive maneuvers, when he turned and his jowly face lighted up.

“Anni!” he called out, as if I were a long-lost friend. “Good to see you.”

“Wish I could say the same, Az.”

“Aw, don’t be that way.”Azad Abkerian, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, had been put on the cops and courts beat decades ago. It was typically the job new journalists got assigned to after an apprenticeship in obituaries, because it was easy. You didn’t have to go out and find stories; you just listened to the scanner. But Az had never moved on to better things. It wasn’t because he wasn’t a good reporter; in fact, he was one of the Trib’s best writers and had even been nominated for Pulitzer once. He just fell in love with cops and never got over it. He liked nothing better than rubbing elbows with detectives at a crime scene, carrying Vicks in his pocket to dab under his nose if the body was too ripe, going out for a drink with the guys afterward. He was especially delighted whenever one of the women who hung out at the bar, attracted to uniforms and guns, mistook him for a detective. It never occurred to him he was like those women, just another cop groupie.

Anyway, it’s a kick to see my name in the Trib. And now I’ll stop this nonsense and get back to reading the paper.

photo courtesy of william couch.