SinC25 Challenge – a roundup of posts

It has been a while since I last took stock of who has been taking the challenge. High time I provided some links from bloggers who are writing about women crime writers in response to my invitation to mark Sisters in Crime‘s 25th anniversary.

Maxine Clarke has been flexing her reading muscles in a big way. As a regular reviewer for Euro Crime and the founder of the friendly FriendFeed Crime & Mystery Fiction group she keeps her finger on the pulse of mystery publishing – and at her own blog, Petrona, she posts lots of excellent reviews and commentary. For the medium challenge she has profiled the following women authors, all from different countries:

• Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale, paired with Charlotte Bronte;
• Catherine Sampson, reminding me of some books set in China that I’ve been meaning to read, paired with Liza Marklund and Diane Wei Lang;
• Saskia Noort, a Dutch author who is also a resident of my TBR, paired with Claudia Pineiro and Simone van der Vlugt;
• Katherine Howell, author of an Australian police procedural series that sounds very interesting, paired with Sue Grafton; and
• Miyuke Miyabe, a Japanese author who has just gone on my long list of writers to try, paired with Dominique Manotti.

Maxine has not only completed the easy and moderate challenges, but she plans to tackle the expert one, as well! I’m looking forward to it, and hope she will remember the tight deadline of “whenever.”

At The Bunburyist, scholar and author of short stories Elizabeth Foxwell has several posts filled with erudition. In one post she profiles women with “Ink in their Blood – women writers who started out as journalists, including Edna Buchanan, Carol Nelson Douglas, Gillian Linscott, Eve K. Sandstrom, and Celestine Sibley. “AKA” presents five women who wrote under pseudonyms:  M.C. Beaton (Marion Chesney), David Frome /Leslie Ford (Zenith Jones Brown), Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), Evelyn Piper (Merriam Modell), and Dell Shannon (Elizabeth Linington). What a lot of creativity among those women and their multiple pseudonyms. And what interesting backstories for the authors who first wrote the news.

At Goodreads, Norma Huss profiles Dorothy Gilman, an author who inspired her own writing, adding to her profile M.C. Beaton and Carolyn G. Hart.

Sarah Ward at Crimepieces takes the challenge by writing about Asa Larsson, whose new book Until Thy Wrath Be Past is definitely one I intend to read as soon as possible. She also recommends five other women authors: Mari Jungstedt, Fred Vargas, Jennifer Egan, Ann Cleeves, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir.

Mrs. Peabody investigates Ingrid Noll’s mystery, The Pharmacist, which sounds quite creepy and psychologically suspenseful. She also recommends Josephine Tey, Fred Vargas, Maj Sjowall, Dominique Manotti, and P.D. James.

The library director at Goshen Public Library highlights some women writers for the challenge, including Sheila Connolly’s Fundraising the Dead

Bernadette, who contributes to Fair Dinkum Crime and writes thoughtful reviews at her own blog, Reactions to Reading, has added a couple of blog posts to the challenge. In her second challenge post, she focuses on historical crime fiction, with a new favorite, Ariana Franklin in the lead, adding notes about Elizabeth Peters, Imogen Robertson, and Victoria Thompson. (My, I have a lot of catching up to do.)  She also profiles “genre busters” – women writers who have done something different within the genre. She starts with an intriguing feminist author, Finola Moorhead, whose Still Murder was published in 1991 by Australian publishing house Spinifex which specializes in “innovative and controversial feminist books with an optimistic edge.” She adds to the genre busters Natsuo Kirino, Dorothy Porter, and Karin Alvtegen.

And – oh my goodness, here’s Laurie King, who is rising to the challenge with a few words about S. J. Rozan and her new book, Ghost Hero, a Lydia Chin book that she calls “a zinger.”

Thanks to all who are participating. If you feel inspired to take the challenge – at whatever level – tag your posts SinC25 and I’ll look for them. At the end of this process, I’ll compile a list of all the authors mentioned. I know I’ve already added a lot to my “to be read” list.

photos courtesy of soyrosa and moriza; postcard courtesy of janwillemsen.

Sinc25 #1 – Margery Allingham

I thought I’d start off my contribution to the Sisters in Crime Book Bloggers Challenge by recalling mysteries that were among the first I read (apart from some written for children – I admit to cutting my reading teeth on Freddie the Pig, the first books I enjoyed; I was not an intellectual child). My mother was a great mystery reader and in my early teens I began reading from bookshelves filled with works by the women of the British Golden Age. My favorite of these authors was Margery Allingham, and rather than review a particular book, I’ll just remember what I felt when reading the Albert Campion series.

I thought I had some insightful things to say about it – then discovered that A.S. Byatt had already said them, better. So I will just say that what I enjoyed about the Albert Campion books was their inventiveness in the baroque worlds that she created and the bizarre yet believable people who inhabited them. Campion didn’t have a Jeeves-like gentleman’s gentleman, always correct and efficient; he had the lewd and low-class former burglar, Magersfontein Lugg. Campion (like Sherlock Holmes) has friends in places both high and low, and when he’s visiting the low ones, they seem to live in Dickens’ London. (Characters’ names are also Dickensian and wonderful.) His love interest and eventual wife, Amanda Fitton, is a strong enough character to hold her own. Her hair is red and her profession is engineering aircraft. In fact, all of the characters have enough energy to jump right off the page, and the worlds they inhabit are richly detailed if not particularly interested in being realistic. The books I remember enjoying particularly were The Fashion in Shrouds, The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, Police at the Funeral, and More Work for the Undertaker.

Tiger in the Smoke departed from the mold by focusing on a killer, with much of the relatively hardboiled story seen from his point of view; Traitor’s Purse was memorable for its dizzying setup – Campion has had a thump on the head and isn’t sure who he is or why he’s in the hospital, but knows there’s something terribly important he must do, so dresses in fireman’s coat, pulls an alarm, and makes his escape. It’s a wartime adventure, with caves and explosions, lots of running about, and so much suspense that when I first read it (I was probably twelve or thirteen) it felt like I’d taken a drug that made my heart speed up. Another unusual (but memorable) book in the series was The  Mind Readers, a late entry in the series that had a science fiction flavor; scientists on “Boffin Island” are working on a device that makes those who have it telepathic; I don’t remember much about the plot, but I do recall that a couple of likeable schoolboys were involved.

I’m not sure I want to reread the books – there’s always the horrible possibility of falling out of love – but enough people continue to enjoy the books that there is a Margery Allingham Society (from which I borrowed her portrait) and in Fall 2004 Clues published a special issue on Allingham.

Similar women authors:

• Dorothy Sayers (though if Margery Allingham is like Dickens, Sayers is more like Anthony Trollope)
• Ngaio Marsh (also good at memorable characters and convoluted families and well-represented on my mother’s bookshelf)
• Carol O’Connell (in that Mallory’s world is also richly baroque and immensely detailed without being the least bit concerned with realism)

Sisters in Crime Book Bloggers Challenge

I am somewhat loath to issue a reading challenge, given that one of the greatest pleasures of reading is choosing books you just feel like reading without being told what to read. But this challenge includes a lot of latitude for crime fiction fans, so I hope it will let you indulge in an activity enjoyed by avid readers: that of grabbing people by the virtual elbow and saying “have you read this book? It’s sooooo good!”

Given that Sisters in Crime is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year at Bouchercon, it seems a good time to blog about women’s contributions to crime fiction.

Easy challenge: write a blog post about a work of crime fiction by a woman author; list five more women authors who you recommend.

Moderate challenge: write five blog posts about works of crime fiction by women authors. For each, mention another woman author who writes in a similar vein.

Expert challenge: write ten blog posts about works of crime fiction by women authors. For each, mention three similar women authors whose works you would recommend.

Deadline: whenever. Another one of the joys of reading for pleasure is not having deadlines. Also, feel free to recycle previous reviews. I’m all about recycling.

If you tag your posts with “SinC25” I will compile them.  And if you tweet, use the hashtag #SinC25.

You can do it!

If you aren’t familiar with Sisters in Crime, it’s a non-profit organization with the mission to “promote the professional development and the advancement of women crime writers to achieve equality in the industry.” It was founded on the heels of a talk Sara Paretsky gave at the first conference on women in detective fiction held at Hunter College in March 1986. It now has 3,000 or so members worldwide and is welcoming to anyone who enjoys a good mystery. For writers in particular, both published and not yet published, it offers some terrific opportunities for friendship and professional development. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a member for many years and am currently serving on the board.)

By the way, this image is based on the famous “Rosie the Riveter” poster in the National Archives. Feel free to reuse my Rosie the Reader variation.

Guess I’ll dive in the deep end and sign up for the Expert Challenge. Stay tuned ….

at the scene of the crime

J. Sydney Jones, author of a historical mystery series set in Vienna that has raked in enough starred reviews to create his own constellation, has recently started a blog devoted to the role that a sense of place plays in mysteries. So far he has interviewed Leighton Gage about Brazil, Matt Rees and his take on Palestine, Rebecca Cantrell on Berlin, Vicki Delany and her series set in British Columbia, Philip Kerr and his Bernie Gunther series set in Berlin (what a hotbed of intrigue), Cara Black’s Paris …

And now me. Me and my obsession with Chicago.

Like so many readers, I am an armchair traveler (and may be so forever – the thought of having to endure an overseas flight without a book in my hands for the final hour is too horrible to contemplate). I teach a first term seminar on international crime fiction and love discovering places and cultures with students who have no idea where Laos is on the map (but either know or are themselves Hmong people living in Minnesota) and have never encountered Aboriginal Australian communities (who face challenges that are not unlike those of Ojibwe and Dakota peoples living in our state). Reading helps me map the world and its peoples and gives me a sense of where I stand. A good sense of place is important to me as a reader.

Recently Laura Miller at Salon decided to stir the pot a bit by responding to writers rules (inspired by Elmore Leonard’s famous rules that include sage advice like “leave out the parts people skip”) with her reader’s rules for writers. She says bluntly “The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting.” I agree about the elements, but I don’t think I would put them in that order or consider any of them optional. It’s sort of like saying “The components of a curry that are important are curry, x, y, and z; if you can’t manage them all, just heat up some curry powder because that’s essential.” Yeah, but . . . She also says (and it’s probably accurate) that the quality of the writing is not important for many readers. James Patterson’s success is ample evidence of that. But I can’t read a book that grates on my nerves with clunky writing. Nor can I make it through a novel that is all sparkling prose but no story, no characters, no setting.

The comments on her essay are predictable: littrature is all boring rubbish; only philistines read popular fiction, which is all formulaic rubbish. A pox on both their houses. Just give me a well-written story with characters I care about doing something that matters in a world that feels real and I’ll keep turning the pages.

things found on the Internet when I should be working, #1

Excerpts from G.K. Chesterton’s “Defence of Detective Stories“

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. . . .  The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.

There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal.

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the ‘Iliad.’ No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery.

This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. . . .  There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.

(Thanks to Wordle for the tag cloud.)

the Joker’s on us

Yesterday, Jonathan Lethem responded to Andrew Klavan’s bizarre likening of Batman to George Bush – a hero who has to bear the brunt of doing the right thing by means of torture, rendition, and violation of the law.

Lethem found the film’s main take-away message is a kind of “morbid incoherence,” one that marks our current civic discourse, “strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance.” And sadly, he sees a parallel with our current exhausted shrug in the face of the latest news, which is not so much “new” as more of the same.

No wonder we crave an entertainment like “The Dark Knight,” where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion.

It may be possible to see the nightly news in a similar light, where any risk of uncovering the vulnerable yearnings, all the tenderness aroused by, yes, the seemingly needless death of a promising young actor or of a brilliant colleague, all hope of conversation between the paranoid blues and the paranoid reds, all that might bind us together, is forever armored in a gleeful and cynical cartoon of spin and disinformation. Keywords — “change,” “victory” — are repeated until adapted out of meaning, into self-canceling glyphs. Meanwhile, pigs break into the lipstick store, and we go hollering down the street after them, relieving ourselves of another hour or day or week of clear thought.

Beneath the sniping, so many real things lie in ruins: a corporate paradigm displaying no shred of responsibility, but eager for rescue by taxpayers; a military leadership’s implicit promise to its recruits and their families; a public discourse commodified into channels that feed any given preacher’s resentments to a self-selecting chorus. In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel.

If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us.

So here we are again: what does popular culture tell us about our world? In this case, nothing really. The world is broken, and so is our discourse; so are our heroes, and apparently we find some absolving relief in that. For Andrew Klavan, celebrating lawless and brutal vigilantism for the sake of fighting our enemies, burning the village to save it, is the heroic message.

But as I read Lethem’s list of real things that lie in ruins, I swear I hear an echo of Chandler.

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge. . . . it is the world you live in.” (“The Gentle Art of Murder,” The Atlantic December 1944.)

It’s the world you live in, not a fantasy where good and evil duke it out to a draw. It’s the role of good popular culture – good crime fiction, anyway – to think about the real things that lie in ruins, and to give us a good look at them. Down these mean streets we must go; and in our exploration – even through as prosaic an art as crime fiction – there should be a quality of redemption – not just of blissfully numbing confusion, with a sequel in the works.

Such is my faith.

being genre-ous

Declan Burke, whose latest book The Big O is being released right about now in the US (we’re so often the last kids on the block to read the best things coming out of Europe, though at least this time the US publisher didn’t decide to change the title) recently hosted the Carnival of the Criminal Minds at his blog, Crime Always Pays. Rather than provide the usual feast of links – something that’s hard to top after Brian Lindenmuth hosted the Carnival – he raised a serious question.

Do blogs have a particular role to play in fostering thoughtful critical discussion of a genre that has been typically neglected by mainstream media? Can we do better than the handful of short plot recaps that stand for book reviews in a book review market that is contracting daily? Can bloggers bring out the best in the genre? He thinks we can.

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.

The genre has not only been neglected by traditional channels, it’s often reviewed by people who are ignorant of the genre, who are shocked, shocked to find good writing. You know this is the case when a reviewer is gobsmacked by a book that “transcends the genre” because it’s well-constructed, has fully-developed characters, and is well-written – in other words, it’s a good work of crime fiction, like a great many books published in this genre. It’s only if you’re assuming James Patterson represents the genre that it’s being transcended. Dec goes on to say -

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 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.

Wow.

It’s interesting that a number of traditional venues for book criticism are cutting their coverage and trying to make up for it by taking to the web. I’m not sure what that means, other than that they think they can save money on both newsprint and staff. The Monreal Gazette is the latest to shrink their coverage and call it an improvement.

It’s also interesting how defensive people get when a mainstream critic says a book is more than a mystery. Yes, it’s tiresome to hear people who haven’t read much in the genre say something has transcended it – how would you know if you haven’t read much of it? – but Janet Maslin saying Dennis Lehane’s newest book is a big step beyond his crime fiction is not to say his other books are dreck that only idiots would read. She seemed to me to be saying his 700-page epic is ambitious in ways his other books were not. Quite often any perceived critique of the genre is met by bristling anger and assertions that literary fiction is navel-gazing plotless crap that nobody wants to read, anyway. And that’s just as silly as declaring all genre fiction mediocre.

We have the means to celebrate the best in a genre, and we certainly have the motive, as Dec stated it above – it matters to us. Those of us who know the genre best need to give it our best critical shot. I’d say that the critical lens that Dec has turned on Irish crime fiction in his blog posts at The Rap Sheet this week are a fine example.

Or take a look at Material Witness. It’s one of several blogs that, when it comes to traditional book reviewing, easily . . . er, dare I say it? . . . transcend the genre.

Gas City by Loren Estleman

Amazing book – not so much for the plot or the characters as for the whole package. Set in a mythical city, presumably in the Midwestern US, this story involves two major plotlines – the police chief, who has just buried his wife, has decided to buck the system he’s supported for years and actually enforce the law, even in “the circle,” the part of town ruled by criminals. And someone is butchering women and leaving their parts in garbage bags around the city. Both of these plotlines intersect in a hotel detective and erstwhile alcoholic pimp, who comes out of his haze when he has a chance to do some real detecting.

Estleman has always had a yen for the past (in books like Retro) but here the world of Gas City is hermetically sealed, a world unto itself, where people occasionally use phrases that are from the 1930s and yet the police chief has a son who died years ago in Vietnam. Though it’s somewhat disorienting, it’s a richly detailed, internally consistent, and lavishly described fictional universe, full of lyrical passages and sometimes hilarious throwaway lines.

This is one of those books you have to give yourself to. Adapt to its pace, savor the lines, and don’t worry about what time it is.

by the time you’ve read these . . .

. . . you’ll have gone right around the world.

LibraryThing is having another book pile contest. I decided to join in this time – with a few books I’ve been picking up that are from different parts of the world. Here’s my entry:

In ascending order, there’s crime fiction from Sweden, Palestine, Slovakia, Turkey, Brazil, Botswana, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Iceland, Scotland, and Canada – with a non-fiction book about China, thrown in for good measure. (We’re reading John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons as a college common reading this year.)

By the way, LibraryThing is fun – and it’s where I keep track of what I’ve been reading, which is handy when you have a terrible memory.

the holy trinity

Karen Chisolm has tagged me with a meme that started over at David Montgomery’s Crime Fiction Dossier: who are the three authors you couldn’t live without?

A few years ago, I might actually have duplicated his answer – Lawrence Block, John Connelly, and George Pelecanos. Or maybe it would have been John Harvey, Reginald Hill, and Dennis Lehane. Or Elmore Leonard, Robert Crais and James Lee Burke . . . Okay, you get the picture. It wasn’t hard at all to name my favorites. I had a fairly short list.

Now I have a very long list. And an even longer list of authors I want to try, but haven’t yet. (Damn you, 4MA! I’ll read until I die and I still won’t be finished!!) Another thing that has happened is that some of my favorites ten years ago are still writing, but either I’ve changed or they have. They just don’t have the pizazz for me they once had.

So I think I’ll divide this into two parts: authors who made me the reader I am today and authors whose work really excites me right now. And then the Meme graders can give me an F for not following directions.

Three authors who made me the reader I am today – Dennis Lehane, who showed me you could write beautifully about terrible things. Elmore Leonard, who loves all of his characters, even the lame, the halt, and the uncool, and who has a laconic but utterly generous approach to the world. And John Harvey, whose writing has a very special quality of light.

Three authors whose work excites me right now – Jo Nesbo, who is simply brilliant and makes me believe in his world. David Corbett, who takes risks and is insightful about what’s going on. And Denise Mina, who had me with GarnethIll, but keeps surprising me with her range.

Of course that’s three authors among some 3,000 that I could name . . .

photo courtesy of Your Guide.