Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

The Criminalist: The Legacy of Charlie Chan

My newest - and final - column for The Barnes & Noble Review focuses on Yunte Huang's new book about the famed fictional Chinese detective, one whose influence has ranged wide and provoked all manner of controversy and uncomfortable discussion about race in the United States. Here's how my piece opens:

Despite the many strides the past few decades have made toward eliminating ethnic injustice, race is an issue that isn't going away just yet  -- and is, instead, heating up. A black president in conjunction with a crippled economy and a 24/7 news cycle means innocuous comments are blown out of proportion, latent ugly feelings become blatantly manifest in comments sections and public demonstrations alike, and complex examinations are passé  in the face of cartoon-style rhetoric. There are many days when it feels like America hasn't learned from past mistakes, or can't admit it's making them again and again.

Into this volatile mix comes Yunte Huang, an English Professor at UC Santa Barbara. He has spent the past two decades researching one of the most popular and troubling characters in American culture, a star of books and movies and a reminder of some of the country's worst anti-immigration sentiments and practices. Can this character be as Huang writes in Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History, "a funny, beloved, albeit somewhat inscrutable...character who talks wisely and acts even more wisely" while also "a pernicious example of a racist stereotype"? Can he truly carry "both the stigma of racial parody and the stimulus of creative imitation?"

The answer, of course, is yes, because the character in question is Charlie Chan, born of a primordial stew of culture and politics that includes a legendary Chinese-Hawaiian police detective, a Harvard-educated novelist, a journeyman Swedish actor, argumentative critics and millions of Americans looking for fleeting entertainment. Naturally this is a tricky maze of contexts to navigate, but in choosing to assemble a psycho-biography of Charlie Chan, Huang had to merge these disparate strands into a cohesive narrative whole. The end result is not merely successful, but a revelation: you're never going to think the same way again about the wise detective's broken English aphorisms like "An idle brain is the devil's workshop" or  "Biggest mistakes in history made by people who didn't think."

Read on for the rest, and for a much fuller and comprehensive treatment, see Jill Lepore's excellent essay on Huang's book and the cultural significance of Charlie Chan in the New Yorker. 

On Martin Cruz Smith and His New Arkady Renko Novel

My review of Martin Cruz Smith's newest novel featuring his iconic Russian detective, Arkady Renko, appeared in yesterday's Los Angeles Times (but was only put online this afternoon.) Here's how the piece opens:

Russia may be nearly 20 years removed from the end of Soviet Communist rule, but the latest events in that country truly bring home the phrase "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Spies are still trying to infiltrate American soil, albeit with the help of social media and encrypted Wi-Fi connections. The Kremlin still all but controls the flow of media, and don't use the words "election" and "democracy" or you'll be laughed out of Moscow. There's more money for the rich to throw around, and the underworld swells larger with more small- and big-time criminals on the make.

In other words, contemporary Russia is still a prime setting for crime fiction, rife with narrative avenues for a detective to wander down at his or her peril. For Martin Cruz Smith in particular, Russia has proved to be a rich mine for more than three decades, never ceasing to provide tales of corruption, abuse and world-weary observation for his iconic protagonist, Arkady Renko, to investigate.

Read on for the rest, and for comparison purposes, see Olen Steinhauer's rave review of the book that graced last weekend's cover of the NYTBR.

New and Forthcoming: FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES, and A New Short Story

So the busy summer (and year) continues but a couple of new and upcoming publications featuring work of mine that I should draw your attention to. First up is FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES: REAL LOCATIONS IN CRIME FICTION, a collection of essays and illustrated maps about some of your favorite crime writers and their chosen settings edited by the indefatigable Maxim Jakubowski. New Holland Publishers will release this at the end of September, and the contributor list is pretty noteworthy: Barry Forshaw, Peter Rozovsky, J. Kingston Pierce, Oline Cogdill are among them. I've contributed two pieces: New York as filtered through the work of Lawrence Block, and George Pelecanos's Washington, DC. I haven't seen an advance copy yet, but I know they are in the wild, and supposed to be real objets d'art.

Just published is issue 2 of Needle: A Magazine of Noir, the brainchild of Steve Weddle and John Hornor, and along with pieces by Chris Holm, Ray Banks, Stephen Blackmoore and Frank Bill, it includes my first new short story in a long time. "Mirror Image" had a fairly long road to publication. I wrote the initial draft in the fall of 2005, pretty much in one burst as I was able to write first drafts of short fiction back then (now, not so much...) At the time it was a literary story about a young woman's rather dark exploration of body dysmorphia - a topic I, and I think a great many women, understand all too well - and I sent it to a few such publications, many of whom liked the style but felt something was missing. I let the story gestate and then it became obvious to me what was missing: it needed to be more definitively a crime story, and some restructuring and tweaking made it so.

But the end result still felt like it was burning a hole in my hard drive it wasn't a good fit for the mystery mags, and while the late, lamented MURDALAND gave me some good feedback, it wasn't the right fit for them. I'd revisit the story every few months, still think it had some merit, but what to do? And time marched on and priorities shifted.

Then came Needle, and its first issue, which impressed me greatly. Weddle and Hornor had kindly sent me a complimentary copy earlier this year. Nnot only did the magazine look and feel good, the stories were very high calibre all-round. I wanted to be part of that, and casually mentioned I had a story if they were interested in taking a look. They said sure, send it along. And now "Mirror Image", what I think of as a tale of body dysmorphia noir, is between two covers and available for public consumption. So thanks to Steve and John for giving it a home, and I'll be curious what you all think when you buy a copy of the new issue.

On Don Winslow's Hyper-Charged New Novel SAVAGES

I read many books annually, so that means I don't reread all that much. But for Don Winslow's SAVAGES, I couldn't help but make an exception. The book was, at least for me, the literary equivalent of narcotic stimulants* which I wanted to indulge in several times over. So I know I spent much of the year to date urging people to read it, feeling pleased when others loved the book and engaging in debate with those who weren't so wowed.

How, then, to elucidate what's essentially a visceral HFS** reaction in 800 words? The answer, or at least an attempt at an answer, ran over the weekend in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times. Here's how the piece opens:

I'm of two minds about whether "Savages," Don Winslow's marvelous, adrenaline-juiced roller coaster of a novel, is a rookie reader's best introduction to his work. There's a delicious sense of satisfaction in seeing how Winslow has chiseled his increasingly lean prose to diamond-like precision over the course of 12 novels and fused the themes of "The Power of the Dog" (2005), his epic account of the country's never-ending war on drugs, with the razzmatazz syntax of his surf-detective novel "The Dawn Patrol" (2008) to produce something heady and new. "Savages" is both a departure and a culmination, pyrotechnic braggadocio and deep meditation on contemporary American culture.

All those reasons, however, justify foisting "Savages" into the hands of Winslow unfamiliars. The rationale — mine, anyway — is that if newcomers are sucked in by the fierce narrative velocity and perpetual peppering of aphorism upon biting aphorism, each will realize what Winslow fans have long known and will reach for the writer's back catalog.

Read on for the rest about one of my favorite books of the year, bar none. And you'd better believe I'm having a hard time holding off on reading SATORI, the prequel to Trevanian's SHIBUMI that Winslow wrote and Grand Central is publishing in February, resisting only because, well, February is still a while away.

*which, by the way, I don't indulge in, unless coffee counts as a narcotic.

**I think you can guess the particular profanity-laced acronym in question.

Richard Price Can Now Truly Call Himself a Crime Novelist

So Richard Price will be writing a series of detective novels for Henry Holt under a pen name - Jay Morris - starting in fall 2011. It's the same publisher that John Banville has for his Benjamin Black novels, and Josh Gaylord for his zombie novel AND THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS (as Alden Bell) which kind of makes you wonder if this publishing house is where literary writers go to exercise their genre chops. But with respect to Price, this feels like the right move for him career-wise - and one that I suspect has a lot of folks asking "so what took so long?"

Idle speculation might produce this answer: there have been a lot of changes in Price's life since LUSH LIFE was published to near-universal acclaim in March 2008. He divorced his wife and is now living with the writer Lorraine Adams, who also writes literary fiction with crime elements. He left Gramercy Park and moved to Harlem. Screenplays he was contracted to write, such as an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's novel CHILD 44, haven't panned out, at least publicly. And at almost 61, a certain cost-benefit analysis might kick in about whether it's economically worth it to spend 4-5 years researching and writing a big literary book with crime elements while writing screenplays that never get made (or aren't offered at all, which means they don't end up paying the bills) or to produce a series of crime novels at a one-a-year pace, which it appears Price is on track to do.

In other words, this strikes me as a classic "fuck it" move, in the way that Banville had already decided upon the Benjamin Black trajectory before winning the Booker for The Sea. That he got to taste the fruits of literary success and have an obvious blast writing crime fiction in the vein of his two main influences, Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake and Georges Simenon, meant man planned and both he and God laughed.

Anyway, to say my hopes are high for these books is an understatement, but mostly I wish for two things: that Price keeps his prose loose and stays relaxed (my chief complaint about LUSH LIFE was that it felt too worked over, and didn't have enough room to breathe) and that he can deliver manuscripts on time. I base this on what he told me when I interviewed him around the time LUSH LIFE came out, and brought up that he tended to get behind on work, even screenplays:

Nobody ever hands in anything on time, and when they do, it's probably because it's superficial and they didn't do a good job. It's like construction work; a guy looks at your kitchen, says the job will take two weeks. Three months later he says "Ah, the stuff from Italy didn't come, sorry about that." From the outside, anticipating how it's supposed to go is nice, but there's that saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Now we know Price's pseudonymous plans, but something tells me this time, he won't be deterred from them.

UPDATE: Here's the deal memo from Publishers Marketplace:

Author of Clockers and Freedomland, Richard Price's crime novel under the "transparent pseudonym" Jay Morris, the first in a series about a 40-year-old New York City police detective whose career was nearly derailed by two controversial shootings when he was a member of an anything-goes anti-crime unit in Harlem, now a night-watch sergeant on a case involving the fatal knifing of a young drunk in the bathroom of a Third Avenue pub, to editor at large John Sterling, who edited two other Price novels, fo Holt, for publication in fall 2011, by Lynn Nesbit at Janklow & Nesbit (NA).

Several interesting things about this: first, Price is back with John Sterling, who edited the two other books mentioned in the deal memo, CLOCKERS & FREEDOMLAND (LUSH LIFE was with FSG and edited by Lorin Stein, who has since moved on to take over The Paris Review; SAMARITAN was published by Knopf and edited by Robin Desser, who coincidentally happens to be Lorraine Adams' editor as well); the other is that the Harlem setting makes me think this is a reworking of the big Harlem novel Price mentioned he was working on in interviews last year, restructured so that it would take as much time and produce more steady work and income.

Dark Passages: Real Estate Noir

My newest column for the Los Angeles Times looks specifically at Justin Peacock's new novel BLIND MAN'S ALLEY and at the seeming dearth of crime fiction centered around real estate. Here's how the piece opens:

Though I write for this West Coast newspaper, I live in New York City. That means, like a lot of dwellers of the five boroughs, I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about real estate, whether griping about too-high rents for tiny apartments or the erection of another steel-heavy skyscraper in my neighborhood. Walking underneath scaffolding, zigzagging through hastily constructed passageways and watching the work of those awe-inspiring cranes brings to mind other salient points about the making of buildings: construction delays, unfortunate accidents and financial mismanagement. And all of those ingredients seem a natural for mysteries and thrillers.

Indeed, the inner workings of real estate deals provide juicy plot points for many a crime novel, but somehow writers seem to shy away from making this business their primary focus — or readers don't gravitate toward this particular professional subject...[b]u another entry into the miniscule "real estate noir" category, however, might stand the best chance of opening up this wonderfully byzantine world to a larger audience, largely because the author frames this world in the context of other career paths well-familiar to the crime fiction reader: lawyers, journalists, and cops."

Read on for the rest, and what other books should I have mentioned that deal with this very New York-centric topic?

Before Stieg Larsson, There was Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo

With the hype and phenomenal success of the Millenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, a lot of news outlets have been asking the natural but obvious question: who's the next big breakout star? Is he or she Scandinavian? Or from some other country? Or not writing thrillers? But too many of these pieces seem to think the Scandinavian crime wave began in the past decade or so and don't reference Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, whose 10-book "Story of Crime" novels featuring the ordinary, dour but always fascinating detective Martin Beck not only paved the way for Scandinavian crime writers, but for the genre as a whole.

I've wanted to write about Sjowall & Wahloo for many months, ever since Vintage started reissuing the books with striking new covers (cribbed from the UK editions, published by HarperCollins) and introductions from notable types like Henning Mankell, Val McDermid and Michael Connelly explaining how each book and the whole arc merits close reading. Then I found out for myself starting with ROSEANNA, working my way through the tenth and final book THE TERRORISTS, which is reissued today. And that book, in particular, seems a natural segue to Larsson's books - it's the most overtly political, the most pointed, the most rooted in frustration at the system and outrage over how women are abused and tossed aside by system, and by men.

There's much more detail in my essay, which runs today at The Daily Beast, but the quote that really hit home how Sjowall & Wahloo influenced Larsson comes near the end of the series, when Beck is told this: "Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last 10 years. You can't stop or steer that avalanche on your own. It just increases. That's not your fault."

(For further reading, see the Guardian's profile of Maj Sjowall, still alive at age 75, and Tom Nolan's 2009 Sjowall/Wahloo essay in the WSJ.)

The Criminalist: Mysteries for the Teenage Set

At the Barnes & Noble Review, I delve into crime and mystery fiction for young adult readers, discovering that there are some real gems in the mix but even so, there could be so many more. I certainly hope so. In any case, here's how the piece opens:

One of the things that has puzzled me the most in my years of serious mystery reading is why there are relatively few standout books geared specifically for middle grade and young adult readers. Consider that more than 1500 genre novels are published each year for grownups, and that many of those avid readers cut their teeth reading Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie (who wasn't writing for children, but whose prose style and subject matter often appeals to that group.) As they grew older, these readers gravitated towards the creepily suspenseful work by Lois Duncan, Ellen Raskin (her 1978 novel The Westing Game is an indescribable pleasure) and Caroline B. Cooney, who is still producing strong novels like 2009's If The Witness Lied.

Even big-name writers have moved into young adult territory, with mixed success: John Grisham's Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer is more entertaining than it has a right to be (even if Theo seems to share more personality attributes with an older generation) while Carl Hiaasen's eco-themed Hoot nicely captured a middle-school protagonist.  But what teen novels are out there that best reflect pre-teen and adolescent culture as it stands today?

It turns out, after some deep digging and recommendations from trusted sources, there are a number of wonderful recently published books that deserve a wider readership. But before I turn my attention to those, I should mention my favorite young adult mystery writer, Nancy Werlin. Her books offer strong plotting, multi-faceted characters and a keen eye for social issues that speak directly to her readers. At her best, as with the National Book Award nominee for The Rules of Survival and Edgar-Award winner The Killer's Cousin, she's among the best writers of the crime genre, period....

Read on for the rest, and to see which books I think live up to billing.

Dark Passages: Writers Lost & Found

My newest column for the Los Angeles Times takes a close look at HAILEY'S WAR by Jodi Compton, her first book in several years. Only a small number of people read her earlier books, but I was one them and thought she had great talent. As such I'm very glad to see her back publishing books again, and this new book more than lives up to earlier promise. Here's how the piece opens:

The comeback: Publishing as a whole is affected by this particular scourge, but genre fiction in particular suffers from this plight in the most obvious way. It's when a writer appears, sometimes with considerable fanfare, with a new series, garnering an audience with each successive volume. The problem is, if the audience isn't big enough, or the money paid out to said writer doesn't produce expected sales, the publisher may cancel the series after just two or three books (or, in truly worst-case scenarios, after just one). Another company may pick up the slack for a variable advance, or the writer strikes out with new territory, often under a pen name. Or in many instances, the writer simply disappears, his or her career over.

Lately, a handful of writers have sidestepped the "whatever happened to…?" parlor game by publishing new books years after they were last heard from, book-wise....

Jodi Compton, however, may be the most stubborn of the "lost and found writers." She has a new publisher, and a new series but has kept her real name and the same authorial voice, more or less. Her first series, cut short after two books, featured Minnesota police detective Sarah Pribek, whose ability to keep up with her male peers, inscrutable personality and complicated relationship with her husband (and fellow cop) Michael made her seem prickly, but all the more winning. If Compton's plotting in "The 37th Hour" (2005) and "Sympathy Between Humans" (2006) faltered in places, her treatments of setting and characterization more than compensated.

But inscrutable heroines are more in vogue, thanks to a wonderful little fictional phenom named Lisbeth Salander. Something tells me that if Hailey Cain, the 23-year-old protagonist of Compton's new novel "Hailey's War" (Shaye Areheart: 286 pp., $22.99) and Salander ever met, they'd circle around, size each other up and accept some grudging mutual respect that might, with a lot of time, develop into mutual loyalty. Woe to those who think Hailey is some knockoff; as Compton makes clear very early on, she is a creature very much of her own making, singing a metaphorical tune few, if any, can hear...

Read on for the rest.

About Time for Some Sunday Smatterings

Still sporadic, expect to be so for the foreseeable future. But links, they do pile up...

At DailyFinance this weekend, I wrote about Rick Riordan and his extremely successful Percy Jackson novels for children, and what it might take to transform him from the publishing phenomenon he is now to a wider, more cultural phenomenon.

Otto Penzler owns 58,000 first editions, splendidly on display in his Connecticut home, but he emphasizes to the NYT that he's "not a rich guy." Okay, I'm surprised that was part of the story's headline, because the whole point of the Edgar-award winning THE LINEUP was to raise extra capital to keep the Mysterious Bookshop afloat, and I was glad to see the recent British thrillers auction at Swann brought in some good money, especially for the Ian Fleming first editions.

Peter Temple was a surprise winner of the Miles Franklin Prize for his newest crime novel TRUTH, which has the Guardian wondering if a crime novel can win the Booker. Sure, if one is submitted, but with publishers restricted to only two titles per year, the likelihood is pretty slim - and is also why CHILD 44, when it was longlisted a couple of years ago, raised proverbial eyebrows.

On the review front: Oline Cogdill enjoys Craig Johnson's new mystery, while Margaret Cannon has her Globe & Mail roundup, Adam Woog did his for the Seattle Times earlier in the month, as did the Times' Marcel Berlins, while Randy Michael Signor does the same this weekend for the Chicago Sun-Times, as does Jake Kerridge for the Telegraph and John O'Connell for the Guardian. Maureen Corrigan picked thrilling summer reads for NPR, and Patrick Anderson is crazy for Alan Furst. 

That said, I can absolutely see Adam Ross's crime-ish debut MR. PEANUT racking up or being nominated for a slew of awards. He talked with the Nashville Scene and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the making of this inventive, Escher-like book.

Nick Bantock, whose GRIFFIN AND SABINE novels were all over the bestseller lists in the early 1990s, is exhibiting his body of work in the Denver area.

Let the David Mitchell media circus begin in earnest in the United States! His wonderful new novel THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET is out on Tuesday, and the NYT Magazine features a lengthy piece on Mitchell and his life & work by Wyatt Mason.

In 2007, literary agent Harriet Wasserman closed up her shop and disappeared. As the Daily Beast reports, it has a lot to do with stealing royalty money from some awfully prestigious clients.

John Updike's literary archive is full of treasure troves, as Sam Tanenhaus discovers and reports back on.

Someone had to write a hit piece on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, so why not Allen Barra? Meanwhile, a Daily Mail reporter meets the 84-year-old Harper Lee, on the condition that there is to be no talk of the book - ever.

And finally, the new mayor of Reykjavik is kind of awesome.