Rocky Road to Dublin Features in Sherlock Holmes

I Have A Thing

Check out http://www.powderburnflash.com/?q=node/378 for latest flash fiction from Irish crime fiction writer James M McGowan

John Connolly, Lee Child, Carol O'Connell, Otto Penzler at Fiction Center, New York, Wed Nov 11th

Mercantile Library Center for Fiction in NY City hosts a crime fiction evening moderated by Otto Penzler on Wed 11th Nov 2009 at 6.30.

A great recurring character in a series you love becomes an old friend. You learn about their strange quirks and their haunted pasts and root for them every time they face danger. But where do some of the most fascinating sleuths in the mystery and thriller world really come from?

In the anthology, The Lineup, Otto Penzler has gathered the best crime writers of today to tell the stories behind the detectives they've created and we're bringing some of them to the Center.

John Connolly was born in Dublin, Ireland and is a contributing writer to The Irish Times. His first novel, Every Dead Thing, was published in 1999, and introduced the character of Charlie Parker who has been featured in seven of Connolly's novels. He is also the author of several other books including Bad Men.

Carol O'Connell is the author of eleven books, ten featuring Kathy Mallory, most recently Bone by Bone, and a stand-alone Judas Child. She lives in New York City.

Lee Child has written thirteen novels featuring drifter Jack Reacher, including most recently Gone Tomorrow. He is also the editor of the anthology, Killer Year.

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, and the editor of many mystery anthologies, including The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, for which he won an Edgar Award. He lives in New York.

Hard Case Crime Night Wednesday, October 28th at 7pm

Hard Case Crime Night with Peter Blauner, Russell Atwood and Charles Ardai
Wednesday, October 28th at 7pm, Center for Fiction, New York

Hard Case Crime is a publishing house dedicated to bringing back the entertainment, suspense and excitement of the golden age of paperback crime novels. This event will feature three of their best writers.

Peter Blauner won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for Slow Motion Riot. His subsequent books include the New York Times bestseller The Intruder and Slipping Into Darkness.

Russell Atwood is a former managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Losers Live Longer is his second Payton Sherwood mystery and is set against the seedy backdrop of the Lower East Side.

"Charles Ardai" is the alias of award-winning mystery writer Richard Aleas. He is also the co-creator of Hard Case Crime.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America

Crips and Bloods: Made in America, Directed by Stacy Peralta, Produced by Baron Davis, DVD, PBS Independent Lens, 94 minutes.

“Part of the mechanics of oppressing people is to pervert them to the extent that they become their own oppressors.” - Kumasi, 2009.

This Independent Lens production for PBS is a documentary, a sound track, a sociological and historical review, a vivid dissection of the murder that young black men carve through their own community.
This film is also an attempt to act as an adjunct to the peace and reconciliation movements in LA founded and run by ex-gang members. Listening to these articulate and reflective gang members it is sobering to assess the waste of talent and potential apart from the misery behind the 15,000 deaths over the last 40 years in LA County.

The fundamental question of why the internecine feud between the Crips and Bloods has gone untreated or unchecked is addressed in the movie. They are not white or rich, basically. The irony of Blacks killing other Blacks who share the same sidewalks, strip malls, poverty, neglect, urban decay, stigmatization and color is dissected although remains baffling.

One cogent explanation is provided by the 62 year old Kumasi, an original Slauson gang member (they used fists rather than Uzis) “Part of the mechanics of oppressing people is to pervert them to the extent that they become their own oppressors.”

Kumasi has spent 18 years in gaol – he is a revelation – passionate, articulate, forceful, enunciating the oppression and dismay with a voice made for paying attention to, with a timbre made for radio or TV that you could listen to for hours.

In one scene when he recounts how the violence was precipitated in Watts in the 1960s he remarks that “Every day he's (police, whites, the man) feeding me a spoonful of hatred. Every day that's my diet a spoonful of hatred.” Not surprisingly it's going to erupt somewhere and it did in the 1965 Watts' riots and in1992 after the Rodney King trial.

This documentary traces the genesis of the Crips and Bloods from the time of the disintegration of organized black power and civil rights organization after the murder or incarceration of every influential Black leader - Malcom X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King for example.

The territorial limits on Blacks (enforced with manic determination by the racist LA police) fostered a mind set of claiming and protecting territory within the segregated area by various local youths. It consisted of fist fights often at set times – everyone knew you had an appointment so you had to make sure you were there. There were almost no guns or lethal weapons.

After the optimism of the Black Power period was quashed the gangs were re-initiated but this time they were more deadly. The Crips evolved from the Slausons. The Bloods (a name that black soldiers called themselves in Vietnam) established themselves as the rival force to the Crips and black on black murder became the de facto norm.

Ironically the rival gang members were dying by the hundreds every year defending blocks where they were confined by the LAPD. The 'enemy' was not perceived as the establishment, the ruling class, the government, the police – the enemy was the fellow deprived Blacks living in adjacent blocks with the same paucity of schooling, skills and opportunities.

The main aim of the film makers was to start a debate and close the gang warfare down, to highlight the discrepancy between 15,000 African American killing each other and what the reaction would be if affluent white adolescents starting killing each other in such numbers in Beverly Hills.

Forest Whitaker who narrates the film made the valid comparison that the war in Northern Ireland which claimed approx 3,600 deaths (see the Cain Project) in the same time period prompted major initiatives, Nobel prize winners, disarmament and major funding initiatives but nothing of even remote urgency happened in LA.

The main initiatives even now are coming from ex gang members through education and dialog and this movie attempts to bolster this work by producing a cogent, artistic and urgent call to reverse the tide of remorseless murder. One short segement features the mothers of young men killed on both sides, face to camera, and the names of their sons scrolling past. Most are crying, all are grieving - and don't forget there are 15,000 other mothers in one small area of LA County.

The gangs were made in America, the Crips and Bloods were made in America, the poverty, police brutality, white supremacy and oppression were made in America. It is time that justice was made in America.

Dominick Dunne Dies at 83

Dominick John Dunne (October 29, 1925 - August 26, 2009) came from a gifted Irish-American Catholic family in Connecticut. His early career as a TV producer and member of the glitterati imploded at age 50 after his divorce and coincided with the end of his lucrative career in show business.

After sequestering himself in an isolated cottage for six months he refashioned himself as a writer and then later as a true crime writer after his daughter was murdered by her estranged boyfriend. The accuser got four years for manslaughter instead of a longer sentence which a murder conviction would warrant. Dunne objected loudly in court at the sentence and subsequently derailed the career of the judge in the case.

Like many parents he was outraged by the way victims of crime were treated and realized he could have an impact through his writing. Before the murder of his daughter he freely admits he cared less about the criminal justice system or its workings.

He subsequently wrote a fierce account of the trial for Vanity Fair and became the defining voice of that magazine for many years. He also defined how a new generation of writers would consider true crime reporting and many tried to capture his level of passion and elan. His awakening to the justice system however focused on celebrity crime like the Menendez Brothers, OJ Simpson and Phil Spector rather than how the general population interacted with the criminal justice system.

The documentary After The Party (2008) was a critical success and is a major insight into how he viewed himself as a child and a man. The film is full of pathos and courage - he tried to atone for various failures in the course of the documentary and admitted his personal and professional mistakes.

See the official website for more details.

The Homicide Report

The Homicide Report is an experiment by the LA Times to act as a counterbalance to the glamourous and sensational true crime coverage in the tabloids and TV. The FBI promulgated the out-of-control spectre of black on white (female) crime even after crime levels fell off dramatically in the 1990s. (Remember FBI estimations of 200 serial killers roaming America?).

TV shows reinforce this stereotype as do the multi-million selling True Crime books which ignore the reality that the majority of crime across America is perpetrated by young urban poor Hispanic and Black males on young urban poor Hispanic and Black males.

The Homicide Report addresses this imbalance in perception and manufactured fear by outlining each death in LA with the unadorned details that are so compelling and gruesome as you scan through them.

Death Becomes Them

The current issue of Newsweek has an essay by senior editor, Malcolm Jones on this subject.

Jones recalls that in 1945 Edmund Wilson wrote a scathing put-down of detective stories titled “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd” – a ‘snide way of saying crime fiction was worthless.’

Jones feels that Wilson would not do so now (except in Ireland – maybe!) because ‘writers such as James Ellroy, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Donald Westlake, Walter Mosley, Laura Lippman, James Salis, Megan Abbott and George Pelecanos have managed to infuse crime novels with a quality of writing not seen since the days of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.’

The crossover to crime fiction by literary authors may have started with William Faulkner (Sanctuary) and Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), continued by Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy and the up to date examples of Denis Johnson (Nobody Move) and Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice). John Banville (Booker Prize winner) not mentioned in the article (US bias) but he would be another example of the crossover.

Jones reflects that when literary fiction authors write crime/noir fiction they may not be as authentic as the true greats of crime fiction. He gives several examples of this including Mailer, Pynchon and Johnson. So no one is safe!

Jones maintains that because of so much exposure to crime drama, true crime and cross over authors joining the crime fiction writing camp the distinction between literary and crime fiction is very blurred and indeed he concludes that noir isn’t a genre any longer!

This issue of Newsweek also has other essays such as True Crime: The Roots of an American Obsession by Walter Mosley, The Haunting by James Ellroy and The Manson Murders at 40 by Vincent Bugliosi (Author of Helter Skelter – the biggest true crime seller to date).

Panic Attack Book Launch

Panic Attack, Jason Starr's 12th book was launched Aug 9th at Otto Penzler's Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. Otto is the kingpin of crime editing and publishing. He is the series editor for the annual "Best American Crime Writing" and a wide variety of other series and anthologies. Joyce Carol Oates and James Ellroy are friends. Irish writers who have been welcomed and read there include Ken Bruen, John Connolly and Declan Hughes.

Jason in the Q&A showed that he was open, self-deprecating and a quick thinker. He talked about collaborating with Ken Bruen on three books (a fourth is in the planning stage), written collaboratively across the Atlantic and across the web. He recounted the fun they had writing chapters and scenes and submitting to each other. He recalled Ken walking up to him at a book launch for one of their books and saying that's a great line you wrote there and Jason replying you wrote that! Then after a brief silence Ken saying – I know!

Their editor for those books was in the audience, Charles Ardai, author and publisher of Hard Case Crime, a recent but very significant force within noir crime fiction publishing. (Most of the Hard Case Crime covers however objectify women and glorify the women/violence fantasy, a very regrettable situation).

Jason told the audience he has resisted efforts to write a series of books with a recurring character because he likes the novelty of starting with a new set of players each time; that he gets bored easily so he prefers to avoid series and that he is very stubborn (so the more people (editors probably!) say it to him the more resistant he is).

He prefers to write psychological based crime fiction and he finds that his books are tending to get longer. In Panic Attack he uses Multiple Points of View, which is difficult to effect without losing the reader – a capital offence.

He is a recent convert to crime fiction. When he did an MFA in Creative Writing he didn't know there was any other way to write apart from the 'literary' approach so when he was introduced to crime fiction he was amazed by its power and inherent skill (James M Cain, Jim Thompson for example).

His approach to writing is scene-based rather than character based as opposed to George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly who both feel that all books (at least theirs) are character driven. There was some banter in the audience about who these guys Pelecanos and Connelly were!

Many crime fiction writers were at the book launch including Daniel Judson, Wallace Stroby,Megan Abbot, Russell Atwood, Alison Gaylin, and Persia Walker.

The award winning film maker and writer Tim McCann was also at the launch filming for a feature length documentary on crime fiction writers (so far, Jason Starr, Lawrence Block, Megan Abbott and Duane Swierczynski), basically examining their life and process.