Who are your favourite literary sleuths? Sherlock Holmes is a perennial favourite, but after that the field opens right up. The Guardian has come up with its top 10 literary sleuths. The list is sure to provoke debate among crime fiction’s loyal fans. Compare it to some others and you begin to appreciate how broad the field is. If lists aren’t your thing, try this alphabet.
Taken broadly, this most ancient of genres arguably traces its origins as far back as the Bible, but the first undisputed tale of detection is found in the Arabian Nights, in a story called ‘The Three Apples’. The genre’s Golden Age is considered to be the early 20th century, although it still boasts some remarkable writers, including one of the genre’s foremost contemporary practitioners, Henning Mankell. Earlier this year, Andrew Nette took us on a tour of Australian pulp detective and crime fiction.
Learn more about the genre here.
Countries whose governments are powerless to some degree or another are called failed states. But even in countries that don’t qualify as failed states, the ability of governments to provide basic services is often severely compromised. Thus, people are often forced to provide their own. This is called the shadow economy, and a recent Foreign Policy magazine report claims that the global shadow economy is worth $10 trillion a year – about one-sixth of the global economy and about equal with the Chinese economy. The report calls the shadow economy the fastest-growing economy in the world.
The shadow economy can have a real impact on the real economy. Take Greece, a particularly salient example Transparency International recently said of Greece, “The black economy is estimated to be as much as a third of Greece’s gross national product with tax evasion costing upwards of US$20 billion a year.” This represents just under half of the Greek government’s deficit.
The shadow economy is also a place where organised crime thrives. Today, The Age reports that about US$2 trillion of criminal money is laundered worldwide every year, according to the United Nations. In his 2009 book McMafia, tracing the outlines of globalised organised crime, Guardian journalist Misha Glenny estimated that organised crime accounts for about 15% of the global economy – or about US$9 trillion a year.
To coincide with the screening of the screen adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas' novel The Slap, the first episode of which aired on the ABC last week, we’re republishing a piece by Kris Mrksa. It was originally published under the title, ‘The Truth in 42 Minutes’ on this site in November last year. Kris is one of the screenwriters to have adapted The Slap for television.
One of the things that first attracted me to script writing was that there could be no right or wrong. A TV script might be boring, vapid, clichéd or pretentious, but not incorrect. Or so I thought, until I joined the Underbelly team.
You know that thing it says at the start, “based on events”? Well, the Underbelly producers take that very seriously. Huge wedges of photocopied research material soon started to arrive at my home in express post packs, and I was expected not only to absorb it, but turn it into drama.
Readers are accustomed to literature that takes liberties with real characters, recasting them in fanciful and speculative roles, but their square-eyed opposite numbers are far less tolerant. Indeed, most of the criticism of Underbelly focussed on its historical accuracy. Lapses were pounced upon with glee, as a sign that the show had sold out.
Interestingly, the people who have the most cause to be offended by the liberties that Underbelly takes – the crooks themselves – are usually very forgiving. I also co-wrote The King, a telemovie about the life of Graham Kennedy, and I reckon I’m far more likely to be whacked by one of Gra Gra’s former gag writers than I am by any of the drug peddling scumbags I’ve depicted in Underbelly.
After The King premiered there was an avalanche of criticism, not focussed on its artistic merits, but on its accuracy. Kennedy was depicted as drinking brown spirits, while the truth is that he preferred white. He was shown driving to Noeline Brown’s place in a Rolls Royce, while in fact he’d traded the Roller in for a Mercedes by that time.
Such crimes against ‘The Truth’ deserve to be exposed in the popular press, and they were. Repeatedly. Yet there were practical explanations for these outrageous lapses. Clear fluid reads as water on the screen, while brown liquid says booze. And we could only afford a limited number of vintage luxury cars, unlike the King of TV himself.
Turning real lives into an hour or two of commercial television is a wrestle, and compromise is inevitable. But if liberties are taken they are more likely to be due to something boring like the budget bottom-line than a grubby writer’s desire to sex the story up.
Right now I’m working on a TV adaptation of The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas’ world conquering novel; a book which aroused passionate feelings among the literati. The characters aren’t real of course, so Hector and Harry won’t be coming round to my place to rough me up. But I do wonder if I’ll ever feel safe in a book shop again.
Kris Mrksa is a Melbourne-based writer and script editor. In the course of a 13-year career he has won many prizes and accolades, including two AFI Awards.
The Wheeler Centre is hosting a series of crime-related events we’re calling Law & Order Week from 7-10 November.
Yesterday was Talk Like a Pirate Day. Coincidentally, it was also the day we uploaded the video/podcast of a Wheeler Centre event last week featuring Canadian journalist Jay Bahadur. Bahadur is the author of Deadly Waters, a look at the world of Somali pirates that describes an anarchic world of high-stakes drama against a backdrop of poverty and lawlessness. Piracy is an ancient form of illegitimate wealth-creation. By targeting Red Sea and Arabian Gulf merchant shipping, Horn of Africa piracy can be extremely lucrative, but it also threatens shipping routes and is driving up the cost of insurance.
If you want to talk like a real pirate, as opposed to a cartoon, you can forget your “hearties” and “shiver me timbers”. Instead, you’d be better off memorising phrases like, “Istaag ama waan ku tooganayaa!”, which is Somali for “Stop or I will shoot!” or “Kam beh reejaal bilmarkab?”, Yemeni for “How many men are on this ship?” Here’s more on talking like a real pirate from Wired magazine.
(Click to watch video.)
In 2008, young Canadian graduate Jay Bahadur was working a market research job, aching to become a journalist, when – according to his Wikipedia page – he received some telling advice from experienced journalists. He was told to skip journalism school and to work instead as a freelancer in “crazy places”. The advice might well have been unconventional but, as fortune does tend to favour the brave, Bahadur ended up being the right person in the right place at the right time. He spent months in Somalia, principally in Puntland, an autonomous area of northeastern Somalia with a population of four million, more than half of whom are nomadic. Puntland is at the centre of Somali piracy, which in recent years has grown to represent a threat to one of the world’s major international shipping routes.
Somalia is by almost unanimous international reckoning a failed state. For two decades, Somalia has had no central government. Indeed, the country (a country in name only, split at least 11 different ways) has topped the Failed States Index for the last two years running.
Now based back in Canada and running a citizen-journalism website, Journalist Nation, Bahadur has since gone on to publish, at the ripe old age of 27, a groundbreaking book on one of the world’s craziest businesses in one of the world’s craziest places. The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World documents a deeply misunderstood criminal subculture in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
In Bahadur’s book, many Somali pirates – there’s an estimated 1000 of them, split into five gangs – are revealed to be ex-fishermen. Their living was decimated by international shipping vessels illegally dumping toxic waste into Somali waters or exploiting Somalia’s lack of a navy to fish Somalian fishing grounds to the point of exhaustion. Instead, they’ve discovered a far more lucrative trade: hijacking container ships and oil and chemical tankers, sometimes hundreds of miles from the Somali coast, for ransoms of several millions of dollars – leading to a spike in the cost of conducting international trade and a massive international military response. Here’s a report on Somali piracy by Bahadur, published in The Guardian.
Jay Bahadur will be a guest of the Wheeler Centre on Tuesday.
The plot thickens surrounding the prospects of a fourth instalment in the Millennium trilogy of crime novels by the late Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson (previously reported here). Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week, Larsson’s friend and colleague Kurdo Baksi estimated that a partially-finished manuscript that Larsson intended to be the fifth novel in the series is about 70 per cent complete.
Image by Tantillus/Flickr
As many fans of the trilogy will already know, controversy has surrounded Larsson’s legacy. Larsson’s long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson and Larsson’s estate – his father and brother – have been locked in a bitter dispute over the fortune generated by the success of the trilogy, which was published after the author’s death of a heart attack. Larsson died without leaving a will, meaning that his estate reverted to family as he and Gabrielsson weren’t legally married.
The report of Baksi’s comments contradicts comments made by Gabrielsson herself. Speaking in May at a New York bookstore appearance, Gabrielsson estimated the book at just 200 pages and asked, “Is it really right to become a ghost writer, even if it’s [ghostwriting for] your late partner?” Despite talking prospects of another novel down, Gabrielsson seems to see some value in holding onto the unfinished manuscript. It’s believed Larsson’s estate offered Gabrielsson her share of the flat the couple co-owned in exchange for the computer in which the unfinished novel is stored. Gabrielsson refused the offer.
Baksi himself is the author of a memoir of his friendship with Larsson called, appropriately, Stieg Larsson My Friend.
“In constituency, it’s most similar to a prison riot: what will happen is that, usually in the segregation unit, nobody will ever know exactly, but a rumour will emanate that someone has been hurt in some way. There will be some form of moral outrage that takes its expression in self-interested revenge. There is no higher purpose, you just have a high volume of people with a history of impulsive behaviour, having a giant adventure.
“Of course, the difference is that, in a prison, liberty has already been lost. So something pretty serious must have happened in order for young people on the streets to be behaving as though they have already been incarcerated. As another criminologist, Professor John Pitts, has said: ‘Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future. There is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.’”
Taken from Zoe Williams' column in The Guardian.
In today’s New Matilda, Mark Fletcher asks, has News Limited done anything wrong? For those looking for a neat summary of why the Hackgate story is such a big deal, not just in the UK but for the media in general, look no further than a piece by the Columbia Journalism Review. We recommend reading the whole piece, but here are the key points:
“For starters, executives, editors, and reporters at News Corp.’s UK unit have: bribed the police; illegally hacked thousands of people’s phones, including a 13-year-old then-missing murder victim’s; tampered with evidence while the victim was still missing. They interfered with a second murder investigation; misled police and Parliament, repeatedly, when questioned about these activities; knowingly employed an ax-murder suspect who had been convicted and imprisoned for planting cocaine on an innocent woman in a divorce case; paid millions of dollars to victims explicitly in exchange for their silence; paid large sums to former employees after they had been convicted of crimes committed at the behest of News Corporation employees; continued to pay for convicted former employees’ high-powered lawyers. It has further been revealed that a senior News International executive deleted millions of emails in an ‘apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry’; hid the contents of a top journalist’s desk after he was arrested; stuffed documents into trash bags and took them away as detectives came into the office to investigate; put the scandal’s lead police investigator, whose inquiry was a bad joke, on the News Corp. payroll with a plum columnist job.”
How did the constabulary react? The CJR piece says the police “stuffed thousands of pages of convicted hacker Glenn Mulcaire’s notes in plastic bags, leaving them unexamined (or at least uncataloged) for years; did so while insisting publicly, and before Parliament, that the scandal was limited to two people and, crucially, that a full investigation had been performed; hired Neil Wallis, who was News of the World’s deputy editor while the crimes were committed, to advise the police on how to handle their own PR problems stemming from the hacking scandal; Wallis ferried information back to News Corp.; the police notified just a handful of people that their phones might have been hacked despite having evidence that in fact thousands had been; concealed their payments to Wallis for a year. Meanwhile, top police officials dined repeatedly with News International executives during the investigation.” Hence the resignations.
The British government has come under pressure too. This is why: “Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron hired the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who oversaw a newsroom in which criminal activity was commonplace, to be a top aide, despite warnings that Coulson was personally implicated in the scandal; Labour leader Ed Miliband hired a Murdoch journalist to be top flack, and he promptly told the party to tiptoe around the scandal; regulators came very close to approving a massive TV deal for News Corp. that would have furthered its stranglehold on Britain’s private media, all while the scandal was continuing to worsen.”
The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published an editorial defending its parent company, which the American Journalism Review has labelled “misguided”.
(Click to watch video.)
He’s written 24 novels and created two of crime and mystery fictions best-known contemporary heroes, Harry Bosch and Micky Haller. In Australia alone, as of early 2011, he’d sold 1.25 million books. His novels now sell an average of 85,000 copies. He’s Michael Connelly, a colossus of his – and indeed any – literary genre, and in this video he’s in conversation with the Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, Michael Williams.
How did it all begin? “I got interested in crime when I was 16 and I was witness to part of a crime, and I spent a night in a police station dealing with detectives… After that night I started reading crime news and newspapers, I started reading non-fiction books about crime, and then I got to fiction.” Connelly attributes the start of his literary crime obsession to Raymond Chandler, whom he came across at university: “Something about reading those books was like an epiphany or a light going off.” He read all of Chandler’s novels in little more than a fortnight, and a career was born.
The Wheeler Centre, in partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival, will be hosting UK film critic Adrian Wootton in five events, in one of which he’ll be speaking about Raymond Chandler on the silver screen.
This is an extract of a forthcoming essay by Gillian Terzis to be published in issue six of Kill Your Darlings, available in July.
Recently Anonymous, a decentralised collective of hackers and activists, has been everywhere – getting headlines for crashing the websites of governments and corporations alike – but also nowhere. Like an insouciant wart on the foot of institutional power, Anonymous can be irritating, occasionally painful and primed for repeat visits.
Their origins are similarly dubious. But we know that Anonymous is a loose coalition of members spawned from the swamps of 4chan (www.4chan.org): a cluster of bulletin boards where images are regularly uploaded, edited and re-edited by users, all of whom are anonymous. It is the Freudian Id on crack. It’s the place where memes – ideas in the form of a photo, video website, hashtag or phrase that evolve over time and are disseminated via the internet – are made, social mores are transgressed and brains are broken for the ‘lulz’. A corruption of LOL, lulz is the pure, unadulterated joy that comes from knowing that someone somewhere will be mortified by what you’ve uploaded. A hilarious post will unleash a torrent of replies, each one a show of brinkmanship. This is not unexpected: what is the point of social networking if not to constantly establish and re-establish one’s rank?
It was from this morass that Anonymous was spawned: an online community with no defined geographic centre and no formal command structure, although there are less than a handful of members who comprise the decision-making cabal. While Anonymous shares some similarities with 4chan – namely its focus on providing irreverent entertainment – it is increasingly associated with involvement in political and social movements. I wonder what is more astonishing: the fact that this army of trolls has transformed into a demimonde hacktivist movement, or that the movement has the capacity to redefine conventional models of activism.
As Anonymous does the majority of its protesting online, it’s assumed the majority of Anonymous supporters are teenagers and IT professionals with a lot of leisure time. Given the illegal nature of hacktivism, even my close Anon friends are unwilling to reveal too much. The reality is that anybody can count themselves among Anonymous’ rank-and-file, as long as you are in agreement with the objectives determined by the group’s hive mind.
Cover of the sixth issue of Kill Your Darlings, in bookstores in July
I’ve found this hive mind mentality fascinating and repulsive in equal measure. In 4chan, it can generate fleeting cultural phenomena – Rickrolling, cat pictures, for example – and reveal a lot about human behaviour (casual perpetuations of homophobia and misogyny are rife). But in Anonymous, the group mentality mirrors that of real-life activist groups: it is politically idealistic but capable of being focused; its livelihood under siege from constant infighting. But there are some significant differences. For instance, hacktivism requires scant physical effort or genuine political engagement. It’s a bit like tweeting about Q&A.
That said, what intrigues me the most about Anonymous is how quickly the mood vacillates between anarchy and order. Enter the Anonymous internet relay chat channel and you can witness – in real time – the capacity of the hive mind to coalesce fruitfully. This tends to happen when Anons are planning a massive-scale DDoS attack distributed denial-of-service attacks. Often, there’s a lot of juvenile name-calling – but there have also been coups and counter-coups by Anons disenfranchised by the decision-making process. When disorder threatens to derail operations, members are reminded of the two unifying concepts that give Anonymous its potency: unwavering belief in the freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange information. In a world where decisions are routinely made on the basis of information and misinformation, where moral hazard cordons off the truly powerful from the rest of us saps, information is king.But online, everyone in theory can be a commentator; no one is quite who they say they are and the rules are constantly in flux. It’s a virtual free-for-all for information. And that’s exactly how Anonymous wants it to stay. It’s as simple as wanting to ensure the freedoms we enjoy online are replicated in the real world.
The LulzSec Twitter avatar
They’ve been described as “a loose, decentralised group of like-minded computer users, who are almost impossible to track down”, a vigilante group born of the online gaming community determined to humiliate the corporate and government organisations they resent, not out of altruism but out of a malicious persecution complex, according to some, and according to others, an anarchic sense of fun. They have names like Anonymous and LulzSec (links between the two groups are disputed), they sometimes wear Guy Fawkes masks in public, and they are what happens when hacking tools are democratised.
For 50 days, the world watched as LulzSec, described as “a small group of between six and 10 people, with a clear leader (Sabu) and enforcer (Kayla), with a number of hangers-on”, claimed some of the highest profile websites in the world. First they attacked the Sony website, ostensibly as retribution for Sony’s attack on the jailbreak community. Then they went for Nintendo and a bunch of other gaming companies. The United States Senate website was next. But LulzSec was just getting started, showing up their victims' websites for their woefully inadequate security: they claimed the scalps of the CIA and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Fox, the US TV show X Factor, and public broadcaster PBS were all victims. LulzSec took joy in their achievements, and so did some of us – their Twitter account has 260,000 followers.
Then it all began to unravel. An Essex teenager rumoured to have autism was arrested. A lone-wolf hacker called the Jester took down the Lulz website. The Guardian published the full chatroom logs. Finally, LulzSec announced it was to disband.
Is this what William Gibson termed, 15 years ago in his novel Idoru, otaku culture? According to Gibson, the otaku is “the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects […] Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.”
Image of a model of a heart via WikiCommons
Three years ago, a man fainted at the international airport of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. When authorities went to his aid, the man, a Turk, said that one of his kidneys had been stolen. The incident sparked an investigation that earlier this year led to the arrest of an Istanbul surgeon, who stands accused of organ-harvesting. The surgeon is part of a larger ring of traffickers that even includes the prime minister of Kosovo, according to police. This ring lures impoverished people from eastern Turkey and central Asia to Pristina, where their organs are surgically removed and sold to wealthy patients for up to $100,000.
A new book by intrepid anthropologist and investigative journalist Scott Carney, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, takes a look at the illicit international economy of body parts (here’s his excellent blog). Carney looks at how the legitimate medical industry has helped spawn the ghastly business. In an essay adapted from the book published in Foreign Policy magazine, Carney suggests the origins of what he calls the red market lie in the altruism that drives the blood donation industry. “Unfortunately, the anonymous, altruistic system has produced unintended consequences,” he writes. “The result is a system whose best intentions create ample opportunities for criminally minded entrepreneurs … In the age of globalization the brokers are adept at exploiting the knowledge and legal gaps between national jurisdictions to arrange just about any sort of organ acquisition, and advances in anti-rejection drugs allow people with widely diverse genetic backgrounds to swap organs. In Romania, Moldova, Turkey, and Egypt, brokers can easily acquire kidneys for $3,000 and sell them for $50,000 or more.” Here’s a longer review of the book.
In the 1940s and 50s, Australian fiction wasn’t so much dominated by names like Patrick White and George Johnston as by Gordon Clive Bleeck, Carter Brown, Don Haring and KT McCall. These pensmiths were the leading lights of a huge pulp fiction industry. It produced countless cheap westerns, science fiction and above all crime novels, printed cheaply with lurid covers and sold at news-stands on the street and in train stations. The crime novels starred private investigators like Larry Kent and Johnny Buchanan, and many were set elsewhere, in keeping with the culture cringe of the time. Wheeler Centre Fellow Andrew Nette follows the trail of the private investigator in Australian crime fiction.
The Pioneers
In 1938, the federal government decided to levy foreign print publications. As a result of this decision, local publishing houses sprang up to fill the void, releasing hundreds of novels a month, including Westerns, racing and boxing stories, science fiction and crime. Hard-boiled and not so hard-boiled PIs became a standard feature of the pulp crime scene that flourished in Australia for two decades thereafter.
The authors are unknown today, despite some selling in the millions in Australia and abroad. Gordon Clive Bleeck wrote over 200 novels, including PI stories, while working full time for NSW Railroads. Carter Brown, the alias of UK immigrant Alan G Yates, is associated with nearly 300 titles.
Cover image courtesy ThrillingDetective.com
Starting off as a hugely popular radio program on the Macquarie Network, the PI Larry Kent inspired a series of novels by Don Haring, an American who lived in Australia for a time, and Queenslander Des R Dunn. Audrey Armitage and Muriel Watkins wrote over 20 novels featuring PI Johnny Buchanan under the pseudonym of KT McCall.
None of these authors would have got a gig on the ABC’s Book Show. They worked fast to meet deadlines. Books were plotted, written and released in a month, for very little financial return. Most of the plots were generic: dames, drinking, bad guys and fist fights, with a healthy dollop of cultural cringe. Many of the stories were set in America, particularly New York.
It was throwaway fiction in every sense, printed on rough paper, featuring lurid cover art that often bore no connection to the story and sold cheaply at news-stands.
The Second Generation
Although many publishing houses continued to churn out books until the seventies, the golden era of Australian pulp fiction lasted only until 1959, when the levy ended and cheaper imports flooded in again.
It wasn’t until Cliff Hardy came along that the PI was rescued from literary obscurity. I recently re-read Peter Corris’s The Dying Trade, the 1980 debut of the now legendary fictional Australian private investigator, Cliff Hardy. A former insurance claims investigator, Hardy is a hard drinker, good with his fists, and has an eye for the ladies. As is de rigueur for jaded gumshoes, the Sydney PI’s life is always in a state of chaos.
Image courtesy PeterCorris.net
In The Dying Trade Hardy is hired by a shifty property developer to discover who’s behind harassing phone calls to the man’s sister. It’s a violent, hard-boiled mystery, the apparent simplicity of the case inverse to the reality of what’s really occurring. No sooner has Hardy taken his first beating than the secrets of the developer’s rich and powerful family come tumbling out.
The title is fitting. Hardy’s profession is tough and dangerous. People get killed, some of them by Hardy. The Dying Trade could equally well describe the state of the private detective in contemporary Australian crime fiction.
Corris paid homage to the masters of the genre, Hammett and Chandler, as well as earlier local pulp authors, without falling into cliché or pastiche. As any author who has tried to write genre crime will tell you, that’s not as easy as it sounds.
Corris also wasn’t afraid to set his stories locally. Not only did Hardy drive a Falcon and roll his own smokes, his geographic and cultural map of Sydney is keenly informed by a very Australian, perhaps pre-economic deregulation sense of class. Hardy may bump up against pimps, thieves, con men and murderers, but in the bigger picture he knows their deeds are small-beer compared to the crimes of the rich.
Australian crime readers love police procedurals. We’re also partial to what, for want of a better term, could be called accidental PIs. There’s Shane Maloney’s political fixer cum PI, Lenny Bartulin’s second-hand book seller cum PI, Leigh Redhead’s stripper cum PI, just to name a few.
The local scene is not totally bereft of the more traditional private detectives. There’s Kerry Greenwood’s female aristocrat Phryne Fisher, Lindy Cameron’s Kit O’Malley, my own partner Angela Savage’s Bangkok-based sleuth Jayne Keeney and, of course, Hardy, still going strong after 35 books.
To make sure I wasn’t missing anyone, I quizzed Karen Chisholm from the fantastic website, Australian Crime Fiction. She turned up one or two others, including the Gemma Lincoln series by Gabrielle Lord, but that’s it.
The Romance of the PI
Why is the private investigator such a popular narrative figure? Pulp culture commentator Woody Haut has tied the fortunes of the PI as a literary and cultural icon in the US to shifts in that country’s politics.
In the thirties, when Hammett was at his peak and Chandler was getting established, official abuses of power following the Great Depression were high in the public’s consciousness. This allowed the PI to have an adversarial relationship to state power and to undertake investigations that questioned how the rich got their money, not just solve crimes for them.
The Cold War paranoia and communist witch-hunts of the fifties made public investigation something to be avoided for fear of being branded subversive. The PI as a mainstay of crime fiction declined accordingly.
Vietnam and Watergate in the seventies gave the PI genre a new lease of life through writers such as Lawrence Block and James Crumley. The economic downturn of the eighties and the growing gap between rich and poor saw further innovations to the PI character introduced by James Lee Bourke, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Walter Mosley.
In Australia, things were different. Economic protectionism, not oppositional politics, was behind the golden age of pulp crime fiction in Australia – and maybe a hint of cultural cringe. Tough libel laws, weak free speech protections and government secrecy have also meant the Australian PI never had the literary legitimacy of its American equivalent. And delving into the affairs of the rich and powerful is no more profitable a profession in Australia than anywhere else. Maybe this explains why the majority of our fictional sleuths, like many of the writers who create them, don’t give up their day jobs.
The author acknowledges the work of Australian pulp fiction historian Toni Johnson-Woods in the preparation of this post.
Image courtesy ThrillingDetective.com
In Holland, he’s referred to as the grootmeester – the grand master. In Australia, he’s Michael who? As a recent feature in The Age highlighted, Michael Robotham is one of those Australian writers who sell much better overseas than they do here. While he usually sells around 50,000 copies of his books in Australia, Robotham says he can expect to sell three or four times that number in Germany alone.
Robotham sets his books mostly in the United Kingdom for commercial reasons. In an essay published today in the Dailies, crime writer and Wheeler Centre Unpublished Manuscript Fellow Andrew Nette shows that Michael Robotham isn’t the first Australian crime writer who’s set his books in other countries to improve sales.
While Australian crime writing flies under the radar, perhaps, of the broader reading public, an Australian writer played a crucial role in establishing the genre. While crime played a central role in Australian literature from the beginning – as you’d expect in a convict colony – it was Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab that took Australian crime out of the back blocks of the bush and onto the mean streets of the city. It was written and first published in Melbourne at the height of the city’s golden era, before a depression drained it of its confidence and inaugurated the reign of the culture cringe. A generation later, during the Great Depression, Arthur Upfield’s indigenous tracker Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, or ‘Boney’, took the private eye back to the bush and enjoyed great popularity, particularly in the US.
Then, in 1938, the government introduced a levy on foreign print publications, inaugurating a whole new era in Australian crime fiction. This is where Andrew Nette’s look at the PI and Australian pulp fiction begins.
(Click to watch video.)
Politician, pensmith, (ex-) prisoner – there are many ‘P’ words that come to mind when Jeffrey Archer is in the house. Archer toured Australia recently to promote his latest book Only Time Will Tell. He was joined by Jennifer Byrne for a conversation which turned out, for all intents and purposes, to be more of a soliloquy.
In his hour-long appearance, Archer discussed his resilience and the lessons he learned in jail, as well as his relationship with the media and the challenge of having his personal history portrayed and discussed in an even, proportionate manner. He touched on his first love — politics — and his respect for Margaret Thatcher, whom he describes as one of three women who have profoundly affected and influenced him. In the tug-o'-war he imagines between writers and storytellers, Archer comes down heavily on the side of the latter, describing himself as “an old fashioned storyteller”, with a loathing of ebooks to boot.
With over two dozen books and international sales passing 250 million, Jeffrey Archer is a publishing and cultural phenomenon. Former Deputy Chairman of England’s Conservative Party, he served five years in the House of Commons, fourteen years in the House of Lords and two in Her Majesty’s prisons.
A report in Slate looks into why there has been so little looting in Japan since the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis. Looting is a common problem in most countries after major disasters, but observers have noted the lack of it in Japan since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit more than a fortnight ago. Moreover, the Japanese reaction has been typified by a sense of calm and community support. It begs the question, are the Japanese innately more polite than other societies or cultures?
It turns out that the difference in Japan’s post-catastrophe behaviour is three-fold: “a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.” The article quotes Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice and a guest of last year’s Melbourne Writers Festival. Commenting on the role the yakuza play in maintaining social order, Adelstein notes the major yakuza gangs have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur”.
(Image via WikiCommons)
The Daily Beast reports that 15 previously unknown stories by the legendary writer Dashiell Hammett are due to be published following their discovery. The man who popularised the hard-boiled detective fiction genre (and created Sam Spade) wrote 5 novels and many stories. In 1998, The Maltese Falcon was ranked at 56 in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.
In a piece of sleuthing worthy of Sam Spade, Andrew F. Gulli, editor of The Strand magazine, discovered the stories in a collection of Hammett archival material bequeathed to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The first of the stories will be published by The Strand.
The news coincides with the release of a biography of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart brought Sam Spade to the screen in The Maltese Falcon in 1941, a film said to have one of the most complicated plots in film history. Its penultimate line (“The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of” – improvised by Bogart and intended as a reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest) has entered movie folklore.
Crime writer and Wheeler Centre Fellow Andrew Nette writes on Chinese crime fiction. This piece is cross-posted from Andrew’s blog, Pulp Curry.
Something was confirmed for me over the last couple of days that I’ve long suspected: crime fiction and authoritarian governments do not mix.
But before I explore this further, a little background is required.
On Friday night, I and over a thousand other people crammed into the Melbourne Town Hall for the Gala Night of Story Telling 2011: Voices from Elsewhere, organised by the Wheeler Centre.
Of the eight writers who spoke, my favourite story was Chinese writer Murong Xuecun’s parable about the power of traumatic historical events, in this case Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to distort the individual psyche, even long after they are over.
Murong was 28 and working as a sales manager for a car company in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and China’s fifth most populous city, when he started posting his first novel on the Internet.
The book, originally titled Chengdu Please Forget Me Tonight, focuses on three young men in newly capitalist Chengdu, their dead-end jobs, and relationships, their drinking, gambling and whoring.
It became a cult sensation among young middle class Chinese. It also landed him in a lot of trouble, especially when Murong refused to join the Chinese Writers Society, the state sponsored writers organisation.
In addition to selling through the roof in China, the book has been translated into English as Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu. It has also come out in French and German, with editions in Italian and Vietnamese in the works.
I haven’t read Leave me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, but I’m going to.
Anyway, apart from providing some fascinating insights into how young Chinese writers are using the Internet to avoid state censorship and reach audiences, Murong was able to answer a question that’s been nagging me for a while. Why is so little crime fiction coming out of China?
According to Murong, the answer is as follows:
The Chinese government does not encourage crime fiction.
This is because crime fiction is seen as conflicting with the aim of encouraging a “harmonious society”, one of the guiding principles of the ruling communist party.
Foreign crime fiction is available in translated versions and popular (Murong’s favourite is Lawrence Block), because while it is okay for Chinese people to read fictionalised accounts of crime in other countries, it is not okay for them to read similar accounts in their own.
Interestingly, the Chinese government’s tolerance towards foreign crime fiction does not extend to crime films (including those from Hong Kong). These are strictly forbidden, presumably because they can be consumed on a mass basis, although they are widely available on the black market.
It was not always so.
Doing a bit of research on the Internet, I came across this fascinating article on the history of crime fiction in China. This goes back several centuries and often featured clever and incorruptible judges using their wisdom and smarts to solve incredibly complex crimes.
The best known of these in the West is the historical judge Di Renjie, whose stories were translated and made famous by the Dutch diplomat and sinologist Robert van Gulik in 1949, and more recently by the 2010 motion picture, ‘Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame’.
Crime fiction was banned after the communist revolution in 1949. Mao branded private detection and crime “bourgeois” and the historical magistrate genre of crime “feudal”. These restrictions were briefly eased by Deng Xiaoping in 1978-80, giving rise to a new generation of investigative judges in the form of heroic public security personnel who fought criminals with bad class backgrounds.
The current freeze on local crime fictions appears to date from 2007, when the communist party adopted the encouragement of social harmony as a key platform.
There are several Chinese authors writing crime fiction set in China, but they don’t live in China.
The best known of these is Qiu Xiaolong, who is Chinese born but now lives in the United States. His character is a poetry-sprouting cop called Chen Cao based in Shanghai. There are also a series of books featuring a female private detective in Beijing, by Diane Wei Liang. She is also based in the US.
Interviews with Qiu say that his work has been translated into Chinese, although Murong said it is not available locally.
Diane Wei Liang’s book, The Eye of Jade, is on my large to read pile of books. I’ve read one of Qiu’s books, A Case of Two Cities, in which Chen is assigned a high-level corruption case in which the principle figure has fled to the US beyond the reach of the Chinese authorities.
To each their own, but I found Chen’s constant spouting of poetry distracting and it broke up the pace. I was also dissatisfied that a large chunk of the book is set in LA, as I wanted it to focus on what was happening in Shanghai.
Editor’s Note: Video footage of the Gala Night will be published in the next few days.
Click to watch video.
From manga to film to newspaper headlines, Japan’s yakuza are in turn idolised and demonised. What are the yakuza? How are they organised? How is it that they thrive despite their illegal status?
Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein was embedded with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police for years, breaking stories on people trafficking and the city’s dark underbelly.
Listen in as Adelstein talks about how the yakuza works and why it’s so hard for law enforcement to make any dent to yakuza dominance in Japanese civil society.
Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson led a life as fascinating as his fiction, according an extract from The Man Who Left Too Soon by Barry Forshaw published in The Times.
The book reveals Larsson had all too much in common with his fictional journalist-come-detective Mikael Blomkvist with a love of pizza and cigarettes that led to his fatal heart attack. But to Swedish Tourism, it’s all part of the show with their Millennium Tour taking in Larsson’s favourite pizzeria.
Despite their noir crime themes, TLS critic Heather O’Donoghue says that Larsson’s Sweden is “an added pleasure for non-Swedish readers is the setting: it’s all Ikea furniture and democratic socialism”.
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